In divination
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.
The library's note
Two mendicants pass through a snowstorm beneath a lit window they cannot enter, and Waite calls the design's plain sense material trouble, destitution above all. He notes a second, harder to reconcile tradition too, reading the same figures as love and its complications, "wife, husband, friend, mistress," and admits outright that the two readings "cannot be harmonized." Pentacles' material concern turns coldest here, want observed from just outside a warmth the suit has not yet let its figures reach.