Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Pentacles: The final step in the process of manifestation — bringing something into being in the physical world. Actually, the word ‘something’ is really an unnecessary one, because everything that we experience with our five senses makes up the realm of Pentacles.
Moreover, as I have written in previous weeks, we are not passive witnesses to the process of manifestation; we are active participants, whether we know it or not, whether we want to be or not. Our minds’ eyes move out into our physical eyes and we ‘see’ our world into life. Our hands move out and touch what is within reach and we know what we touch to have texture, even feeling the breeze through our fingers. Our ears give mental shape to those things that we cannot see, translating sound waves into images in our imaginations. Smell can transport us back to a single moment in time in a way that nothing else can. Taste has the ability to expand and round out our experiences of the physical, just as salt enhances the flavour of the food to which it is added.
So, to recap: Through the direction of libido (Wands) by our feelings (Cups) and our thoughts (Swords), so we are in a constant process of creation and interaction with what it is that we have created (Pentacles).
Pentacles are often associated primarily with material possessions, and, especially, with money. I feel this puts limitations on what it is that tarot is really about, which is life itself. Pentacles might show up as money, or as a means to money (work, for example), but money is also representative of a state of mind, of our beliefs about how the world operates and how we operate within it. Let me give you an example: For someone with boundary issues, money can take on an energy of its own. When they are single, they manage it pretty well. When in a relationship, they tend to lose control of it, in the same way that they have lost a sense of themselves. Frittering money away is a symptom of a tendency to eschew responsibility: They haven’t banked on themselves, nor invested in themselves. (Talking from personal experience? Who, me? Nooooo!) In this way, Pentacles can be expanded from their often limited sense to one that is holistic. Remember: We might be creating our world, but — by design or default — we are creating ourselves too.
Here are the fourteen Pentacles cards and possible corresponding meanings: