PROJECTS • TAROT

7 of Pentacles

Assessment, evaluation, re-evaluation, reflection

Range of meanings

Light: Measuring progress toward your goal. Looking at results with an eye toward improving performance. Asking, “How happy am I?” Coming up with ideas for improving your health or prosperity. Deciding it’s time for a change. Expressing an honest opinion.

Shadow: Becoming distracted by melancholy thoughts. Longing for “the good old days.” Beating yourself up over lost opportunities. Judging your own work harshly. Holding others to inappropriate standards. Refusing to take part in a project, then whining about the quality of the outcome.

Questions to ask

  1. What expectations do you have? How have these expectations shaped your efforts?
  2. To what extent have I fulfilled my own expectations?
  3. What are the terms of success?
  4. How can I be happier with the progress I’ve made?

Advice

Personal Growth: You can waste an entire lifetime wrestling with regrets. Escape the trap. Shift your focus from the past to the future, and resolve to make the most of the here and now. No amount of looking back can rewrite history; by contrast, working in the here and now can radically alter tomorrow.

Work: Fulfillment keeps work from becoming drudgery. What do you need in order to feel rewarded? To what extent is your current work providing this? A new project can breathe life back into a dull job. Be alert for opportunities to change your job without, necessarily, changing jobs.

Relationships: When this relationship started, what did you imagine it could become? To what extent have your expectations been fulfilled? If it falls short, you have two options: confront the difference … or revise your expectations. Which option is most likely to lead to happiness?

Spirituality: Which are you more likely to do: look back on wasted days or focus on a brighter future? The past is the past; let it go. If you haven’t achieved, spiritually speaking, what you hoped to achieve by now, deepen your resolve, set new goals, and pray for the strength to achieve them.

Fortune-Telling: Things won’t work out as expected. Pick up the pieces and prepare to move on.

Associations

Astrological: Taurus

Planet: Saturn

Fool's Journey: The main character looks back on what he or she has achieved and sees his or her work in a new light.

The Number 7: The Motive: imagination, inner work, psychology.

Coins: One of the four suits of the tarot. Also sometimes called pentacles or diskc. Coins suggest health, wealth, practicality and physicality. Their domain extends beyond money and finance to all physical things, including the human body. Coins explore your attitude toward resources of all kinds: what you’ve been given, and what you do with it. In RWS-influenced decks, Coins are often called Pentacles. A pentacle’s design (with the upright star in the middle that represents the human body) reminds us that physical blessings, from possessions to our bodies, are to be used for higher purposes. In your own life, how often do you focus on “the star in the coin”?

Crop of Coins:

Unhappy Farmer: RWS-influenced decks depict in 7 of Coins a man whose posture and expression suggest a level of exhaustion and regret that not even a bumper crop can alleviate. Most likely, his expectations were out of alignment with reality.