Seven of Coins
Oil on wood in upcycled frame. 18.5" x 30" original available (contact artist)
Wait a while for the next phase, the right moment, take a step back to consider. You don't want your wine too sweet or bitter. Look with experienced evaluation. Risk is crows dark on the horizon, rain clouds saturation. Wait a while. The leaves turn golden and the grapes so heavy with sugar. Wait a while to decide.... then bring in your harvest.
Its interesting how different a traditional reading of a tarot card can be from a new age or modern reading of the same tarot card. The 7 of coins or pentacles is traditionally know as the card of failure. Crowly called it the God of failure. I listened to one Podcast where the reader saw the plant in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck as a potato plant with a disease . Looking at the card I did not see a potato plant. Potato plants do not have tendrills! The reader was looking for failure, likely it was what they needed to see. In yet another Podcast two young ladies say that the 7 of coins is a card about agriculture and depicts a vineyard. This makes so much more sense! It's not a diseased plant, rather now I see the plants are changing with the fall season and the gardener is waiting to see if he will harvest now or wait. With waiting comes risk, too much rain, which dilutes or destroys the grapes, or birds come and eat them ….When I looked at the RWS deck image I saw a person waiting, taking a break, maybe thinking about the next step . I think this was the deck giving me a chance to assess what I had done so far, Giving me an out after all my hard work, a chance to step away if I want to. I don't want to.
So what image do I illustrate? Is the more traditional reading the correct one?? Is it that we have lost track of a symbol and it needs to be brought back? Or has the idea evolved like our culture has evolved and humanity has evolved? Images seen one way in the past are read differently than they may be once were. If I paint a beautiful grape vine, (something that I can do easily being that I live in wine country California! And it's autumn right now) will people not understand that he is stopping to think about his next step? That he has worked so very hard and needs a break? Deciding whether to harvest now or wait? It's truly fascinating to me how different tarot readers will read the same tarot card from the same deck in such a different way! I will stay with what I saw when I first looked at this card, in an intuitive style of reading, and add in the layers of meaning and metaphor that still seem to resonate in our modern culture. The hard working beaver is an earth animal to corespond with the coins/pentacles. And the vineyard belongs to a friend who is an amazing wine maker. Let people read in the card what they need to read and perhaps they will do some research if they would like to understand the other layers of meaning. Either way is just fine by me.
Oil on wood in upcycled frame. 18.5" x 30" original available
