Queen of Pentacles

The Plate

The hare enters at the last moment, lower right, mid-leap, and most descriptions forget it. The Queen sits on a throne carved with ripe fruit and a goat's head, under an arch of roses, in a valley the plate crowds with growth — and unlike her three fellow queens she is looking down, at the large pentacle she holds in her lap with both hands, cradled rather than displayed. Waite (1911) gives her the line the school will not let go of: she contemplates her symbol and may see worlds therein. The coin, held that way, is not money. It is matter itself, being taken seriously.

The Reading

Practical care has a bad reputation among the romantic suits, and this card is its rebuttal. Everything living in the frame is provided for — the roses arched, the fruit carved because fruit was worth carving, the goat and the hare admitted onto a royal plate — and the Queen's downward gaze says the provision is not distraction from contemplation but her form of it. She is the person who expresses devotion in stocked shelves and mended things and a bed made ready before you knew you were tired. In a reading she is that person arriving, or the summons to become them for your own household, body included.

Reversed, the lap closes. Care persists but sours into anxious accounting; the household is served by someone who has quietly left herself off its rolls; or the coin is cradled so protectively it stops circulating at all. The hare is the cure drawn in advance — something untended in the garden, thriving anyway.

In the School

The Queen of each suit keeps its element, and keeping Earth — Pentacles' element in the table of Foundations of Astrology — is the most literal keeping there is: house, ground, larder, body, held in trust.