MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Page of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Study, ambition, a practical new start.
REVERSED
Procrastination, lack of progress, learning from failure.
The card
The Page of Pentacles is one of the four court cards of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
In the Golden Dawn's scheme each court card is an element within its suit's element: the Page of Pentacles is Earth of Earth.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Princess of Disks. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Page.
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 youthful figure, looking intently at the pentacle which hovers over his raised hands. He moves slowly, insensible of that which is about him. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Application, study, scholarship, reflection; another reading says news, messages and the bringer thereof; also rule, management. REVERSED Prodigality, dissipation, liberality, luxury; unfavourable news.
FURTHER MEANINGS A dark youth; a young officer or soldier; a child. REVERSED Sometimes degradation and sometimes pillage.
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: Valet (the knave) of Deniers (coins).
Learn more in the lessons
- Reading the Court Cards · 16 min
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
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.