Minor Arcana, the Pentacles
Eight of Pentacles
Pamela Colman Smith's Eight of Pentacles, from the deck she drew for A. E. Waite in 1909, is the eighth card of the suit of pentacles. A young craftsman sits on a bench cutting a star into a coin with hammer and chisel, while six finished coins line the wooden post beside him and one more lies on the ground.
What Waite wrote it means (1910)
- Divinatory meanings
Work, employment, commission, craftsmanship, skill in craft and business, perhaps in the preparatory stage.
- Reversed
Voided ambition, vanity, cupidity, exaction, usury. It may also signify the possession of skill, in the sense of the ingenious mind turned to cunning and intrigue.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 266. Read it in the chapter
An artist in stone at his work, which he exhibits in the form of trophies.
What's in the picture
- The bowed head. He has dark curly hair and keeps his head down, eyes on the work.
- The hammer. One hand lifts a hammer with a pale head, close to his face.
- The coin on the bench. The other hand holds a chisel upright on a coin that lies flat on the bench. Its star is already cut. A small block of wood sits beside it.
- The finished coins. Six finished coins line the post on the right, one above another, from the top of the card down to the bench. Waite called him “an artist in stone” who shows his work “in the form of trophies”.
- The post. The post is a wooden beam, drawn with the rings and lines of its grain.
- The coin on the ground. One more coin lies on the ground near the bench legs. With the six on the post and the one under his chisel, that makes eight.
- His clothes. He wears a blue shirt, a black apron, red hose and red shoes, and sits with one leg stretched out.
- The town. Far off on the left is a town with a white tower and a red roof, beyond a green field. It is small and far off, right at the edge of the card.
- The empty sky. Most of the card above him is plain grey sky. The numeral VIII sits at the top, and the man and his work stay in the lower half.
The card in brief
- In the deck
- Card 72 of 78
- Arcana
- Minor Arcana, Pentacles
- Number
- Eight
- Element (Golden Dawn)
- Earth
- Astrology (Golden Dawn)
- Sun in Virgo
- Title in Book T
- Lord of Prudence
- 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 Radiating Angelic Hand, issuing from a cloud, and grasping a branch of a rose tree, with four white roses thereon, which touch only the four lowermost Pentacles. No rosebuds even, but only leaves, touch the four uppermost disks. All the Pentacles are similar to that of the Ace, but without the Maltese cross and wings. They are arranged like the geomantic figure Populus. Above and below them are the symbols ☉ and ♍︎ for the Decan.
Over-careful in small things at the expense of great: "Penny wise and pound foolish": gain of ready money in small sums; mean; avaricious; industrious; cultivation of land; hoarding, lacking in enterprise.
Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), pp. 179–180. See the source Papus (1892)
Partial success. Great loss of money at the moment apparently of definitely securing the fortune.
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: an artist in stone at his work, which he exhibits in the form of trophies.Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III, Eight 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.