Pentacles · minor arcana
Two of Pentacles
One of the fourteen pentacles. Drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the deck first published in London in December 1909.
What is drawn on it
A young man, in the act of dancing, has a pentacle in either hand, and they are joined by that endless cord which is like the number 8 reversed.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, Part III, § 2, where the meanings below follow it in the same paragraph.
What Waite says it means
These are the divinatory meanings printed in 1911, quoted as he wrote them. They are reported here as what one named book says, not as a claim that a card means anything or predicts anything.
- Upright
- On the one hand it is represented as a card of gaiety, recreation and its connexions, which is the subject of the design; but it is read also as news and messages in writing, as obstacles, agitation, trouble, embroilment.
- Reversed
- Enforced gaiety, simulated enjoyment, literal sense, handwriting, composition, letters of exchange.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, London, 1911, Part III, § 2. Out of copyright.
Its suit
Pentacles is one of the four suits of the minor arcana. The Golden Dawn attributed it to earth, and in the tradition Waite worked in it is taken to cover money, craft and the body. Its counterpart in an ordinary playing-card pack is diamonds: the two packs share an ancestor, rather than one descending from the other.
The pentacles
Read on
Card face: Pamela Colman Smith, from the first printing published by William Rider & Son. Public domain. Source file. Full list on the credits page.
