Minor Arcana, the Pentacles
Ace of Pentacles
The Ace of Pentacles opens the suit of pentacles, the coins, in the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew in 1909 for Arthur Edward Waite. A pale hand reaches out of a cloud with a large gold coin standing in its open palm, and below it a hedge of roses rises into an arch over a path to a far mountain.
What Waite wrote it means (1910)
- Divinatory meanings
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.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 280. Read it in the chapter
A hand—issuing, as usual, from a cloud—holds up a pentacle.
What's in the picture
- The cloud. A grey cloud with curled edges fills the left side, from the top of the coin to well below the hand, and the arm comes straight out of it. Waite's note says the hand comes from a cloud “as usual”, and so it does on all four aces.
- The open hand. The hand is bare, with no sleeve, and it lies open. The coin stands upright in the open palm, and the fingers curl up around its lower edge, as if to keep it from rolling off.
- The coin. It is plain gold with a double rim. A five-pointed star is drawn on it in thin black lines, one point straight up.
- The glow. Short white strokes stand out around the hand, mostly to its right and below it, like a glow of light on the speckled grey sky.
- The white flowers. White flowers, probably lilies, grow at the foot of the hedge on the left, with one more at the right end of the hedge.
- The arch of roses. The hedge is dark green and dotted with red roses. Near the right it climbs into a high, rounded arch.
- The path. A yellow path runs over the grass and through the arch, out of the garden.
- The far mountain. Through the opening you can see blue sky and the white peak of a mountain far off. The garden fills only the bottom quarter of the card; the rest is sky, cloud and coin.
The card in brief
- In the deck
- Card 65 of 78
- Arcana
- Minor Arcana, Pentacles
- Number
- Ace
- Element (Golden Dawn)
- Earth
- Title in Book T
- Root of the Powers of Earth
- Drawn by
- Pamela Colman Smith
- Planned by
- Arthur Edward Waite
- Published
- London, William Rider & Son, 1909
- Scan
- Pam-A printing, c. 1910, Wikimedia Commons
In the old books
Book T (1912)
A White Radiant Angelic Hand, holding a branch of a Rose Tree, whereon is a large Pentacle, formed of Five concentric circles. The Innermost Circle is white, charged with a red Greek Cross. From this White Centre, Twelve Rays, also white, issue: these terminate at the circumference, making the whole something like an Astrological figure of the Heavens.
It is surmounted by a small circle, above which is a large white Maltese Cross, and with two white wings.
Four Crosses and two buds are shewn. The Hand issueth from the Clouds as in the other three cases.
It represents materiality in all senses, good and evil: and is, therefore, in a sense, illusionary: it shows material gain, labour, power, wealth, etc.
Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), pp. 155–156. See the source Papus (1892)
Commencement of fortune. Inheritance. Gifts. Economy, etc., etc.
Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, tr. A. P. Morton (London, 1892), p. 314. See the source
Before 1909
The older cards and pictures behind this one will be shown here once their licences are checked.
The film
No film for this card yet.
Sources
- Waite: the hand of the Ace of Pentacles comes from a cloud, “as usual”.Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III, Ace of Pentacles
Around this card
Before and after it in the deck
The same number in the other suits
All the cards of the Pentacles, or the whole deck.