The mathematician Alan Turing was the best historical figure of the 20th century to represent the 7 of wands, according to the oracle Hexen 2.0 -- and can symbolize a drug front or a fugitive when playing Zak Smith's tarot-driven game, Demon City. But I have an even more leftfield interpretation of this card for my Tarot and my Demon City playthroughs, a love of labour: the 7 of sticks is just like Fermat's Last Theorem, in every regard.
In the Marvel movie Eternals, extraterrestrial educators are tasked with the job of levelling-up the overall knowledge by which humanity directs itself, and are shown in human disguises helping the ancients develop tools like astrolabes and plows -- and holding off on introducing things like steam engines to the ancient Babylonians.
But let's examine what's eternal about Fermat's Last Theorem. For hundreds of years, some people thought the marginary note Fermat penned must have been a lie. Because Fermat was claiming to have proven some very deep truths about the nature of three-dimensional space, fourth-dimensional space, and beyond.
Fermat's last theorem was claiming, in the 1600s, to prove things about the nature of spaces as vastly multidimensional as the neural networks that run programs like ChatGPT.
My entire point in brining up Eternals is that, when the theorem was finally proven, during the 90s and 00s, the mathematical paradigms needed to make such deep statements about the supreme order of futuristic spaces turned out to be things that humanity had already been studying for thousands of years: namely, the algebra of ellipses.
So the 7 of wands is like that. The 7 of wands is the mountain in the molehill. The Alan Turing that saves the day. The thief in the night actually *stealing away* the apocalypse so that the whole earth can feel itself for yet another day.
And who is that thief putting Robin Hood to shame? Why, it's a gang of thieves yet more dapper and plucky. It's none other than Pynchon's superhero team -- the airship crew, The Chums of Chance, from that huge secret history book, Against The Day -- making a cameo in a Bioshock: Infinite sequel.
And what are they doing? Why, they're laughing down at us from heaven. Humanity is so stuck on the shape of the saucer that will take it to another galaxy, just as every human mouth looks forward to its next plate of food. But the entire reason our ancient astronomers had to reckon with ellipses, and not circles, was that an oval is secretly the more magical shape.
So what I'm saying in terms of Eternals is that our solar system is a math problem that, properly solved, would have brought us to distant galaxies by now.
Humanity has always been too hyperfocused on the circle to *really* draw a perfect one. A great mathematician I once met, who studied under Steven Hawking, once confessed to me that her intuition told her there were better numbers than Pi for reckoning the circle. But that, whatever these numbers were (she called them Garden Numbers) they belonged to a style of thought that humans are scarcely-capable of having.
In my Tarot, the 7 of sticks is one such Garden Number.
When it comes to multidimensional spaces like neural networks, the ellipse is the only one that can draw the shortest line through them all.
So instead of searching for magic in all the expected places, look deeper than the ordinary symbols of your practice, into what Perec called the infra-ordinary.
The left brain loves to get caught-up in semantics and semiotics, when reality is painted in tones and lyrics.
The recommendation of Pythagorus, eat not an eye, also applies.
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