MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Three of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Material Works
UPRIGHT
Teamwork, skill, building something together.
REVERSED
Lack of teamwork, poor quality, disregard for skill.
The card
The Three of Pentacles is the third card of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Material Works and gave it Mars in Capricorn, the decan of 10°–20° Capricorn, which the Sun passes through each year from about 31 December to 10 January.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Three 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 sculptor at his work in a monastery. Compare the design which illustrates the Eight of Pentacles. The apprentice or amateur therein has received his reward and is now at work in earnest. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Métier, trade, skilled labour; usually, how-ever, regarded as a card of nobility, aristocracy, renown, glory. REVERSED Mediocrity, in work and otherwise, puerility, pettiness, weakness.
FURTHER MEANINGS If for a man, celebrity for his eldest son. REVERSED Depends on neighbouring cards.
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: Three 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.