The Suit of Pentacles

What Pentacles govern

Pentacles are where everything else lands: health, work, money, home, craft, the slow accumulation of skill. This is the most patient suit in the deck, and the one that most often answers "will this actually work" rather than "how do I feel about it".

The shadow of the suit

Earth is slow to change and slow to forgive. The difficult Pentacles cards are about scarcity and rigidity - the Five outside in the snow, the Four holding on too tightly, the Seven waiting on a crop that has not come in yet.

The signs it carries

Pentacles correspond to the earth signs — Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo. The suit's Two through Ten map onto the decans of those three signs, which is how a pentacle card can be placed against a date as well as a theme.

Ace to Ten in Pentacles

The Ace is a tangible opportunity - traditionally the most concrete card in the deck. The Two juggles two commitments, the Three is craft recognised by others, the Four holds on. The Five is hardship with help closer than the figures realise; both walk past a lit window. The Six weighs charity and the power in it, the Seven waits on a crop, the Eight is deliberate practice, the Nine is self-sufficiency and the Ten is wealth that has become a family rather than a person.

How this suit gets misread

Pentacles get dismissed as merely the money suit, which loses most of what they cover: health, skill, home, and the body itself. The Seven is also frequently read as failure when it is a card about an unfinished growing season - the work is done and the waiting is the hard part. And the Five is not simply poverty; the sanctuary window in the image is the point of the card.

Reading the court

The Pentacles court runs steady, practical and slow to move. Page, Knight, Queen and King each take Earth and handle it differently — the Knight at full tilt, the Queen holding it, the King directing it outward.

All fourteen Pentacles cards

Ace of Pentacles Two of Pentacles Three of Pentacles Four of Pentacles Five of Pentacles Six of Pentacles Seven of Pentacles Eight of Pentacles Nine of Pentacles Ten of Pentacles Page of Pentacles Knight of Pentacles Queen of Pentacles King of Pentacles

The Pentacles decans

The Two through Ten of Pentacles map onto the nine decans of Capricorn, Taurus, Virgo — each a ten-degree slice of the zodiac with its own planetary ruler, its own stretch of the calendar, and the Golden Dawn title the pip inherits from it.