Tarot · Pentacles
Five of Pentacles
Five of Pentacles - Earth
Correspondences
- Element
- Earth
- Planet
- Mercury
- Sign
- Taurus
- Number
- 5
- Yes / no
- No upright, Yes reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
A real hardship is being faced, and support may feel out of reach.
Five of Pentacles. A real hardship is being faced, and support may feel out of reach. As a Five it is the suit's crisis point. The stable four is disturbed, and the disturbance is the information. In Pentacles, that stage plays out in work, money and the body. Its sign is Taurus, which holds: slow, sensory and immovable, valuing what can be touched and kept over what merely sounds good. Being Earth, it resolves only in material terms: time, money, body, or work actually done. Its keyword range runs through hardship, financial worry, feeling left out in the cold, and insecurity.
Reversed
Help is closer than it appears, and circumstances are beginning to turn.
Five of Pentacles reversed. Help is closer than it appears, and circumstances are beginning to turn. Under Mercury, it moves by message, exchange and quickness of mind, and its characteristic failure is cleverness outrunning judgement. Reversed here, it is loosening rather than failing. The grip of this is coming off, and the reversal reads as release rather than denial. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: recovery, finding support, improving circumstances, and help arriving.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.