7 of Swords: Aquarius III}
Hermetic Title: Futility / Unstable Effort
Decan ruler (Chaldean): Moon
Corresponding majors: The High Priestess (Moon) and The Star (Aquarius)
Dates: February 9 - February 18
Something most peculiar is going on in the 7 of Swords. Furtive posture, fuzzy hat, tiptoeing on stocking feet - everything about this guy screams "Funny business afoot!" Even amongst the sword cards, the 7 is singular, its bright yellow backdrop an oddball among the overcast or ominously dark night skies of the rest of the sequence. Its sword-siblings are somber, despairing, cruel - but the 7 of Swords has a sense of humor, if a warped one. It's definitely the banana in this fruit basket.
Which one’s not like the others…which one doesn’t belong?!
The Sola Busca version, a likely inspiration for Pamela Colman Smith.
The Card of the Divided Mind.
The Golden Dawn called it the Lord of Unstable Effort; Crowley called it "Futility". The idea here is that you're trying to do something - there is definitely effort. But either you're not trying hard enough or you're being thwarted at every turn. Because of this history, and because of Smith's image, most people think of the 7 of Swords as a sneaky bastard who is sure to get his comeuppance eventually.
I like to call the 7 of Swords "the card of the divided mind". Have you ever said to yourself, "I'm of two minds about that"? Of course you have. We're complicated people, and we can hold two contradictory thoughts in our heads at the same time. The twisted posture of our conniving friend - the head going one way, the feet going the other - conveys this doubleness of intention.
The upshot of this condition may vary. If the dueling thoughts, Thought A and Thought B, are equally powerful, we might end up paralyzed like the next card, the 8 of Swords. But if Thought A prevails and we proceed to act on it, Thought B becomes the voice of sabotage, distracting our protagonist, causing him to trip or stray from the path (why not check Twitter for the tenth time in an hour?!). This is the Mind Divided Against Itself - which is actually a pretty good definition of "Futility."
Themes of separation run throughout the Aquarius cards (sea vs. sky, above vs below). After all, the story of Aquarius, as earlier discussed, is the myth of Ganymede, abducted from his mortal home to live with celestial Zeus. The story of Inanna's descent, the story of Persephone - these too are stories of separation: leaving the familiar, taking a perilous journey, assuming a new role. So is the story of perhaps the ultimate 7 of Swords hero: Odysseus.
Odysseus of Many Ways
There are many ways a mind can be divided. A 7 of Swords can be a diplomat, a spy, a thief, a politician, a double agent, the mastermind behind a casino heist, an actor - anything that requires the ability to think one thing and say another; any role where one's apparent direction and one's true intentions are not in line with each other. Indeed, the 7 of Swords is a "stage" card, which emphasizes the role-playing, performative nature of its subject. At all times, we must inspect the hero's logos for authenticity! for misdirection and irony are his lingua franca.
As is so often the case, the 5 and 7 mirror each other. The 5 looks ahead and sets the conditions that mandate a journey in the 6. The 7 looks back from its new normal and makes the best of its situation. Both stage cards, the 5 and 7 of Swords represent attitudes one may take on, if only temporarily, to reach the true goal of the 6.
I often ascribe to this card the twisty ways of Ὀδυσσεύς πολύτροπος, "Odysseus of many ways". πολύτροπος is an epithet used to describe both Odysseus and his divine great-grandfather, Hermes, and it describes not just the many travels of Odysseus, but the many turnings of his wily mind. (Fun fact: did you know that the developmental "wrinkling" of the human brain - thought to be linked to intelligence - is called "gyrification"? Which, as you've probably guessed, literally means the making of turns.)
Innumerable were Odysseus' arts of deception - his fashioning of the Trojan horse, his sheep-assisted escape from the murderous Cyclops Polyphemus, his besting of the suitors in disguise on returning home. Like the furtive klepto in the 7 of Swords, this was a man who viewed every obstacle as a problem that could be solved. Often enough his boldness ended in tragedy. But he survived, and that was the point.
“Surprise!!!” says wily, lethal Odysseus.
. . . Complementi Voluntatis et Affrontacionis
The decan commentaries seem to describe Aquarius III with a certain trepidation: its resident spirit is "a man with a mutilated head," or "a beheaded man". He is said to be angry or insolent; he "turns from place to place" (πολύτροπος!). According to the Latin Picatrix, this signifies "the accomplishing of will, and the giving of offense" - as if one cannot be achieved without the other. Indeed, every one of Odysseus' successful ruses resulted in somebody - whether mortal or divine - getting very, very upset.
Different centuries, same general idea.
Agrippa's rendition mentions "detectione, insolentia, et impudentia" - disclosure, insolence, and shamelessness. And the Aquarius III figure from the Astrolabium Planum bears an eerie resemblance in demeanor to the 7 of Swords. What is he hiding under that coat?! $300K in Rolexes? What could "disclosure" mean ...hey! is he about to flash us???
Secret Seas, by Night and Day
It's worth taking a closer look at the major arcana associated with the 7 of Swords: The High Priestess and the Star. Remember, the High Priestess is the card that represents the moon (not The Moon!). So this pairing brings together moon and stars, denizens of the night sky. The High Priestess - she who hides her book within the folds of her moonlit robe - is also associated with silence and secrecy: Knowledge equals Power. It's little wonder that our surreptitious friend appears to be engaged in burgling, the most secretive and nocturnal activity of all. The fact that he's doing it in broad daylight only makes it more brazen and shameless - remember, this is the "divided mind": it may be noon outside, but he's thinking midnight thoughts.
