MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Seven of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Success Unfulfilled
UPRIGHT
Patience, long-term investment, waiting for growth.
REVERSED
Impatience, poor returns, wasted effort.
The card
The Seven of Pentacles is the seventh card of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Success Unfulfilled and gave it Saturn in Taurus, the decan of 20°–30° Taurus, which the Sun passes through each year from about 10 to 21 May.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Seven 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 young man, leaning on his staff, looks intently at seven pentacles attached to a clump of greenery on his right; one would say that these were his treasures and that his heart was there. DIVINATORY MEANINGS These are exceedingly contradictory; in the main, it is a card of money, business, barter; but one reading gives altercation, quarrel—and another innocence, ingenuity, purgation. REVERSED Cause for anxiety regarding money which it may be proposed to lend.
FURTHER MEANINGS Improved position for a lady's future husband. REVERSED Impatience, apprehension, suspicion.
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: Seven 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.