Still Life with Tarot

I tend to read from Tarot decks based on the old Renaissance style decks with no scenarios depicted on the Minor Arcana. I see the Four of Coins and it’s four coins and a number four. Fours represent foundations and stability and coins represent labor, fruits of labor and sometimes health. I extrapolate from there.
When Pamela Colman Smith drew the 4 of Coins, renamed the 4 of Pentacles, she drew a king sitting on a throne, with countryside and city in the background. On his crown is a pentacle, beneath each foot is a pentacle and in his arms is a pentacle. Being more intuitive than calculating, Smith didn’t take notes so we don’t know what she intended to portray. Arthur Waite wrote “The surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance.”

In a recent class, a student speculated on the relationship of Smith’s king to the sacred king of the land, a popular mythology among Waite and Smith’s contemporaries. That creates a powerful connection to number 4 in the Major Arcana, The Emperor as well. However this is not the prevailing explication of the icon.
Sometime in the 20th Century, the 4 of Coins or Pentacles became popularly known as the Miser Card, described as selfish, possessive, greedy, controlling. In a recent adaption, the king’s stance and dramatic expression communicates nothing so much as constipation. Though the miser interpretation is fairly comtemporary, it’s become predominant.

The disagreement is not whether the 4 of Coins or Pentacles is a card of financial stability, but rather how we view or value that.
As a young woman reading the Waite Smith I leaned toward the miser camp, on this card and several others. I was impressed in one deck to see the devil on The Devil card replaced by a trunk of jewels and coins.
After years of watching underemployment, lack of health insurance and other financial stresses impact people’s overall well being and their ability to bring their gifts to the world, I sit firmly as the 4 of Coins king in my belief that a little fiscal surety goes a long way. Prior to the trend of reading Smith’s pictures for deeper meanings, the 4 of Coins was almost universally a card of benefit and that is how most folks receive the word that their financial position is either stable or stabilizing.

Now what they do with that I leave to the other 77 cards.

(As an interesting aside, Rachel Pollack gives the miser meaning in her work, Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom. But in the design of the Vertigo deck on which she advised, the king/miser is gone and the card is the simple four coins again. Writing is added to imply that stability can come from creativity and creative work.)

This entry was posted Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Minor Arcana. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.