TAROTFive of Pentacles
Upright
Hardship and feelings of being alone. Disconnection from your inner beliefs.
A rough patch in an area of your life.
Loss of faith or having to make difficult decisions because of your circumstances.
An important need to realize that any setback is temporary.
Intuition
This card was significantly changed from the standard Rider-Waite-Smith image as its meaning is often not clear to beginners.
The image shown in this card is much more stark; a poor mother having to abandon her child, with the shadowy Goddess Oizys (literally meaning Misery) looking on.
Reversed
Recovery and return to faith after a setback.
Renewal of hope or a return to faith in yourself or your situation.
Overcoming problems you have faced in the recent past.
A better appreciation of your life. Realizing temporary problems have been obscuring a good life.
Astrologia
Straightforward in communication, practical and realistic. A patient listener, with a focus on stability. Mercury in Taurus gives an impetus to face any fears that may break this stability. Can be inflexible, slow and materialistic.
Five of Pentacles
The Five of Pentacles primarily represents a challenge to your material security that knocks your faith. This used to refer to religious faith, but may mean ‘faith in yourself’ today.
In extreme situations, the card can also point to separation and the breaking of close bonds through the adversity, and the potential for arguments and a falling out.
When you don’t believe in yourself nor anything else, and have separated yourself from those who could have helped in the past, then you are certainly at a low and feeling it!
The name for this feeling is misery and the ancients had a Goddess for it. We know of her far less today than most deities, but she may still watch us silently…
Oizys
Oizys is the personification of misery, suffering and distress. Her Roman/Latin counterpart Miseria is where the word misery comes from.
Like most personification deities, Oizys has no mythology of her own and neither are there any clear images or statues of her appearance. She is simply the anthropomorphism of the emotions of misery and distress.
On the card she is shown as a ghostly woman wrapped in a dirty white dress. This could be a modern wedding dress were it not for the thorns that wrap around her. The deeper the misery she sees, the more the thorns twist and tighten around her, inflicting greater pain.
Oizys was said to be a silent witness whenever misery occurred, and in this case we see a particularly miserable event. A woman is leaving her baby behind. The poor child raises a hand to the mother, shocked by the abandonment. The mother does not see this as her head is bent in sadness as she leaves.
Yet the five pentacles on this card are arranged around the Torch symbol that the Fool leaps towards and the High Priestess and Empress hold. This symbol is related to the Eleusinian mysteries. Its secrets revealed the path to redemption and the afterlife for the ancients - so long as you kept your faith.
Keeping your faith and working (and staying) together despite adversity plays an important part in the original Rider-Waite-Smith card. The RWS original design shows a blind and a lame man walking together, and this may refer to Mathew 21:14, or to the older (1st century BC) parable of the Blind man and the Lame (if the lame man were to sit on the shoulders of the blind man, they would overcome their individual adversities by helping each other). It probably means both.
Perhaps if the mother could have kept her faith there would be a less bitter ending. Like the parable of the blind man and the lame, the baby has kept the mother alive for this long by giving her a reason to carry on. The separation may unfortunately mean the end of both of them, and Oizys knows this.
But she must as ever, remain silent as she bears the tightening of thorns.
Description and Symbology
The card shows the Goddess of misery, Oizys acting as the silent witness to a particularly painful event. A mother abandons her child in a dark and misty forest, away from any help.
The Goddess Oizys must watch, feeling the pain being felt by mother and child via tightening thorns across her own body. She is with us all at some point in all but the luckiest of lives, silently witnessing and sharing our pain.
The card tells us that we will see an event that may test our faith or cause us to move away from those we love, argue or become angry and blame others.
This is not however the right way to respond. The card shows us a better way via the symbol of the Torch; a symbol of faith.
We should always have faith in something larger than us, and if we can’t do that then we must at least have faith in ourselves.
We should also remember who we are in the good times and stay the same in the bad times. This means staying together and working together. So long as we do this, we will come out of adversity stronger than when we went into it. Adversity is a test, and if we pass, the prize is becoming a better person.
Adversity is a test, and if we pass, the prize is becoming a better person
It is also important to remember that this is a Minor Arcana card, meaning that it suggests a short period of adversity. This is a temporary setback and you will recover!
Faith and misery
Oizys is the Goddess of misery, standing as silent witness to our suffering. Behind her we see the symbol of the Torch; a symbol of faith. This helps us to bear our burdens by giving us purpose. This faith can be in a deity, ourselves or a wider group.
Mother and child
We see the abandonment of a child. The child looks to be well fed whereas the mother is thin and has dirty bare feet. She has been a good mother so far. The child has been the mother’s reason to carry on, and now they are separated, both child and mother will die.
Tips for Readings
The following table shows the upright and reverse meanings for general questions. The last row ('Yes/No') is useful when you are picking a single card to decide a yes or no decision.
Upright
Reversed
You or your partner has problems of a financial nature, and it is pretty easy to know which one it is (if it isn’t you, then…). There may be a need to bring things into the open and work on the issues together, as problems left alone in the dark tend to get bigger and scarier.
If you are single, then there may be problems outside the relationship that are causing problems for one of you. A supportive shoulder and a listening ear cost nothing, but be wary of what you are getting in to if you want to help further.
In either case, remember that periods of financial insecurity don’t last that long, and the longest lasting repercussion is showing you who you and others really are.
There is a new hope in the relationship caused by a period of insecurity ending.
Before you go out and celebrate, it is wise to understand what went wrong and what went right. More importantly, this is a good time to consider your life together and how you stand.
