Seven of Pentacles

The Plate

Nothing on this card moves. A laborer stands with both hands stacked on the head of his hoe and his chin resting on his hands, staring at a dark clump of greenery where — Waite (1911) counts them for us — seven pentacles hang attached to the vine like fruit of doubtful ripeness. His boots are planted. The sky is done being interesting. The whole composition is a man not working, drawn by an artist who understood that not-working, done at the right moment and the right angle, is one of the labors.

The Reading

Between sowing and harvest the suit inserts this card, and I read the hoe as its center: still in his hands, still upright, but bearing his weight instead of breaking ground. The question under his chin is the real one of any long project at its middle — is this growing, or merely still here? Sunk labor argues for staying; the look on his face has not decided. The card counsels patience, but patience of the appraising kind, with a date attached. Whatever he concludes, tomorrow the hoe goes back to one use or the other: tending this vine, or clearing it.

Reversed, the two wrong exits from the pause. One is the gardener who cannot leave the roots alone, hauling the plant up monthly to admire its progress, killing it with attention. The other walks away in week eleven of a twelve-week season. Both mistake the discomfort of waiting for evidence about the vine.

In the School

Sevens test each element against time. Earth — the suit's element in the elements table of the astrology course — is the element most at home there, and so its seven is the gentlest: no storm, no duel, only a man, a vine, and a season that will not be hurried.