Seven of Wands · Wands · Fire

A young man in an olive tunic, yellow sleeves and red hose stands on a low green mound, gripping a leafing staff in both hands: the upper fist raised past his shoulder, the lower flung out at his hip, the shaft a long diagonal across his chest. His mouth is open, his brow set. Six more staves rise from the bottom edge of the card, sprouting the same green shoots, and nobody holds them. Pamela Colman Smith drew the defense and kept the attackers out of the frame. One foot wears a laced boot, the other a low slipper. He was not dressed for this. He is doing it anyway.

The sky behind him is a flat sheet of turquoise. No army, no castle, nothing to say how long this has to last.

The Golden Dawn assigns this decan to Mars in Leo and calls the card Valour. The Six was the parade; the crowd has gone home. The Seven is the holding, done by whoever took the ground, alone and badly shod.

Upright, the tradition reads conviction under pressure: a stance kept when keeping it costs something. Whether the stance is correct is a question the card declines to answer. It is about staying.

Reversed, the same heat runs the other way and the high ground turns into a habit. Defending what nobody attacks. Some readers give the reversal to lost nerve, the rise abandoned too cheaply. Others to a fight kept long past its cause, the fighter no longer sure who he is without six staves in front of him. Both are one heat, dug in.

He has the hill. In the picture, that is all he has.