Minor Arcana, the Pentacles
Ten of Pentacles
The Ten of Pentacles is the last numbered card of the suit of pentacles, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 for Arthur Edward Waite's deck. An old man in a patterned robe sits with two white dogs by a stone archway, a couple and a child stand beyond him, and ten gold coins hang over the whole scene.
What Waite wrote it means (1910)
- Divinatory meanings
Gain, riches; family matters, archives, extraction, the abode of a family.
- Reversed
Chance, fatality, loss, robbery, games of hazard; sometimes gift, dowry, pension.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London, 1911), p. 262. Read it in the chapter
A man and woman beneath an archway which gives entrance to a house and domain. They are accompanied by a child, who looks curiously at two dogs accosting an ancient personage seated in the foreground. The child's hand is on one of them.
What's in the picture
- The ten coins. The coins float over everything, in front of the people and the stone. Three run down each side and four down the middle, the left side matching the right.
- The arch. A great stone arch spans the top of the card. Through it you see a house with a red roof, a field, a few trees and blue sky.
- The carved shield. On the wall at the left, a shield is carved with a tower over wavy lines, like a castle above water, between red windows.
- The old man. In front, on the left, sits an old man with white hair, seen from the side, his face turned to the right.
- Grapes and vines. His robe is crowded with small patterns in red, green and gold, and grapes and vine leaves fill the bottom left corner.
- The dogs. Two white dogs come up to him from the right, both turned his way. In Waite's words, the dogs are “accosting” him.
- The child. At the right edge a small child in blue rests one hand on the back of a dog and peers out from behind it.
- The couple. Under the arch a man in a blue cloak stands with his back to us, his dark hair short. Beside him a woman in a red dress turns her head toward him.
- The tower. Beyond them rises a tall square tower with small dark windows, and trees stand along a pale field on the right.
The card in brief
- In the deck
- Card 74 of 78
- Arcana
- Minor Arcana, Pentacles
- Number
- Ten
- Element (Golden Dawn)
- Earth
- Astrology (Golden Dawn)
- Mercury in Virgo
- Title in Book T
- Lord of Wealth
- 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)
An Angelic Hand, holding by the lower extremity a branch whose roses touch all the Pentacles. No buds, however, are shewn. The symbols of ☿ and ♏︎ are above and below.
The Pentacles are thus arranged ⟨figure⟩.
Completion of material gain and fortune; but nothing beyond: as it were, at the very pinnacle of success. Old age, slothfulness; great wealth, yet sometimes loss in part; heaviness; dullness of mind, yet clever and prosperous in money transactions.
Book T, “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”, The Equinox I.8 (London, 1912), p. 181. See the source Papus (1892)
Uncertainty in the fortune. Great success and great reverses.
Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, tr. A. P. Morton (London, 1892), p. 315. 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 man and woman beneath an archway, a child, and two dogs accosting an ancient personage; the child's hand is on one of them.Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III, Ten 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.