The seventeenth arcanum is about a heritage that was not kept. Letters and photographs burned, things sold or abandoned; songs, recipes, crafts and stories that stopped being told; names nobody knows any more.
The descendant meets this as a severed connection with the past. The family tree runs up against two or three people and beyond them there is fog; and yet old objects and other people's archives have a pull. A second frequent sign is a creative blockage: there are ideas, but nothing gets as far as being finished, as though there were no permission for it.
The working-off is to restore the memory of the lineage. To question the living while there is still anyone to question; to gather the photographs and write the names on them; to record what is only remembered out loud. And to carry through to the end at least one piece of one's own work — the law concerns not only what is kept but also what is made.