The 78 Cards
Seven of Swords
Minor Arcana, the suit of Swords, the Seven. Element: air.
Stealth and strategy. Trying to get away with it.
The picture
A man in a red cap and red shoes tiptoes away from a camp of tents, carrying five swords bundled in his arms. Two more swords stand upright in the ground behind him. He looks back over his shoulder as he goes. The whole sky is a flat, bright yellow.
Upright
Seven is the number of reflection and reassessment. In Swords, it is the mind working the angles. Strategy, cleverness, doing something on your own, and sometimes doing something behind somebody's back.
This is the card of the quiet exit, the white lie, the plan kept to yourself. It can describe you, or it can describe someone around you. It can also be perfectly reasonable. Plenty of plans are better kept quiet until they are ready, and some battles are best won by slipping away before they start.
Look at what he leaves behind, though. Two swords are still standing in the ground. Nobody gets away with all of it. Something always stays behind to tell the story, and the tiptoe itself gives the game away.
So this card asks two things of me in a reading. What are you doing alone that could be done in the open? And is somebody near you taking more than their share?
Reversed
Reversed, I read this as turned inward or blocked. Turned inward is when the person being fooled is you: the habit you say is under control, the spending you have stopped adding up, the story you tell yourself so you do not have to change. Blocked is the scheme that stalls, gets found out, or loses its nerve, often because a conscience has finally caught up with the plan.
To tell which, look at who else is involved. If other people are part of it, reversed often means it is coming to light, and it may be better to bring it out yourself first. If it involves nobody but you, it has turned inward, and the swords you are carrying off are your own.
When it turns up
Which two swords are you pretending you did not leave behind?
If you would like the cards read against your own chart, my readings are here.
Related pages
The Number 7
The 78 Cards
Every card in the deck, upright and reversed.
See every page and post in the Contents.
The Members area has songs, Moon pages to print, the Sunday article a day early and a first look at new Library pages.