MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Ten of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Wealth
UPRIGHT
Legacy, family wealth, long-term success.
REVERSED
Family disputes, financial failure, loss of legacy.
The card
The Ten of Pentacles is the tenth card of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Wealth and gave it Mercury in Virgo, the decan of 20°–30° Virgo, which the Sun passes through each year from about 12 to 23 September.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Ten 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 man and woman beneath an archway which gives entrance to a house and domain. They are accompanied by a child, who looks curiously at two dogs accosting an ancient personage seated in the foreground. The child's hand is on one of them. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Gain, riches; family matters, archives, extraction, the abode of a family. REVERSED Chance, fatality, loss, robbery, games of hazard; sometimes gift, dowry, pension.
FURTHER MEANINGS Represents house or dwelling, and de rives its value from other cards. REVERSED An occasion which may be fortunate or otherwise.
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: Ten 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.