Seven of Coins

'When the student is ready the teacher comes along' is a saying that we tend to throw around without properly examining its implications. In my case I'm finding that Jean-Baptist Alliette is reaching across the past two-and-a-half centuries & giving me a good shake. Perhaps I have become too accustomed to our English-speaking RWS tarot tradition, & it was high time to be refreshed by trying a new system. The French tradition of cartomancy is proving fertile ground, although typically of me I don't take to the currently fashionable Lenormand cards at all. A friend showed me how to do a reading with them, & it made perfect sense when he did it, but left alone with those cards they mean nothing to me.
Lenormand is rumoured to have used cards of the Petit Etteilla tradition, & I'm finding that my Grand Etteilla cards want to be read very differently from RWS cards. They much prefer indicating what is surrounding the querent by locating the Etteilla card, to the card for the day tradition.
Today I see the 7 of Coins Reversed ahead of me. I always think of the RWS card as the 'what now?' Card, but Etteilla's keyword for this is Inquietude. Pronounce it the French way (an-key-ay-tood) & it gives the full depths of the French existential crisis underlying this card. Once again the RWS image confuses & limits the meaning: who the hell puts coins in a bush anyway? Rather this card is about not arriving - 'I still haven't found what I'm looking for' type thing. It is everyone who has attained what they were aiming for on the material plane - whether the house, the job or whatever - & found that that was not It.
On other planes that meaning is deepened to the things that keep happening 'to' us - I wouldn't like to say that we always attract these things, since some people just seem to be shit magnets, no matter how hard they try. I have been thinking a lot recently about how an individual's magic is very characteristic of them, & they keep on finding themselves in the position where their magical 'signature' comes into play.
Mine for example is that I attract piss takers. Before I accepted the mantle of witch I used to wonder why it was, but now I know that it is because my own magical signature is that I face people with the consequences of their actions. This will be the other person's 'stuff', not mine, but it means that I (completely without trying to) attract people whose task at that time is to learn respect. Even people who don't know I'm a witch will sometimes say that they realise they shouldn't mess (& invariably go on to do so); & these people will know that I will stand in their way on the material plane. Magically this means that my magic is slow & painful; magically I'm a plodder & will happily spend years working on facing someone with their actions so they can't escape. Maybe this is why I work so well with my magical partner: I'll slowly & surely make their life a living hell - a hell they will have created themselves, mark you, before anyone accuses me of so-called 'black' magic, but a hell that they have created by doing things that they thought they would get away with but then find they can't. Whereas my magical partner's signature is different: shorter, sharper, & sudden.
The upshot of all this is that as a witch, a priest of nature, a priest of inescapable life & death, there is much inquietude ahead for me. There is no way I would have chosen where I am, but I'm there & have to see this as what I'm for.
As for why & how this is, that's a whole different blog post...
------------------