Nine of Pentacles.
Plenty, finished, and she is alone in it.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A walled garden, a hooded falcon, a gown nobody works in. She stands among vines heavy with grapes with the bird on her gloved left hand and her right hand resting on the coins.
This is what self-sufficiency looks like finished rather than while it is being earned, and she is alone in it. Nothing in the card says that is a problem. It only asks whether the garden was the point or the wall was. You built both of them, and only you know which one you were building.
Four things people go to on this card
- the bird
You went to the bird first. It is hooded, which is easy to miss, so the one wild thing in the picture is the one thing she is keeping still on purpose.
The part of yourself you keep hooded in order to get anything done. It is on her hand, close enough to feel through the glove, and she takes it out and flies it when she decides.
Discipline in this card is not the absence of appetite. It is appetite with a hood on. The hood is a tool, not a verdict, and a hood that is never taken off stops being a tool. Whatever you have kept hooded, the test is when it last flew, not whether it is still there.
What have you kept hooded so long that you have stopped taking it out at all?
- the snail
You went to the snail, which almost nobody notices. It is the slowest thing in the garden and the only other living thing on the ground with her.
This is the pace the garden was actually grown at. Everything around her took years and none of the years are visible in the frame. The snail is the only thing in the picture still moving at the speed it was all made at.
If you have been measuring yourself against a finished picture this week, the snail is the part the picture leaves out. The person whose garden you are comparing yours to had a snail in it too, for years, and they will not mention it.
What are you comparing yourself to, and how long did it actually take the person who has it?
- the grapes
The vine is heavy because somebody tended it for years, and the card is quiet about who.
Inheritance in the plainest sense. Somebody planted this. Vines take years to bear like that, and she is standing among them in a gown nobody works in.
Some of what you have was handed to you and some of it you grew, and being accurate about the ratio is not humility. It is also the thing that tells you what is yours to give away, because you can only give away the part you grew; the rest is only yours to keep.
Which part of what you have did you actually grow, and who planted the rest?
- her hand
Her hand is on the coins and she is not counting them; she is resting on them, and the difference is the whole card.
Money being counted is not yet enough. Money being leaned on is. She has her weight on the pile the way you put your weight on a wall you have stopped checking.
This is what security feels like from the inside, rather than what it cost to get. If your hand is still moving over the pile, there is a number or a condition that would let it stop, and you have either not named it or named it and then moved it.
What number, or what condition, would let your hand stop moving over the pile?
Its ten degrees
The Golden Dawn gave the Nine of Pentacles 10° to 20° of Virgo, ruled by Venus, and Book T calls it the Lord of Material Gain. The Sun is in it from 2 September to 12 September. The decan page for this card.
The wheel runs on from here. The decan before this one is Eight of Pentacles, the Sun in Virgo, 23 August to 2 September. The one after is Ten of Pentacles, Mercury in Virgo, 12 September to 23 September. All thirty-six, in order.
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Nine of Pentacles on Yesod, the foundation, in Assiah, the world of earth: every nine is Yesod, in its own suit's world. It is the ninth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.
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