Card of the Day - Seven of Pentacles

As we go along, we'll be talking about the different cards that make up the 78 cards in the Tarot. Today, I wanted to start with a representative card, to illustrate how the symbols of the Tarot can be interpreted for your own personal situation. As you learn how to read tarot cards, you will gain a greater understanding of the nuances of each card, and that will enhance your ability to apply the messages of the Tarot to your own situation.

The suit of pentacles is one of four in the minor arcana of the Tarot. The four suits each concern an area of human life as follows:

• Cups - emotional matters
• Rods (also called staves or wands) - spiritual matters
• Swords - power, position, or physical matters
• Pentacles (also called coins) - monetary or financial matters
  

Everyone loves to see pentacles come up in a good position in a spread because of that relationship of pentacles to money, prosperity, and material gain. However, pentacles also have to do with industry, personal effort and application, work, career, skills and talents, and contribution to society. So you can see that the Tarot begins to be more complex than just reading symbols on a card.

Depending upon the location of the card in a spread, and its relationship to the cards surrounding it, your reading can be very different indeed.

The seven of pentacles is a good example. On its face, it shows a man, a farmer or gardener, holding a hoe or other implement. He is surrounded by leafy growth, against a beautiful landscape. The Rider-Waite (RW) version is a bit more spartan than the picture of the card from my Morgan-Greer (MG) deck. We'll be talking about decks in the near future. You can see the difference in tone between the two cards. In RW, the sense is of someone who has completed a tiring job, or someone who is contemplating what has grown there. In MG, you get a sense that he is satisfied with his labour, and perhaps also proud of his successful accomplishment.

The meanings of this card include the idea that one's hard labor is necessary to cultivate material gain. It speaks to individual and sustained effort as well as care and attention paid to that thing which is growing. The message includes the idea that time and effort are necessary in order to get reward, and that one can be satisfied with such an endeavour if good, honest effort has been expended. The symbols indicate that there will be a payoff for hard work, and that you can see and enjoy the fruits of your labors. It also indicates that it may be necessary to take time for assessment of one's work so far, and may herald a change in direction.

In the reversed position (which we will talk about soon) it could indicate some concern or anxiety regarding one's economic status, and uncertainty about whether one's labor will be rewarded, even about whether one is working in the right field, or whether cultivating this particular seed (or project) is worthwhile.

As you can see, the symbols of the Tarot offer multiple meanings and interpretations depending upon other factors such as position in the spread, surrounding cards, and the situation in which the question is asked. When you learn how to read tarot cards for yourself, you will develop an ability to know which of these meanings is the right one for your situation at the present time.