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Minor Arcana · Suit of Pentacles · Number card
Five · Pentacles
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightHardshipFeeling shut outHelp close by
↓ ReversedDisorderDiscordCareless spending
What it means
↑ Upright
Two figures limp through snow past a lit window, too cold or too proud to look up. The card points to a lean stretch — worry over work, home or means, the sense of being shut out. Yet they walk it together, and the light is only a door away: say what you need to someone who can help, and let yourself accept what is offered.
↓ Reversed
Hardship made worse by disorder: letters left unopened, discord at home, money or strength spent carelessly because nothing seems worth saving. Disorder, discord and squandering are what Waite lists for this side. Restore one plain routine — a list, a fixed hour for the difficult correspondence, a meal at the same time each day — so that the ground stops shifting under you.
Five is strain, and in Pentacles it is hardship of the body and the purse: cold, need and being left outside. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows two ragged figures making their way through a snowstorm, one on crutches with a bell at his neck, past a lit church window of stained glass set with five pentacles. Shelter is only a wall away; that their eyes stay on the snow is the heart of the card.
Upright
The card foretells material trouble above all, whether in the form illustrated—that is, destitution—or otherwise. For some cartomancists, it is a card of love and lovers—wife, husband, friend, mistress; also concordance, affinities. These alternatives cannot be harmonized.
Reversed
Disorder, chaos, ruin, discord, profligacy.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.