In this version from the Los Arcanos Tarot, it’s nighttime inside and out.
In both the High Priestess' and the Star's images, water features prominently. The Priestess' robe ripples and pools, overflowing the crescent moon at her feet; perhaps it indicates the moon's invisible influence on the ocean's tides. The Star pours water from her pitchers into pool and stream. The work of Ganymede is to pour from the wine carafe into the glass; perhaps Aquarius III is the last time our spirit may apprehend itself, in its separate vessel, before dissolving into the seas of Pisces.
The Hebrew letter associated with the Priestess is gimel, the camel; the letter of the Star (usually) is tzaddi, the fishhook. There are those who sail the desert to seek out what they want, and those who cast their lines into the sea to bring it to them. It is said that to be a tzaddiq, a righteous person, one must come to terms with secrecy: Secrecy is not a dark place to hide your guilt. Secrecy is the silence of a good deed done for its own sake - something our burglar may yet learn, in time.
7 is the number of restless quests, of skills and seeking; in the suit of swords, the skill in question is a certain flexibility of mind. The lunar, liquid identity of this protagonist resists pinning down; he is as much an anti-hero as a hero.
The Resourcefulness of the Refugee
With the 7 of Swords, we come to the end of a journey begun 20 days ago. The 5 of Swords described conditions of unbearable inequality, causing us to leave our familiar environs. The 6 of Swords described the great voyage from homeland to promised land, navigating by our wits. With the 7 of Swords, we arrive at a place where we must begin all over again, with new jobs, new roles, new identities, even a new language.
These scrappy antiheroes are my personal favorite for tonight’s Oscars.
As strangers in a strange land, our minds think in one idiom as our tongues stumble over another. We might be like Ganymede, adjusting to his new job as cupbearer. We might be like Persephone, newly Queen of the Dead. We might be like Noah, or his Greek counterparts, Deucalion and Pyrrha, stepping ashore after the deluge and finding ourselves - with nothing - in a world washed clean. We work by night and day to establish a place for ourselves. Everything we own we must scavenge, and in that sense, we are thieves and parasites, even as we are the heroes of our own stories.
Interestingly, the early European cartomancers - who often diverge widely from the meanings we use today - somehow traced this same arc in their card delineations. Here are some excerpts from Etteilla's meanings, which pre-dated the Waite-Smith deck by over a century:
5 of Swords: Loss or degradation.
6 of Swords: Route or passage.
7 of Swords: Hope, intention.
The Trickster and His Traps
The 7 of Swords loves to wear many hats. It's the card of the Trickster, the shape-changer, the chameleon, the fox - we see that in his furred, animalistic boots and hat. Like the similarly garbed shamanic healer, he is a citizen of (at least) two worlds. Resilient and resourceful, he may be a figure of daring and brilliance ("They seek him here, they seek him there, those Frenchies seek him everywhere! Is he in heaven, or in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel!") But as charismatic as he is on maneuvers, be cautious of befriending him. Heed the immortal words of Bruce Banner! i.e., "Loki's brain is a bag of cats."
The 7 of Swords' ingeniousness is also its downfall. It's the fox with so many escape routes it cannot choose before the hounds' jaws close around its ankles. It's Vizzini in "The Princess Bride," fatally thinking himself into circles. The façade can slip, the curtain fall away, and then all you have is a troublemaker stumbling across a stage. Every Rube Goldberg machine, no matter how impressive, is only one slipped cog away from being just another pile of junk.
The Everyday 7 of Swords
My own moon falls in this decan (which means it has "decanic dignity"), so I'm deeply familiar with its mazy contortions. I seem forever to be locating my expertise and my attention in different places. I have literally half a dozen jobs. (In fact, next time I'm paralyzed filling in a Job Description field, I think I'm going to put "Full-Time Side Hustler".)
On occasions when I have drawn this card, I have found myself:
- driving to the store to do a million errands, only to realize I left my wallet behind;
- sitting down to lunch and trying to simultaneously listen to a podcast, read a book, and solve a crossword puzzle;
- transcribing weeks of dreams recorded on my phone while half-asleep;
- doing readings for multiple clients involved in extramarital affairs;
- in one truly morbidly funny instantiation of the "divided mind": remembering, the week of my father's death about the brain donation we'd arranged for him decades ago with a teaching hospital.
What these have in common is the phenomenon of the mind dividing its attention, or even observing itself.
Over the years, I've learned to play my passions against each other, like a boat tacking port and starboard to reach its destination. Now, when I am very distracted, I am usually also very productive. If I cannot bear to focus on one thing, I allow myself two or three - as long as they are among the dozen or so things on the list that need to get done. The 7 of Swords' moon presides over changing tides and a choppy sea, but I trust a steady wind - fixed air - to get me there, in the end.
The Takeaway
When you draw the 7 of Swords, the trick - and there is always a trick - is to learn to use its machinations to your advantage.
The 7 of Swords has an intimate relationship with its counterpart, the 8 of Swords. When you are feeling trapped and paralyzed by the 8 of Swords, you can use the 7 of Swords to "think outside of the box" and find a way out of the dilemma. However, the 7 of Swords can also be an endless series of charming distractions that in the end lead you to an 8 of Swords standstill. When you're stuck writing your dissertation, the flash of insight you need might be just a few steps away, if you can get up and move for a bit. Or you might decide to Google something and fall down an endless series of wormhole traps.
The Star acts like a guiding light only so long as you keep your eyes trained in its direction. But if you cannot focus on one thing indefinitely, then focus on one thing at a time. If you can keep your ADD ping-ponging between your two most important priorities, most likely both can be achieved.
ONE AT A TIME!