Five of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as material hardship and feeling left out in the cold. Readers note the lit window just behind the figures, showing help that is near and unnoticed.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as recovery from hardship, accepting help, or a hard season ending.
A question to sit with
Where are you struggling that you have not told anyone? What help is closer than it looks?
The deeper reading
Traditionally a card of need. Readers take it as the reminder that no one gets through winter alone.
What is drawn on the card
Two poor figures, one on crutches, trudge through falling snow. Behind them a lit stained-glass window displays five pentacles.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
- Suit
- Pentacles
- Element
- Earth
- Domain
- Material world, health, wealth, work
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Five of Pentacles is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.