What the card shows
Two mendicants in a snow-storm pass a lighted casement.
pentacles
Five
Five of Pentacles
Suit: Pentacles Minor Arcana Element: Earth
Also known as Five of Coins, Five of Disks, and Five of Denaries.
Core interpretation
Five of Pentacles: material hardship and exclusion occurring beside possible shelter. The card joins the earth nature of Pentacles to its place in the numbered sequence.
The card's place in the historical Minor Arcana sits beside its Golden Dawn correspondences and Waite's account of Pamela Colman Smith's image. Each reading keeps the source and deck that gave it shape.
8 sourced claims: 5 traditional , 3 modern
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
Divinatory meaning
- Upright
- The card foretells material trouble above all, whether in the form illustrated— that is, destitution— or otherwise. For some cartomancists, it is a card of love and lovers-wife, husband, friend, mistress; also concordance, affinities. These alternatives cannot be harmonized.
- Reversed
- Disorder, chaos, ruin, discord, profligacy.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §2, The Lesser Arcana — Five of Pentacles.
The same card in the Thoth deck
Five of Disks · Material Trouble
What the card shows
ModernTwo impoverished figures move through snow beneath the lit pentacles of a stained-glass window.
A concise visual description of Pamela Colman Smith's 1910 design, checked against Waite's card entry and the public-domain scan.
Divinatory meaning
ModernUpright, Waite chiefly associates the card with material trouble and destitution, while noting a contradictory tradition of love and affinity. Reversed, it can indicate disorder, chaos, ruin or discord.
Waite treats these as historical divinatory allocations and explicitly warns that they vary by context and are not a universal symbolic canon.
Tree of Life number
In the Golden Dawn system, all four Fives share a numerical relationship with one Hermetic Sephirah.
Golden Dawn correspondences 5 sourced claims
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Lord of Material Trouble
Book T's formal decan-card title.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Titles of the decan cards, pp. 4–5; Five of Pentacles, pp. 28–46
Earth · Pentacles
Pentacles express the powers of Earth: material conditions, labour, resources, embodiment and practical consequence.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Titles and descriptions of the four suits, pp. 3–23
Geburah · Severity
The Fives bring resistance. The suit's growing force meets conflict, obstruction and the test of whether it can continue under strain.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — General meanings of the small cards under the Sephiroth, p. 27
Mercury in Taurus
Book T assigns each pip card from Two through Ten to one ten-degree decan of the zodiac.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Of the Thirty-Six Decans, pp. 23–27; Five of Pentacles, pp. 28–46
Material strain brings loss, labour or anxiety and demands practical intelligence rather than denial.
A concise paraphrase of Book T. Its dignity method modifies every decan card through the cards surrounding it.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Lord of Material Trouble, Five of Pentacles, pp. 28–46
History and variants 1 sourced claim
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the fifty-six suit cards in a standard Tarot pack: four suits of ten pip cards and four court cards.
The Met documents this structure in surviving fifteenth-century Tarot: Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins, each numbered from one to ten with king, queen, knight and knave. Occult correspondences developed later.
Sources (1)
- Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards , Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — paragraphs 2–4