Tarot: Seven of Wands

To log my reflections (or perhaps reflexions) on today's card I have to rewind a few days and pass comment on some things I haven't posted about here yet because they hadn't started to fall into place yet. A few days ago I pulled the Magician as my card of the day. Always one to elucidate tarot cards by drawing other tarot cards, I asked what were my magical tools and drew four other tarot cards to represent them. To disclose all four of them would be to over-disclose even by my standards, so I will only mention what two of them were.
The one which initially gave me trouble was the 9 of swords. Up until then I had been seing these cards as atttitudes or, uncharacteristically, seeing them rather passively as things happening to me. Since I got stuck on the interpretation of 9 of swords as staying in bed and refusing to look at anything, I asked a friend how she would interpret this card, and interestingly she gave this card a much more active, in fact almost opposite, interpretation to my own.
My friend saw the nine of swords as referring to one of my magical tools, as meaning my ability to confront other people with their own reality that they are trying to ignore. I felt rather embarrassed that I had almost completely misinterpreted these cards as meaning things happening to me, when given that they were representing magical tools, it was staring me in the face that they meant me doing things to other people.
Coming hard on the heels of my drawing the 6 of Pentacles, which I have seen both as referring to receiving and giving money, and therefore being active and passive - a tension I have attempted to reconcile by seeing it as a card of 'accounting' - I have been reflecting on how tarot cards can be understood passively and actively. Regular readers will know that I don't routinely read tarot with reversals, but perhaps these passive and active meanings are another way of understanding the sort of polarities of meaning that reversals often refer to. I am contemplating a whole post just on this dynamic, but as usual don't hold your breath, it will happen when inspiration hits the Hound.
Today I drew the 7 of Wands, which is ironically another of the four cards I drew for my own magical tools. This time I have been a little less dense in trying to understand what this card may mean for me. I worked from the obvious surface meaning of this card that I had been engaged in a struggle and won by exerting my will, or at least come to some sort of resolution of the struggle that I, rather than anyone else, could live with.
For me there is another reference in this card, in fact in the whole Wands suit in addition to the obvious one of magic wand - that Wands can become clubs, and can be used for, well, clubbing, competing, and what have you. You could do someone some proper damage with a club, and in fact hey are used as a traditional means of physical training in India, where they were originally imported from the middle East, and those sort of clubs form the illustration to this post.
It is interesting that this certainly seems to be one of the more fruitful tarot cards in terms of different interpretations, even down to the odd shoes in the RWS tarot, which attract various interpretations. I am intrigued by Katz and Goodwin's interpretation that the odd shoes refer to the character of Petruchio in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. I wouldn't like to say that this is the definitive, or even the only possible interpretation of the man's odd shoes (I find others such as the man defending his own personal eccentricities, etc, just as compelling and would avoid definitive interpretations as far as possible) but find it interesting that this interpretation places an element of discomfort in the interpretation of this card. Petruchio is a nasty piece of work, a wife abuser, and not someone we would probably want to identify with - in the light of that interpretation this card takes on a 'reversed' meaning that we are defending our own will against all odds, but that we may not be having a very nice effect on other people doing so!
Additionally the man is defending himself against six wands being brandished from below. Always interesting to see one tarot referring to another tarot card and the reference here is the six of wands, another ambivalent card in my humble opinion. The surface meaning is very simplistically triumph and acclaim, but it is always so obvious to me in the RWS deck that the horse is rolling his eye and indicating that there is something ridiculous about the man, or the triumph is a fake, or that the cheering crowd are just going along with it. A definite case of the Emperor's new clothes. The implication is that what you are defending yourself against is in some way either a fake, or a front, or an aspect of yourself that is undesirable and false: once again the tarot becomes completely reflexive and points the 'action' of the card inwards rather than outwards.
The suggestion therefore for me is that my magical tool at this point is defending my own will and eccentricities, but it is defending my true will against the false assumptions and victories inside. It is intensely uncomfortable, and references a sense I have had recently that I must let lots of stuff go and move on. The reading became even more reflexive when I drew another card to indicate what the one wand I was holding in the card could represent and got... The Magician!

Image credit: wikipedia page on Indian clubs