4 of Pentacles: Filling the Void

Questions from Mary K Greer's 'Tarot for Yourself':

What is keeping you centred? What are your greatest strengths? How are you powerful? What gives you a sense of security? What do you want to hold on to or possess? Who or what do you need to protect? 

I last drew this card nearly a month ago, so I linked to it in the 'Featured Post' to the right.

I do draw this card rather frequently, and it is quite true that stability and security are very important to me. You could perhaps say they are an obsession to me. Material possessions are not that important, but security is. Stability is. Spending makes me feel that I'm putting myself in danger, always has. I've always looked upon everything in terms of how many hours it took me to earn the money that paid for it. I drop a teapot and say, 'It took me half a day to earn the money that bought that and now I've broken it.' Or I might justify a purchase by saying to myself, 'That is only fifteen minutes of work.' I'm a scrimper and saver and my little hoard makes me feel safe, in the same way I feel satisfied knowing there are several tins of baked beans and plenty of rice and pasta in the pantry -- we won't starve. Not that I ever have starved (though when I was in uni I remember living for a week on a box of Cheerios, so I guess your definition of starving may vary.)

I've never considered myself materialistic because I don't feel the need to keep stuff and frequently have clear-outs where I give away or donate loads of accumulated things, and I am not bothered about flash cars or prime real estate. Still, even though my security blanket may be less flash than some, I suppose my grasping need for feeling safe is a type of materialism. There are more ways to feel secure and stable than a certain amount of cash in the bank or number of cans in the pantry, but these are two of the coping mechanisms I've developed.

Wanting to take a closer look at this today, I have turned to James Ricklef's 'The Soul's Journey: Finding Spiritual Messages in the Tarot'.

The question becomes, 'How much do we have to have in order to find peace and happiness?' and the problem is that for many of us, the answer is generally, 'More!' But if you have your basic needs met so that you do not have to worry about them, then you do not need more money to become happy; you need more stability within. 

This I quite agree with. If I were interested in acquiring a lot of money, I would have pursued a more lucrative career, I would be more of a go-getter in that way. I don't really crave money so much as stability, so let's see what more he has to say:

Through practices like meditation, mindful living, and spiritual devotion, you can create inner stability and find a place of refuge within where you will find peace and security in times of turbulence and anxiety. So a spiritual practice is like putting money into a savings account when times are good so that it will be there to carry you through when times get tough. 

I agree with this statement and have lived firsthand this experience of a meditation practice serving me well in times of trouble. And it is true that money in the bank was not my biggest concern at that time -- though of course that could have been because there was some money in the bank!

Here's the sentence that stands out strongest to me today:

We each have our own dysfunctional ways of filling the void that is not really there... 

'...when the real solution is to work on rediscovering our true divine nature, which does make us whole.'

It's not wrong to want security or even to be materialistic. It's not wrong to be rich. It's not virtuous to be poor. The 4 of Pentacles reminds us to examine our deepest needs for security and stability. Where do they come from? How are they affecting our decision making? Our anxiety level? Our overall enjoyment of our lives? Do we need to inspect and challenge the behaviours we have developed in order to feel secure and stable?

I think maybe we do.

Slow and steady and a wary eye

I have a warning today not to splash out, from 4 of Pentacles from the Original Rider Waite Tarot.

Four is the number of stability and Pentacles is the suit of element Earth. The 4 of Pentacles is Fire of Earth, (along with Ace of Pentacles, 7 of Pentacles, and King of Pentacles). It represents seeking shelter, structure and safety for our physical bodies and material wealth. It is a fierce defender of the status quo.

The card advises me to keep my head down today. Don't take risks in the Earth realm. I should be careful with my money, probably check my accounts just to make sure, eat sensibly, take it easy with my back (which I did twitch day before yesterday, doing something as simple as leaning over to pick up something I dropped on the floor).

It is a day for taking no risks with myself, my stuff, or the routines of my life. Slow and steady and a wary eye. (That doesn't sound very 'fiery', but for Pentacles, it is the essence of life, so yeah!)

I can do that.

What are you hanging on to?

Hezicos Tarot 

Today I've got the 4 of Coins, a card that is traditionally associated with being stingy with money. The card can also be seen as worrying too much about and hanging too tightly to anything, particularly as it pertains to the physical/material aspects of life. I've also often read it as pertaining to our time and how we spend it.

How are you worrying over, being too protective of, or being selfish or stingy with your time?

