5 of Pentacles

  • Arcana Minor
  • Suit Pentacles
  • Figure on this site A poor harvest
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

The Five of Pentacles belongs to the suit that Italian and Latin-suited packs call Coins (denari). In most early Italian tarot packs the numbered cards of a suit were plain pips: five coins arranged on the card, with no scene and no figures.

The first known exception is the Sola Busca deck, engraved around 1490 and hand-painted around 1491, probably in Venice. Its 56 suit cards use Cups, Coins, Batons and Swords, and every numbered card carries a picture, with the suit pips set in a scene and the numbers written in Arabic numerals. It is described as the earliest known deck to give the numbered suit cards pictures.

So the Five of Pentacles as most people know it, a scene of figures in the cold, is not a fifteenth-century card. Where a deck gives this card a picture at all, the picture comes from a particular artist and deck, not from a single old tradition.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

In the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Pamela Colman Smith drew the numbered suit cards as full scenes, working under Arthur Edward Waite’s direction. Scholars suggest she was inspired by the Sola Busca deck, photographs of which reached the British Museum in 1907. For some cards the resemblance is close, as with her Three of Swords and Ten of Wands.

Her Five of Pentacles shows two poor figures walking through snow, one of them on crutches, past the lit window of a church with pentacles worked into it. Waite’s own description is a single line, quoted below.

Myth and literature · Quotation

Waite’s description

Two mendicants in a snow-storm pass a lighted casement.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: material hardship, exclusion, real scarcity, left out in the cold

Two figures pass a lit window from the cold outside, hungry and excluded from warmth that others have and they don't. This card is real material hardship: scarcity, loss, or exclusion that costs something genuine, not a setback dressed up as character-building. It's allowed to simply be hard and unwanted right now.

In general: Real scarcity or exclusion is present right now. It's worth naming plainly rather than rushing to find the upside.

In love: Feeling genuinely excluded or unsupported in a relationship, a real material or emotional shortfall, not just a passing rough patch.

In work: A real financial or material setback, lost income, a missed opportunity, lasting hardship, that deserves to be named as difficult rather than reframed as minor.

Reversed

Keywords: hardship easing, recovery beginning, warmth returning, the lean season ending

Eventually the cold passes, or a door opens, or the lit window becomes one you're standing inside instead of outside, but that recovery has its own timeline and doesn't arrive on command. This card, reversed, is hardship starting to ease: the first sign of warmth returning after a real lean stretch, worth trusting once it actually appears, not assumed before it does.

In general: A hard stretch is starting to ease. Trust the actual signs of recovery as they show up, rather than rushing to declare it over early.

In love: Support or stability returning to a relationship after a genuinely hard stretch, with the difficulty actually easing rather than just being endured better.

In work: Material circumstances beginning to improve after real hardship, the first concrete sign rather than just optimism about one arriving.

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