Plough

What this is

A plough standing in the furrowed field, set at the head of the twenty-eighth folio. It is the emblem of the labour that prepares the ground, the work done in spring for a harvest not yet seen. The translator's Preface names it in the answer given to a gentleman who asked whether his beloved would prove true in his absence: “The affections of the being whom thou lovest, will be placed on none other but thyself.”

What it governs

Presides over honest toil, preparation, and patience: the ground broken and sown before anything can be reaped. Folio 28.

Its properties

Its colour is the brown of turned earth; its number twenty-eight, the days of the moon's round. The quality is diligence and faith in the season; its shadow is drudgery without purpose, the furrow ploughed and never sown.

Where else it appears

The same note is the plough with which the old farming year began, the hand put to the plough that does not look back, the sword beaten into a ploughshare, and the Plough of stars that wheels about the pole.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

On the Oracle it heads the Folio of the Day on the daily Book of Fate surface, and it heads the folio your own five rows of strokes lead to when you consult the Book. The words you are given are the Book's own Answer on that folio, the one that stands beside your Sign; the Hieroglyph marks the page and does not choose the words. As a frame for the day, do the plain preparatory work and trust the season.

Why it matters

The Book gives its Hieroglyphs no order but their folios, and no meaning but the Answers that stand under them. In the Table a Question meets this one wherever the number of the Question and the number of the Sign together make twenty-nine or sixty-one.

Correspondences

planet

Saturn

element

Earth

zodiac

Virgo

number

28

sephirah

Malkuth

day

Saturday

colour

Earth-brown

metal

Iron

stone

Jasper

tarot

Seven of Pentacles