We talk about 'me time' and 'making time for ourselves', but it's also possible to go the other direction and be so protective of our 'time' that we end up not using it for anything at all. Then again, sometimes 'wasting' time comes from paralysis -- what if we spend a lot of time doing something and then we fail? We'll not only have wasted our time, we will have wasted our effort, possibly other resources (like ingredients if it's a new recipe, or doing our knee in if it's a new dance move or type of workout.)

Are you protecting your resources, your body, your time, so zealously that you end up sitting there doing nothing but holding on to what you've got?

Guess what happens to it eventually anyway. Time runs out. The body deteriorates. The milk and eggs spoil. The lotion loses its scent or goes hard in the bottle. The silver tarnishes. The nice clean pages in the blank book go yellow and fall out. All that stuff you were saving up so you wouldn't waste it -- wasted.

What do you need to stop wasting through trying not to waste it? :)

Serenity of minding my own business

What can I do today to help keep me on the course that will change my life for the better?

This card from Tarot de St Croix by Lisa de St Croix is the Four of Pentacles. The LWB says only, 'The child is the Emperor of her domain, focusing on building a castle without concern about the tide. Meaning: controlling your own projects.'

Now, I find this interesting. 'Controlling your own projects' reminds me very much of the 12-step literature I've been reading lately. The one lesson that is repeated over and over again is that there are things in this life that we are powerless over and that we should learn to accept this. Buddhism has a similar philosophy, teaching that the struggle against accepting reality is the cause of all suffering. We are also taught to tend to our own business and no one else's. I like how this little girl is building her sand castle in the safe zone (just above the tide line) instead of far, far up the beach near where the cars are parked. It shows that she has trust and that she also acknowledges that she is powerless--that there are things that she cannot control. In this case, her business is to get on with building her sand castle. She takes  precautions - she has set a 'boundary', the tide line - and then she focuses herself on her own task. She doesn't sit and stare morosely out to sea, afraid to make a start. She doesn't build the castle on the wet sand, defying the ocean to come in and knock it down. She knows that she is both safe and not safe. That things are under her control and beyond her control.

The thing I can do today to help keep me on the course that will change my life for the better is to 'keep to my side of the street', as they say in recovery language. And also to remember that while there are things beyond my control, things I am powerless over, I don't have to fear them. I can live alongside them, by letting go, with the same serenity and acceptance shown by this little girl.

Tarot de St Croix, Devera Publishing 2013

The safe choice?

Watch the clip from Jim Carrey's commencement speech to Maharishi University of Management Class of 2014. It's such an important lesson for us all, the lesson he learned by observing his father:

You can take the path that seems like the safe path, but there is no guarantee of safety there. As Jim Carrey puts it so well, 'You can fail at what you DON'T want...so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.' 

My bulletin board

And Here's the Tale as Told by Gaian Tarot

The world's a scary place. 

So you do the 'right thing' - take the safe and responsible option.

But guess what -- you can't keep lightning from striking the oak tree by stockpiling a few acorns! (You don't even like acorns, but they seemed like a safe bet...)

Well, surprise! All your 'safety' goes up in smoke. You didn't think this could happen. You thought karma would accept the 'noble sacrifice' of your dreams and give you security as a reward. Wrong.

You might as well have listened to your own heart, although it is scarier than gathering acorns.

And dared to dance a little too close to the fire, out in the open, where everyone could see you. Yes, you might get burned. 

But you might also find real joy. 

It's not too late. It's never too late. What have you got to lose that you couldn't lose anyway? 

Not letting go, no way no how

Spiral Tarot, 1997

The Spiral Tarot certainly models itself on the Rider Waite-Smith deck, with a few variations. I like what the creators have done with the 4 of Pentacles here. Look at this amazing image. The man sits on a throne of bricks, fist clinched. His legs look more like marble columns, rooted firmly on the two pentacles on the floor. He grips one pentacle to his chest and the other sits firmly on top of his head, mashing his hair down a bit. The ornament on the back wall makes me think of a prison window. And the floor is stark black and white. This is a card of grasping and clinging, of seeing things as 'mine' or 'not mine', of limiting yourself through trying to hang on to what you've got.

