IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: Deception & Double Crossings. Getting away with something. Masking and self-preservation. Behaving strategically
REVERSED: Self-deceptions. Imposter syndrome. Living a double life & keeping secrets.
KEEP SCROLLING FOR IN DEPTH EXPLANATION
IN DEPTH:
The Seven of Swords shows a woman sneaking off from an explosion in the nearby city-blocks. She whips her gaze across the street, as she skulks away with five 7 assault rifles haphazardly stashed in a baby-stroller. Right now, what she doesn’t realize is that this feeling of being on high-alert, this posture of looking over her shoulder, was about to become a semi permanent state of existence.
The figure at the center of the Seven of Swords is upright and alert. She might still pull off this act of breath-taking sabotage. In fact, chances are strong the fugitive may still evade authorities: however this is not to say that she is escaping without consequence. The streets around her are just as empty as she had planned for, in fact most elements of this well-orchestrated act of economic-destruction have gone exactly as she planned for. She knows that, when prevailing conditions are so intently at odds with the very crux of who we are, and even the survival of our subjective self—deceit; and the ability to disappear or ‘blend-in’: or operate below the radar, becomes an invaluable form of self-preservation.
The Seven of swords invokes the type of activities that compels us towards extreme caution, deceit, and anxiously ‘looking-over-our-shoulder’. In reverse this card reminds us of emotional turbulence and chaotic exhaustion that of maintaining status quo behavior and a ‘public-self’ that feels untrue. Seven of swords reminds us that cunning is an art, not a science. Wherever this card appears we are asked to consider in which situations do the ‘ends justify the means’?
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“Our intention is to forge an underground… a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and weapons of the state, a base against repression, to accumulate lessons, experience and constant practice, a base from which to attack.”
-the weather underground
“You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows”
-/New Left Notes/, June 18, 1959
“You’re always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.”
-Bernadine Dohrn
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