Minor Arcana, the Pentacles
Seven of Pentacles
The Seven of Pentacles is the seventh card of the suit of pentacles, from the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew in 1909 for Arthur Edward Waite. A young man in an orange tunic leans on a long-handled tool and looks down at a leafy bush with six gold coins on it, while a seventh coin lies at his feet.
What Waite wrote it means (1910)
- Divinatory meanings
These are exceedingly contradictory; in the main, it is a card of money, business, barter; but one reading gives altercation, quarrel—and another innocence, ingenuity, purgation.
- Reversed
Cause for anxiety regarding money which it may be proposed to lend.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 268. Read it in the chapter
A young man, leaning on his staff, looks intently at seven pentacles attached to a clump of greenery on his right; one would say that these were his treasures and that his heart was there.
What's in the picture
- The bush. A low bush grows on the left, its broad leaves overlapping, with thin tendrils curling from its edges.
- Six coins on the leaves. Six coins rest among the leaves in no neat order, from the top of the bush down to the ground at the left edge.
- The seventh coin. The seventh lies apart, on the ground between his feet. Waite's text puts all seven on the greenery. The drawing doesn't.
- Hands and chin. He folds both hands over the top of the handle and rests his chin on them. His head is bowed, and his eyes look down and to the left, at the coins on the bush.
- The tunic. He wears a loose orange tunic that reaches his thighs, over blue sleeves and blue-grey hose, with a white collar at the neck.
- The handle. The handle is long, straight and striped, and reaches from his chin to the ground. Waite calls it a staff.
- The blade. Where it meets the soil a short blade shows, so it may be a hoe or a mattock.
- The boots. His boots don't match. The left one is orange and the right one brown, and both reach up to the calf.
- The ground. Behind his legs the land runs in bands of purple and pink, with curling blue shapes near his feet. Above that the grey sky is plain and empty, all the way up to the numeral VII at the top.
The card in brief
- In the deck
- Card 71 of 78
- Arcana
- Minor Arcana, Pentacles
- Number
- Seven
- Element (Golden Dawn)
- Earth
- Astrology (Golden Dawn)
- Saturn in Taurus
- Title in Book T
- Lord of Success Unfulfilled
- 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 holding a white rose branch. Seven Pentacles arranged like the geomantic figure Rubeus. There are only five buds, which overhang, but do not touch the five uppermost Pentacles. Above and below are the Decan symbols, ♄ and ♉︎ respectively.
Promises of success unfulfilled. (Shewn, as it were, by the fact that the rosebuds do not come to anything.) Loss of apparently promising fortune. Hopes deceived and crushed. Disappointment, misery, slavery, necessity and baseness. A cultivator of land, and yet a loser thereby. Sometimes it denotes slight and isolated gains with no fruits resulting therefrom, and of no further account, though seeming to promise well.
Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), pp. 197–198. See the source Papus (1892)
Success assured. A large 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: a young man, leaning on his staff, looks at seven pentacles attached to a clump of greenery.Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III, Seven 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.