Queen of Pentacles.
Care given close up, one thing at a time.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
She is looking down into the coin in her lap. A throne carved with goats and fruit, an arbour of roses in flower over her head, and a rabbit in the grass at the corner of the card.
Care rather than command. This is the person who keeps the thing alive. Queens are the holding of their suits, and this one holds by tending. If what you need at the moment is looking after rather than judgement, this is what it looks like, and it will not be performed for you.
Four things people go to on this card
- her gaze
You went to where she is looking. Down, into the coin in her lap, and not out at you.
Attention given entirely to the thing in hand. Every other queen is looking out of the picture at something, or at us. This one has her eyes on the object, and the object is not going anywhere.
So the competence here is not presence or judgement. It is care, applied close up, to one object at a time, and it does not perform. Something in your situation needs looking after rather than deciding about, and looking after is slower, quieter, and harder to get credit for.
What needs looking after closely rather than deciding about?
- the rabbit
You went to the rabbit. Bottom right, in the grass, small, and easy to miss entirely.
Fertility and appetite, drawn as an animal that will not stay still and cannot be managed. It is in her garden and it is not hers. Nobody in the picture is looking at it.
That is the wild part of a very settled card. Something in a well-kept life is always breeding, eating and unaccounted for, and the queen has apparently made her peace with it. You have something loose in your life that you have decided to stop managing, and the rabbit says that was allowed.
What is loose in your life that you have decided to stop managing?
- the roses
The roses arch right over the top of the throne, in leaf and in flower, and they are growing.
A throne inside a living thing rather than in a hall. She is sitting under something that grew there, and it is over her head rather than behind her. It will need cutting back next year.
The suit is earth and this queen has not separated the office from the garden. Her authority and her plants are the same project. If you keep trying to keep yours apart, the roses are the argument against: they are the throne's ceiling and they are alive.
What are you keeping in two separate parts of your life that is actually one thing?
- the goats
On the throne, carved into the stone she is sitting on: goats, fruit and a winged head.
The carving is the long climb and the patient accumulation, cut into the seat itself. This is not new money and it is not luck. Goats get up mountains one hoof at a time, and the throne says so.
She has been here for a while and it shows in the furniture. If you are dealing with somebody like this, the useful thing to know is that they have already seen the whole cycle once. They will not be alarmed by your emergency, and that calm is not indifference; it is a memory.
Who around you has already been through the whole cycle of this once?
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Queen of Pentacles on Binah, understanding, in Assiah, the world of earth: the queens of all four suits sit there, one to a world. It is the third place in the Tree of Life spread.
Which zodiac signs does the Queen of Pentacles cover?
Twenty degrees of Sagittarius to twenty degrees of Capricorn: the last third of Sagittarius and the first two thirds of Capricorn, which the Sun crosses about 12 December to 10 January each year. Book T gives every queen thirty degrees across two signs like this, which is why a court card belongs to no single sign. The three decans inside it are Ten of Wands · Two of Pentacles · Three of Pentacles, so a birth in any of them carries the Queen of Pentacles as well as its own card.
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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