That's also the way the 4 of Pentacles is seen in the Rider Waite-Smith, but in another tradition, the 4 of Pentacles (or Coins or Disks) has a different meaning, incompatible with this. On the Tree of Life, this card falls at Chesed, which is about benevolent outpourings of mercy, and because the pentacles are about earthly power, it would be natural to assume this benevolence would come from someone in power. Now I suppose one way to reconcile the two meanings would be to say that the figure in the RWS 4 of Pentacles is not currently showing benevolent outpourings of mercy, but obviously needs to. And in fact, that is usually the spin that we put on this card. You're hanging on, but you should be letting go. On occasion, the card can mean a healthy sort of self-protection, but in the main, most readers would see it as advice to be less rigid, self-protecting, self-limiting, and miserly. It's just that the card gets the message across by looking at from the negative angle.

This is one reason why unillustrated pip cards can be helpful. If you know the full range of possible meanings, you can combine the card with other cards nearby and not be overly influenced by the slant that the illustrator has chosen to put on the card. See the 4 of Pentacles from the Golden Dawn Magical Tarot, a firm favourite of mine, at right. The disks are in the four corners, suggesting the groundedness of the number four, and the white rose in the middle gives a hint of the 'purity' of the benevolence of Chesed, but you could go either way or even both ways with this card, with perhaps less explaining of 'alternate' meanings to do to a client who is looking at a picture of someone hanging on to coins and listening to you telling them to 'release'.

I do love my RWS decks -- don't get me wrong! Most of my decks are based on RWS. It's good to remember that there are other kinds of cards out there. And as usual, since both decks are a Golden Dawn tradition, if you look at and think about them long enough, both systems end up in the same sort of interpretation anyway.

For today, then, I will examine what I'm clinging to and what I need to let go of, particularly as it pertains to my physical and material life.

Roots and rocks

What says 'earth' to you more than anything else? On a really basic level, I mean. Sticks and stones? Roots and rocks? That's what we have here in the Four of Stones from the Haindl Tarot (Lotos 2002). I don't know about you, but I see the base of a tree, its roots partially exposed, and two broad wisps of brownish mist hovering around it, with four round stones floating in front, as they are strangely wont to do in this deck.

The RWS deck of course has Four of Pentacles meaning someone being miserly or self-protective, showing a person hugging a giant coin, more under each foot, with one usually balanced on their head. Here we've got none of that, just rocks and roots. And the name of this card is 'The Power of the Earth'. That has a wonderful ring to it, don't you think?

The Four of Disks in the Thoth deck also seems to hold a feeling of protectiveness. Crowley likens the image to a fortress. He then goes on to talk about Sol in Capricornus, and various translations of the words 'queen' and 'castle', ending his comments on the Four of Disks by noting the guttural sounds of Hebrew, so...not much help from Uncle Al in his Book of Thoth.

I am not sure why each stone is a different colour (blue, red, white, yellow), but Pollack suggests it has to do with the cardinal directions (though she actually says it's the tree roots that are colours, but that must be just an editorial mishap.)

No, for me the meaning of this card comes from the combination of the image and the title. 'The Power of the    Earth', and the tree roots, and now that I look at possibly water around the roots, and the rocks, and the mist. The earth is filled with mysteries and mundanities.

For a reading, I would be most likely to fall back on numerology and suit:  the stolid nature of the four, the material/physical energy of the suit. Heavy rocks, gripping tree roots, I can see how these could link back to the fortress and protection themes of the Thoth and RWS. But I would see this coming from a much deeper and, dare I say it, 'grounded' place than either RWS or Thoth. This is an assurance that comes from the very foundations.

Does he look like a miser to you?

West, US Games 2008

The Four of Pumpkins -- ie, 4 of Coins -- in the Halloween Tarot by Kipling West doesn't look anything at all to me like the typical miserly character we see in the RWS deck.

At first glance you think, hey, what a nice guy!  Even if he is a marrow with a turnip head and peapds for arms and legs. He's sowing seeds, he's providing for others. But then when you look closer you see...the garden is walled. It's protected by spikes. The tree marking out the garden wall is posted with a big sign. It might as well say, 'Keep out!' and all the rows of the garden have the same sign. Now, this could be marking out the community pumpkin patch. But somehow I think it marks out HIS pumpkin patch.

In fact, maybe he's made of vegetables because he's so fully identified with his vegetable treasure that he sees it as his only substance.

But that's a little deep for a card featuring a turnip wearing a crown.

Today's 1st November, and thus it is Samhain (which starts at sunset on 31st October and ends at either sunset or midnight 1st November, depending on your tradition). It can be considered the first day of winter, a bad day to be planting, I hate to break it to Turnip Head. But that's what you get when you're so totally selfish. A lot of barriers and defenses, a lot of planning and scheming and worrying, and you come out with very little in the end.