Five of Pentacles

The Plate

There is no door under the window. Snow falls; a stained-glass window glows from inside, five pentacles set in its leading among branches like a tree; and beneath it two figures pass — a woman wrapped in a shawl, barefoot in the drift, and a man on crutches with a bell hung at his neck, the old signal of the leper. Neither looks up. The light lands on the snow around them and on nothing they can use. Whoever built the window built it high, and the plate declines to show where the entrance is, or whether the two of them ever looked for it.

The Reading

The snow is not the subject; the not-looking is. Material want is drawn honestly — bandages, bare feet, the bell that makes the man announce his own condition — but the card's sharpest line is the angle of two heads held down while lit glass passes overhead. Waite (1911) gives the plain sense, material trouble, and readers ever since have argued about whether the church excludes the beggars or the beggars the church. The picture supports both, which is the point worth keeping: in hardship the door and the pride are usually lost together.

Reversed, the composition turns a few degrees. Someone looks up; someone asks; the interior of the building finally appears in the story. The school reads the reversal as the beginning of repair — or, read hard, as want concealed so well that even the window no longer sees it.

In the School

Fives break the stability the fours built, and in Earth — the suit's element in the astrology course's table — the break is felt in the body and the purse, the places where nothing stays abstract.