Card of the Week: Seven of Rods

Whether as kids playing king-of-the-hill, as adults maneuvering for business or political gain, or in outright combat, it is important to hold your ground and defend your gains.

The Seven of Rods represents inner conviction and self defense, to hold a firm position, to “stick up” for one’s self, while remaining aware of the potential tenuousness of your success.  Courage and persistence can pay off, whether in simple negotiations or against a powerful adversary.  But even a strong leader may be either admired or feared, and is not invincible or incapable of error.

Inverted, this card warns of anxiety, from internal paranoia or from external forces.  Embarrassment could come from  your own distress or from an overabundance creating its own complications.

In “Operation -- Annihilate!” the Enterprise is investigating a pattern of mass insanity moving through the galaxy, arriving at planet Deneva just as a colonist deliberately flies his shuttle into the sun and shouts “I’m free!” as he dies.  A landing party transports down to find the colony infected and many colonists already dead.  They find the cause when they are attacked by flying neural parasites which they repel with phasers.  Spock is stung, and the parasite’s tendrils invade his nervous system and begin to drive him mad, but he uses his Vulcan training to overcome its effects well enough to return to the planet to gather more samples.  Tests in Sickbay reveal the parasites’ weakness to light, a way to cure Spock, and the Enterprise deploys hundreds of satellites to briefly flood the planet with intense ultraviolet light and destroy the parasites.