The problem may have brought you together, or shown where the cracks lie, and it is important to resolve or understand them for the future.
You may also be realizing the problem makes you cherish what you have rather than concentrate on what you did not have (or lost). We often focus on the problems but ignore the good luck we have, particularly when that good luck is the person standing next to us.
There is a financial or status loss coming towards you, and it may be related to work. A lack of opportunity that you thought was a dead certainty, a pay-cut, or a job loss.
This is never good news, but the worst thing you can lose is none of the above - real loss is losing faith in yourself or taking it out on blameless loved ones.
Look to what you have rather than what you do not, as this storm will soon blow itself out, and you will sail far better with a full crew on board and working with you.
You have gone through a period of trial or discomfort and the worst is over, and you can expect things to get better at work, or opportunities to move to better will present themselves to you.
For those stuck in a dead end job, the path is clear to bettering yourself, either by an improvement in your current position, or a new one elsewhere. The card does however suggest a bold move is the best one, as luck is finally on your side.
If you are out of work, expect the chance of a new start.
It is important to learn from the past however, and take steps to ensure the next time you have problems you are better prepared.
Be careful of your health as there is a chance that a health issue could cause a lack of security in your life.
Forewarned is forewarned, so lay off the martial arts or contact sport for a while, and don’t take chances as you might suffer more than a sore body.
On the plus side, the card denotes a temporary situation, and the bigger problem will be how much faith you have for recovery rather than any injury itself, so if you find yourself on the injury bench, have hope!
A period of illness or low spirits will soon end.
More importantly, it is important to learn from the experience.
The sky rarely falls down, the sun always rises, and the wolf at the door has no key.
Patience and faith are often your two most reliable assets!
This is one of the biggest spiritual cards in the deck, and although it brings bad news in material terms, it also brings a message that you need to hear.
You may be going through a tough time at the moment, and losing financial security, but instead dwell towards what you have rather than what you are losing, because your solution lies there. Help and support, close communication within relationships and perhaps even a change of lifestyle that requires less.
The problems will be short-lived, but if you do everything right, the positive repercussions and understanding you gain may last a lifetime.
You have passed through a difficult financial or material change in your life. It may have been small or large, but you are now through it.
As well as celebrating, now is a good time to consider your faith in yourself and those close to you.
If it has gone up, all well and good, and something to recall next time you have problems.
If it has gone down, now is the time to think about the issues and start fixing them once the celebrating is over.
Money will be tight for a period, and this may affect your plans or cause anxiety.
It might be caused by a financial loss, unexpected bills, an accident or repair, or a drop in income
It is important to focus on what you have rather than what you don’t have, because you have more than you realize.
Make changes, communicate the problem so there are no surprises, and realize this will not last forever.
Financial problems that you have lived through in the recent past are coming to an end.
As well as thinking yourself lucky, now is a good time to plan ahead.
Put money away to make sure the lights stay on and the roof stays intact for a whole when the worst happens, cut some of your most indulgent excesses for a while so you fully recover, or realise you can’t invest absolutely everything in stocks or property because you also have eat and pay the bills at times when neither are paying out!
No, because of material losses and worry caused by them.
Yes, through recovery from material losses and lessons learned from them.
Reading the Card
The upright card
The upright Five of Pentacles suggests you will soon see a challenge or event that results in a loss of material security: financial losses, bills, loss of income or job, an expensive accident or injury, or something else that causes a change to your everyday life.
Although the card shows a particularly miserable event, most things in life are not that bad, even if they might initially seem that way. The way to fix these problems in your own life are often simple:
- Have faith in yourself and things turning out right if you take the time to do things properly.
- Stick together through adversity in the exact same way you stick together in the good times. Never walk away from loved ones; pick them up and carry them, because they will carry you in return.
- Anything that will not matter in a couple of years should not matter by tomorrow either - unless you have trained yourself to create more drama and misery when anything happens!
Adversity will still happen, but you will be stronger and ready for the challenge.
The reversal
The reversed Five of Pentacles denotes a return of hope and a better situation. Your material losses or problems related to money/assets have been resolved one way or another.
A more important change is that the situation in your eyes has got better. It probably has got better but the more important change is that your faith has returned.
It is sometimes important to look at what you still have rather than what you have lost. Perhaps you now have a better understanding of how things work and what part you played in the problem and how to avoid it in the future.
The situation may have bright you closer to loved ones, or showed potential problems and fractures that you can now resolve and mend.
You may now have a better appreciation of people you certainly cannot rely on when the chips are down. This may have initially been a cause of anger and panic, but now the dust has settled, you have knowledge, and knowledge is power for the future.
Card Design Process
The original Rider-Waite-Smith card is often hard to decipher, especially because the reference to a blind and lame man are not modern nor well known, and may no longer even refer easily back to the biblical passage it comes from never mind the ancient Greek parable!
It was decided instead to make use of Oizys as the personification of misery and show a particularly miserable event play out.
Unfortunately, there are no vases, friezes nor statues that depict Oizys (this is not uncommon as many minor Gods were described via now lost oral traditions). This was however a perfect point to build up an appearance ourselves.
It was know that Oizys is a silent witness to misery, so that idea was expanded via a visual way to show Oizys feeling the same pain as those she watches.
Final Words
The Five of Pentacles denotes a period of hardship. The card suggests having faith and hope, plus coming together with others to solve the problem is the best way forward.
Once you are past the problem, the knowledge gained from the hardship will make you better able to weather future storms, and have a better understanding of how or why the problem occurred in the first place.
