The Open Athenaeum

✶ The Study Deck

Ace of Pentacles

Pentacles, of the lesser arcana

Waite & Colman Smith, 1909 · described 1911

A hand—issuing, as usual, from a cloud—holds up a pentacle.

the plate, in waite's words · the painted card will hang here in time

In divination

Perfect contentment, felicity, ecstasy; also speedy intelligence; gold.

Reversed: The evil side of wealth, bad intelligence; also great riches. In any case it shews prosperity, comfortable material conditions, but whether these are of advantage to the possessor will depend on whether the card is reversed or not.

The library's note

Pentacles opens on the same convention every ace keeps, a single hand offered from a cloud, though here it simply holds a pentacle up, the plainest image the suit will show across its whole run. Waite's compiled reading calls it "perfect contentment, felicity, ecstasy," though he hedges the coin's welcome later, noting that its prosperity can turn either useful or corrosive depending on the cards it falls beside. Every ace in this deck begins the same way, one hand and one object, before the ten pips ahead complicate it.

a young page · the keeper's voice pass on the note is still to come

Doors Onward

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Waite, A. E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Card text quoted verbatim, his punctuation kept. (Public domain.)
  2. Card described at: http://sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktpeac.htm

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