MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Four of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Earthly Power
UPRIGHT
Saving, security, holding on tightly.
REVERSED
Greed, materialism, or generosity and letting go.
The card
The Four of Pentacles is the fourth card of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Earthly Power and gave it Sun in Capricorn, the decan of 20°–30° Capricorn, which the Sun passes through each year from about 10 to 20 January.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Four 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:
A crowned figure, having a pentacle over his crown, clasps another with hands and arms; two pentacles are under his feet. He holds to that which he has. DIVINATORY MEANINGS The surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance. Reversed; Suspense, delay, opposition.
FURTHER MEANINGS For a bachelor, pleasant news from a lady. REVERSED Observation, hindrances.
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
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: Four 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.