Meditations On My Personal Fears: The Five of Pentacles

I’ve found tarot to be a profound tool of meditation and inner connection, so spending time with the deck is one of the more enriching experiences for me. I don’t see it as just drawing a single card, or three, or only Celtic Crosses. Spending time in deeper contemplation of the cards can also be helpful in sorting my own feelings about what the cards communicate. It’s also been an amazing tool for me to reconnecting to my emotions and intuition which is part of why I’ve found it to be an invaluable asset in trauma recovery.

Shadow Card

Each tarot deck comes with a “Little White Book” of instructions, and often exercises and layouts are included in addition to all of the meanings of the cards. For the Light Seer’s tarot, the book is a Little Teal Book. One of the exercises is to ‘select your light and shadow cards.’ I’ll save writing about my light card for another time, for now let’s deal with the shadow Card, the card whose imagery makes me the most uncomfortable and unsettled (the book says ‘the card you feel the most aversion to’).

A lot of people would choose a major arcana card like the Tower or maybe a high sword — the 9 or 10. But no. Not me. I’m very acclimated to Tower energy, and who doesn’t love a good nightmare.

As soon as I read the description of the shadow card, I knew what it was for me. The Five of Pentacles.

Divination

The Five of Pentacles, like many other fives, deals with challenges and change. The pentacles are the suit that represents the material manifestation of things. Thus, the most common divinatory meaning is one of hardship or worry, especially in the financial realm. A quick comparitive study finds Barbara G. Walker’s deck describes the card as ‘Hardship’ and Alastair Crowley’s Thoth Tarot (some relation) calls it ‘Worry.’ Isabella Rothman’s This Might Hurt Tarot describes it as the ‘Dying Alone in the Cold’ Card. And boy oh boy is that apt. All of those descriptions are. Since the 5 hits around mid cycle from a numerological sense, it follows it should be a card of challenge and hardship.

Nearly every version of the card contains snow, and figures bracing against it, under a window of stained glass containing the pentacles. It’s a card of struggle, often in money or financial matters or the career. It could also represent a physical illness. Or — rejection.

What’s interesting isn’t just the figures in the card as being outsiders, or outcasts. Because there’s another rejection going on the card that was more subtle for me, and that could have to do with my own trauma around the card itself. Let’s talk about the trauma, and then I’ll get into the rejection.

Personal Connection

This card not only recalls for me trauma, but a lot of visceral fears I’ve held in life. One of the things that my grandmother (the woman that raised me after my Mom left) stuck in my brain is that I was going to end up poor, miserable, alone, and in a gutter. Sometimes it was a ditch. It’s what I deserved, and I was lucky I wasn’t already in a ditch. I’d be there if it weren’t for her. And she said this stuff to me constantly. As these things often do, that worked its way into ever growing list of fears.

I’d always felt uncomfortable with the Five of Pentacles even before I ever picked up the Light Seer’s Tarot and read the instruction to contemplate a card that I felt aversion to. It took years for me to explore why, or to be able to link it backwards. After meditating on it, it’s clear why someone with abandonment trauma and a high ACES score would be painful to contemplate and connect with. And it was during this meditation that I was finally able to see something about the card I had never really allowed myself to see before.

Here is the card:

Do you see it?

It’s the door and the key. Right there next to her. In nearly all iterations of the card, there is a symbol of possible salvation nearby, which is meant to make us contemplate: why isn’t the person suffering seeking help? The key is there. Are they so wrapped in their own pain they don’t see the chance of salvation? Is something blocking that choice (for those cards using Christian and church imagery it could be that they don’t feel safe there)?. The rejection part of the card isn’t just the rejection of the central figures in it — but the rejection OF the central figures that the ornate window / door and light near them is not for them. It is their rejection of the possibility of help.

This card isn’t just focused on the hardships we face, but how we lock ourselves into our pain and away from possible help and support.

Reversal

The reversal of the card is read as a straight reversal — thus the ill omens in the 5 of Pentacls upright are directly reversed. Instead of being about rejection and a negative change in circumstance or illness, it can represent the lifting or absence of the same. It transforms into a card of recovery, solace, and sanctuary.

Like other fives in the tarot, the Five of Pentacles represents a time of challenge. It also emphasizes the physicality and material aspects of the card. It also presents possibilities for growth and expansion after the experience if we allow ourselves to see past the pain and suffering and allow ourselves to acknowledge that we need help. The card isn’t just about the hardships we suffer, but how we lock our perspective into our suffering until we’re incapable of seeing the light, hope, and help around us.