Pentacles · Earth

Four of Pentacles

Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed

securitysavingcontrolholding on

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What it means

Upright

This card is read as security through holding on: saving, guarding, and keeping control of what you have. Readers note it can tip into possessiveness.

Reversed

Reversed, it is read either as greed tightening, or as the grip finally loosening toward generosity.

A question to sit with

What are you holding so tightly that it cannot grow? What would feel safe enough to let go of?

The deeper reading

Readers see here the urge to protect what is solid, and the question of when protection becomes a cage.

What is drawn on the card

A crowned man sits holding one pentacle tightly against his chest, with another on his crown and two under his feet. A city spreads out behind him.

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).

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Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.

What it means

Upright

This card is read as security through holding on: saving, guarding, and keeping control of what you have. Readers note it can tip into possessiveness.

Reversed

Reversed, it is read either as greed tightening, or as the grip finally loosening toward generosity.

A question to sit with

What are you holding so tightly that it cannot grow? What would feel safe enough to let go of?

The deeper reading

Readers see here the urge to protect what is solid, and the question of when protection becomes a cage.

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.