Minor Arcana · Wands · Number 7
Seven of Wands
holding a position against pressure
Element
Fire · will, work in progress, enterprise and drive
The card in tarot
What Seven of Wands means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A man on high ground fights off six staves rising from below with one of his own. He has the advantage of position and the disadvantage of number. Smith gave him two different shoes, which readers have argued about for a century.
In a reading
Holding a position under pressure. Defending a decision, a boundary, a piece of work you believe in against people who do not. The ground is yours; that is the card's small mercy.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
holding a position against pressure
Reversed
the position no longer feels worth defending
Reversed, readers take it as being worn down, giving up ground that mattered, or defending something that no longer needs defending.
The suit
Seven of Wands is a Wands card
Wands are the suit of things being attempted. They cover ambition, creative heat, the argument you are willing to have and the project that is not finished yet. Where the Cups ask how you feel about something, the Wands ask whether you are going to do it. The suit is busy: more of its cards show people mid-action than in any other suit.
Fire is not the same as anger, and a run of Wands is not a promise that the thing succeeds. The suit describes energy going somewhere, not the outcome of the journey.
Wands is the suit of Fire, and it is the suit that became Clubs in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Wands
The number
What the Seven does
Across all four suits, the Seven is a choice made alone, usually with imperfect information.
Every Seven shows one figure and no witnesses. The suit decides whether the solitude is defence, deceit, patience or fantasy.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Seven of Wands is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.