Page of Pentacles.
Studying a thing before spending it.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
In a flowering meadow, a young man in a red hat and green tunic holds a coin up in both hands and looks at it. The field to his right has been ploughed, and there is no path under his feet.
Pages are the beginnings of their suits, and this is the beginning of having: the appetite without the arrangements. He has not started and nothing is making him. Whatever you want, you are still turning it over in your hands, and nobody is asking you to put it down yet.
Four things people go to on this card
- his hands
You went to how he is holding it. Both hands, up above his own eye level, looking at it rather than at you.
Somebody studying a thing they have not owned before. He is not showing it to anyone. He has lifted it into the light to see it properly, and the coin is drawn hovering just above his palms, not quite touched.
That is the whole of his competence at the moment: close attention to one object, which is more than most people manage with the things they already have. You own something you have never actually stopped and examined, and the page is the part of you that would.
What have you got that you have never actually stopped and examined?
- the field
Past him, the field has been turned over in furrows, recently, and he is not standing in it.
Work is already underway around somebody who has not started. The ground is prepared. He is in the flowers looking at a coin, and the furrows are right there, brown, waiting.
That is not idleness. It is the gap between understanding a thing and doing it, and the suit takes that gap seriously. But the field has been ploughed, and ploughed ground does not stay ready. What you are still examining has a season attached, and you are in it now.
The ground is ready. What are you still examining instead of starting?
- the meadow
You went to the grass. He is standing in flowering meadow, and there is no path under his feet.
At the beginning with no route yet. He is not lost; he has not picked a direction, and nothing in the picture is forcing him to. The flowers go in every direction equally.
Take the reprieve seriously. This is the only pentacles card where nobody is working, owed, or waiting, and it does not last. If nothing is forcing your hand at the moment, the honest exercise is to say what you would choose if that stayed true, because it will not, and the choice will then be made for you.
Nothing is forcing your hand yet. What would you choose if it stayed that way?
- the hood
The red hood hangs down his back over a green tunic, and it is the loudest thing in the card.
The suit of earth, wearing something conspicuous. Green for growing and red for wanting, on somebody who has neither built nor bought anything yet. The colours are ahead of the position.
That is what makes pages both promising and expensive to employ, and it is worth saying kindly rather than as a complaint. If your appetite is ahead of your position at the moment, that is not a fault; it is early. The fault would be dressing it as arrival.
Is your appetite here ahead of your position, and is that a problem or just early?
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Page of Pentacles on Malkuth, the kingdom, in Assiah, the world of earth: the pages of all four suits sit there, one to a world. It is the tenth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Which zodiac sign is the Page of Pentacles?
None, and that is the answer Book T gives. The Kings, Queens and Knights each hold thirty degrees of the zodiac, but the four Pages are given a quarter of the heavens around the pole instead, so the Page of Pentacles has no sign and no dates. What it does have is the whole of Pentacles under it: it is the earth of that suit, and on the Tree of Life it sits on Malkuth, the kingdom. A birthday cannot land on a Page.
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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