Seven of Pentacles
Fixed Earth
Saturn in Taurus
Influence of Netzach in the realm of Assiah, or Earth
Keywords: deciding to harvest a bounty, anxiety, decision, failure, rhizome
Rider-Waite-Smith
In the Pictorial Key, Waite describes this as a young man looking at a “clump of greenery,” which is not exactly a description befitting a thriving crop. However, he goes on to say “one would say that these were his treasures and that his heart was there.”
Moreover, Waite describes the divinatory meanings as “these are exceedingly contradictory; in the main, it is a card of money, business, barter; but one reading gives altercation, quarrels – and another innocence, ingenuity, purgation.”
Often this card is described as a kind of decision threshold: do you harvest the crop or not? However, the astrological associations of the card with Saturn in Taurus show that there is a limitation around the Earth, keeping it weighed down. The only way to relieve oneself of the burden of Saturn is through toil, and thus we see the physical weariness of the man in the image.
He has worked long and hard for this crop. It is his whole life poured into the Earth. And he is tired. But will the crop fail? There is no reward yet. The fruits of his labor have failed to materialize. But crucially the card does not say with certainty the crop has failed. Only that it has the potential for it has not yet succeeded. It is thus appropriate the original name of this card is Lord of Failure (Success Unfulfilled).
Most interprets view this card as essentially imbalanced because they see Netzach as essentially imbalanced, due to the influence of Venus on Victory within the masculine Pillar of Severity.
Thoth – Failure
In the Liber T tarot, the Self is shown as dead and buried in a rhizomatic root structure.
As Deleuze and Guattari describe it, with a “radicle-system, or fascicular root…an immediate, indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots grafts onto it and undergoes a flourishing development.” (Thousand Plateaus, p. 5)
This development is what the Eight of Pentacles brings about, the Virgo tendency to plant creative energy in a fertile Earth.
The Self in the Seven of Pentacles fails for the same reason the Self in The Devil fails: it is too entangled in the snares of its own limitations to really advance to something truly Divine. But the good thing is there is a way out of this failure, we need only slip off the chains of Saturn by sinking into the Oblivion of the rhizomatic root system, comforted in the knowledge that once dead we will rise again,
From Book T – The Lord of Success Unfulfilled
A White Radiating Angelic Hand issuing from a cloud, and holding a white rose branch. Seven Pentacles arranged like the geomantic figure Rubeus.
There are only five buds, which overhang, but do not touch the five uppermost Pentacles. Above and below are the Decan symbols, Saturn and Taurus respectively.
Promises of success unfulfilled. (Shewn, as it were, by the fact that the rosebuds do not come to anything.) Loss of apparently promising fortune. Hopes deceived and crushed. Disappointment, misery, slavery, necessity and baseness. A cultivator of land, and yet a loser thereby. Sometimes it denotes slight and isolated gains with no fruits resulting therefrom, and of no further account, though seeming to promise well.
Netzach of HB:H (Unprofitable speculations and employments; little gain for much labour).
Therein HB:HRChAL and HB:MTzRAL are ruling Angels.