Hello and welcome to My Tiny Tarot Practice. I'm Amelia Hruby,

and on this podcast, I share my journey through the tarot, going card by card

through each suit of the Minor Arcana.

Today's episode is about the Seven of Swords.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith edition of the tarot, the Seven of Swords depicts a

person standing in the center of the card, holding five swords in their arms.

They appear to be kind of mid-run, taking a leap of some sort, a bound even.

And they're running from kind of one side of the card toward the other and looking

behind them at what appear to be tents with flags.

And there are two swords still still standing back there.

So this figure appears to have stolen or taken these five swords from this encampment.

Sometimes when I look at this card, I see those tents and flags as a battalion

of soldiers and how they've camped for a night or weeks on the line of battle.

Other times I look at it and it feels more like a carnival. We have a jester

escaping the carnival, running away with the swords in hand.

I think that this is one of the more playful and elusive cards,

not only of the suit of swords, but of the tarot as well.

It often feels to me like it has the tenor of the fool, but where the fool is

looking up and ahead, this figure is looking back and behind.

Often when I've drawn this card in a reading, I've been a little puzzled as to what it means.

Am I stealing something? Have I taken something?

This is sort of the way that Jessa Crispin takes up the card in the creative tarot,

where she interprets this as an invitation to consider where we as artists might

be sampling from other creators in our work versus stealing from them,

where we might have slipped from emulation to theft,

and how we can make sure that our creative practice is in conversation with

other artists, but never simply copying them.

Rachel Pollack has a very different interpretation, arguing that this card is

all about taking action, but perhaps that action is more impulsive and less planned,

and we'll have to see whether that pays out or backfires.

Often what I've come to when I think of this card is I end up taking this idea

of theft and of swords and battlefields somewhat literally and asking myself,

is there anywhere in my life where I'm bringing an ethos of all's fair in love and war?

Because I'm not the type, and I imagine, dear listener, you too might not be

the type to be running around stealing things.

I'm not much of a jester in this way in my day-to-day life, but I can certainly

sometimes slip into these moments where my thinking goes a little more into

that all's fair in love and war mindset.

And I might find myself doing things that perhaps I wouldn't when I'm in a moment

where I'm fully in my integrity.

And that said, I think there are circumstances, particularly particularly in

our resistance to systems and structures of our overculture,

where we need to be a little sneaky, a little sly.

We need to bring the spirit of the trickster to what we're doing so that we

can bring about the world that we hope to see.

So in that sense, I think that this card can be a real invitation to reimagine the rules of the game.

Just because we've been told there are certain rules doesn't mean we have to play by them.

Doesn't mean we have to play that game at all. Are there ways that we can change

the rules, refuse the rules, warp the rules given to us by unjust systems?

Customs, and take a little more of what we're owed, perhaps.

I love imagining this figure in the Seven of Swords as Robin Hood,

taking from the rich to feed the poor.

All's fair in love and war in that story.

So again, these are the themes that come up around this card for me,

and I want to invite all of us to just hesitate to put any moral judgment on

the actions or what's depicted in this card.

Imagine ways where the spirit of the thief or the jester or the trickster may

actually help you step more into your values rather than being out of alignment.

And with that question, I think this card also evokes the hanged man from the Major Arcana.

This figure in the Seven of Swords even brings in some of similar colors to that card.

We see the blue and red of the hanged man's tunic and pants mirrored in the

pants and shoes of this figure in the Seven of Swords.

And so once again, an invitation to get upside down, to flip things upside down.

If these are the rules of the game, can we invert them?

If these rules benefit one particular group of people, could we flip everything

upside down to benefit everyone else?

I love recording these episodes because cards that have been really puzzling

to me, as I shared at the start of this, suddenly become these embodiments of

capitalist critique and liberation in my mind somehow. Somehow.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode and joining me on this journey

that we just took with the Seven of Swords and continuing our journey through

the Suit of Swords in this fourth season of My Tiny Tarot Practice.

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And if you'd like to expand your own tarot library, you can head to the show

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that helps me keep this show going.

As always, I'm so grateful that you tuned in, and I hope that you're able to

carry the playful spirit of the Seven of Swords into the rest of your day.