Decan walk musings

The Seven of Pentacles, Taurus III, protection that comes from and through failure, and a playlist.

Some free *bonus* (oh no) content this week for everyone to offer you a glimpse into how the collaborative decan walk is going over on our Discord server. I’ve also posted a recording of this essay there, along with additional thoughts about what’s up for us in the last week and a half before Gemini season:

There has long been an air of confusion among tarot practitioners about how to interpret the Seven of Pentacles—perhaps fitting given the ambiguous expression with which Pamela Coleman Smith saddled the figure on the Rider-Waite-Smith version of the card.

Smith’s Seven of Pentacles

Contemporary readers like to focus on the latent possibilities that exist within this decan’s tarot image: Here is a person who has dutifully planted their harvest, leaving only the relative pleasures of wait and rest for them to immerse themselves in as what’s been planted (hopefully) grows. This late 20th and 21st-century interpretation of the card—and the last ten days of Taurus that are associated with it—is one of positive expectancy. It mashes together two well-worn clichés of the American Dream. The related, but different (indeed, sometimes opposing) beliefs that “good things come to those who wait” and “good things come to those who work hard” are combined here into a sort of cheerful orientation toward the accumulatory and static nature of Taurus. A summary mantra of this type of reading might be: Do your work, rest, don’t fret, and pretty much all will be well.

In the preceding century, however, tarot readers and esoteric practitioners found themselves not nearly so optimistic about this card and the Sun’s trek through the last swath of tropical Taurus. This was (and is) the decan ruled by Saturn, after all, and rather than center on the card’s potential for hope and possibility, Aleister Crowley and members of the Golden Dawn focused on its association with frustration, thwarted efforts, and disappointing ends. “… There is no effort here, not even dream; the stake has been thrown down, and it is lost,” Crowley wrote about the Seven of Pentacles. “That is all. Labour itself is abandoned; everything is sunk in sloth.”

They named the card The Lord of Failure, and scholars of the tarot connected Smith’s flowering coins and despondent man to the totalizing anxiety and impoverishment of the potato blights in Ireland in the 1840s, a far cry from the expectant and fruitful harvest in today’s interpretations. Not even dream offers much help here, and the waiting celebrated by our culture’s obsession with the dubious belief in the “natural” cause and effect of hard work, then rest, is instead transformed into an uneasy, white-knuckling kind of laziness.

Ok, ouch. So that’s it then?

Not quite. The undiluted faith in will, and in magic, marred the 19th-century esoteric tarotists’ understanding of the card perhaps just as much as our contemporary judgment falls prey to the neoliberal capitalist visions of willpower, work, and earned rest. Instead it helps to borrow what’s insightful about both views on the card, and through this syncretism, create a more useful picture of what to do with it and these last 10 days of Taurus.

The Seven of Pentacles does, after all, offer elements of protection and inspiration, but only after and through the necessity of needing them in the first place. Saturn’s lessons arrive through the function of punishment, loss, and deprivation, while Venus, which rules Taurus, bestows gifts of connection, accumulation, and beauty. Together Saturn’s strictures and Venus’ ease combine in Taurus III to offer gifts of endurance, perseverance, and protected guidance in the face of seemingly pointless failure and exhaustive inertia.

We might pause here to think about the myth of Medusa, as the fixed star representing her archetype—Algol, arguably the most feared and revered of all of the fixed stars—burns within this decan, at 26 degrees of Taurus. Medusa was raped in Athena’s temple, so the Greek myth goes, and, rather than turn her infamous rage against Medusa’s perpetrator, the Goddess of Wisdom unfairly cursed Medusa herself for the defamation of the sacred space. Not even a dream could transform Medusa back from the snake-haired monster she had become. It was only Perseus’ sword, and death, that could do so, blade and beheading shot through with an uncomfortable ambiguity about what it all means—what it all should mean for us today—especially as Perseus and Athena herself later went on to to wear Medusa’s head as protection against aggressors.

Carravaggio’s Medusa

It seems too easy too simply land on “well, we must embrace the rejected parts of ourselves for protection” as a balm for the stake that this decan throws down, and yet, of course, easy answers are often truer than we’d like to believe. The conscious embrace of and engagement with the pilloried and rejected—and thus, powerful—feminine became a potent, if not often discussed symbol of protection for leaders throughout history, including Alexander the Great, who wore the Medusa head on his armor into battle.

So what to do, then, for these next 10 days, bookended by a stinging lunar eclipse in Scorpio and the Sun’s trine with retrograde Pluto, the last major aspect it makes before moving into Gemini on May 20? Are we supposed to sit back, waiting for a boon, as modern tarotists would have us do? Or are we in for a time of tensing ourselves against our own failed expectations, slights, and fuck-ups?

Because we are in the realm of pentacles, of work, however slow-going, I think one of the best ways to approach this decan is through a combination of manual and psychological labor. First, we turn our attention to that aspect of ourselves we are most disgusted with, that we try to cast eternally into the shadows, and then we spend time crafting a physical altar to that part of ourselves, a place where we can go to honor it, every day. If Medusa wasn’t afforded honor even as she became transformed into the most powerful version of herself, we can try to undo the separation of honor and power in our own lives. We can try to push back against the notion that one only becomes powerful through dishonor, that failure only ever leads to separating out what and who is weak, from what and who is not.

The Seven of Pentacles asks us to not flinch away from—to make visible—our own failures of self, for therein lies protection, grace, and aid, along with the righteous empowerment that gets so rotely turned into Twitter plodder these days.

If you need help thinking about how to confront failure in your own life, body, and mind, the Major Arcana cards associated with this decan, The World and The Hierophant, also might hold some insight. We’ve been walking with The Hierophant for a month now, and we know some of his ways—prayer, study, and seeking out a balance between spirit and matter are his keys to moving through difficulty.

Smith’s World

The World, though, is an interesting card. While it is associated with Saturn, astrology’s greater malefic, most people experience its energy as joyful, positive, a cause for celebration and recognition. I like this paradox a lot, how it ties together success and failure in thought-provoking ways, in that our sense of ourselves as enlivened, protected, and visible only arrives through the trial and error of time and space, the creativity of material constraint. We become known to ourselves through the frustration and the fury of living in a physical world whose mechanics, for as much as we know, will always be partially occulted.

Speaking of the occult, the Seven of Pentacles, also has a final strange and hidden history of being associated with the grace of knowledge—and of rest—that we stumble upon without meaning to at all. This is the notion of the library angel that leads us to the exact book we needed to read even though we were searching for something else. This is the “beer angel” that blesses you with random companionship and conversation in the moments when you were least expecting either. All of this to say: Go to a bookstore this week, linger amidst the library stacks, take yourself out to an outdoor bar, allow yourself to drift into conversations you would have never considered having.

Wait out your anxiety, fear, and regret with the patience of sage, if you can, knowing how, in just 10 days, life will be speeding along again, too fast, and you’ll be looking back, nostalgic of course, for a time that wasn’t what you had initially thought.

My two-card draw for the final decan of Taurus is the Eight of Cups and Death, from the Golden Tarot of Klimt. Also pictured is a black-and-gold version of the Waite-Smith Seven of Pentacles, our decan guide for the next ten days, and the constellation Centaurus from Claire Goodchild’s Constellations Compendium.

This is an example of the decanic introductions we’ve been doing as we move through the 2022-2023 year using the astrological decans and their associated Minor Arcana tarot cards as guides to the quality of time. If you’d like to join our decan walk, send me a message! We also have collaborative playlists, conversation to support each other throughout each week, and weird esoteric, artistic, and other random musings to assist in the journey together.