MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Five of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Material Trouble
UPRIGHT
Hardship, insecurity, feeling left out in the cold.
REVERSED
Recovery from loss, spiritual poverty ending, help accepted.
The card
The Five of Pentacles is the fifth card of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Material Trouble and gave it Mercury in Taurus, the decan of 0°–10° Taurus, which the Sun passes through each year from about 20 to 30 April.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Five of Disks, with the title and the zodiac decan from the Golden Dawn, as shown above.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
Two mendicants in a snow-storm pass a lighted casement. DIVINATORY MEANINGS The card foretells material trouble above all, whether in the form illustrated—that is, destitution—or otherwise. For some cartomancists, it is a card of love and lovers—wife, husband, friend, mistress; also concordance, affinities. These alternatives cannot be harmonized. REVERSED Disorder, chaos, ruin, discord, profligacy.
FURTHER MEANINGS Conquest of fortune by reason. REVERSED Troubles in love.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
Its trumps
The Magician: its planet, Mercury · The Hierophant: its sign, Taurus
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Five of Deniers (coins). The numbered cards carry no scene, only the suit's symbols arranged as on a playing card, so they are read from the number and the pattern.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- Reading the Cards · 16 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.