Day 3 : Six of Pentacles Reversed
A man dressed in fine robes, blue cape and red tunic, holds a set of scales in his left hand. The scales have three coins on it and they’re perfectly balanced. A fourth coin pins together his cloak—money keeps him together. In his right hand he’s holding two coins and is offering them to two people who are kneeling on the ground in front of him, each reaching up toward him with empty hands. Their clothes are worn and ragged, they look gaunt—beggars perhaps; they’ve gone through a period of malnourishment. In the background the city looms tall. There’s a sense of justice and proportioning because of the scales—yet’s there an imbalance between the rich and poor, for there’s only one man who’s rich and two who are poor. The rich man also has the power over the poor and can control their states of being, in a sense.
This card isn’t simply a story of wealth, of having or not having; it’s about the relationships that emerge between giver and receiver. There’s a process involved when someone needs help: sometimes they have to ask for it, or be willing to accept it when it’s given. Sometimes they need to recognize they need help at all. A question of balance also arises, as the scales suggest: how much are you giving and how much are you receiving?
Pentacles are about wealth, health, fortunes; a reversed card suggests we look inward at our internal health, our mental and spiritual flourishing…our souls. How we care for our souls. We are both givers and receivers of and from ourselves; we’re also capable of abusing ourselves, of failing to recognize when we need to receive or when it would nourish us to give. How do we talk to ourselves? What is the content our intrapersonal rhetoric, our self-talk? Alexandria Peary says in Prolific Moment our intrapersonal rhetoric is “that interior river of phrases, images, shifts in voice, imagined conversations with imaginary interlocutors and future audiences” (31). Our self-talk can drag us into a place of mind where we actually believe what we’re telling ourselves: that we’re terrible persons, we fail at our jobs, we’re not good enough; or conversely, our self-talk belittles others to make us feel better about ourselves.
In Paulo Coelho’s book The Pilgrimage, Paulo’s guide on his pilgrimage to Santiago teaches him that spiritual cruelty to the self is just as detrimental to our wellbeing as physical pain: “The only way we can rescue our dreams is by being generous with ourselves,” says his guide. “Any attempt to inflict self-punishment—no matter how subtle it may be—should be dealt with rigorously. In order to know we are being cruel to ourselves, we have to transform any attempt at causing spiritual pain—such as guilt, remorse, indecision, and cowardice—into physical pain. By transforming a spiritual pain into a physical one, we can learn what harm it can cause us” (61). His guide’s “Cruelty Exercise” is to have Paulo dig a fingernail into his own cuticle every time he catches himself being cruel to himself, to repeat it as many times as necessary until the thought has left.
While I’m not advocating inflicting self-harm (my cuticles also are in a bad enough state from gardening bare handed!), his point strikes to the core of this card’s story about relationships, including our relationship with ourselves. So the first step is transforming spiritual pain into physical pain to teach us this is real. Once we recognize pain for what it is, what can we do about it? John O’Donohue says in Eternal Echoes: “When you come in to a rhythm of breathing, you go deeper than the incisions of thought and feeling which separate you” (298). Breathing as a meditation practice takes you into your deeper self, that eternal place of the present where you can observe your self-talk, witness it, and reject it. Then we have space to be generous to ourselves, space to both give and to receive.
Bibliography:
Coelho, Paulo. The Pilgrimage. Harper Perrenial, 1998.
O’Donohue, John. Eternal Echoes, Exploring Our Hunger to Belong. Bantam Press, 1998.
Peary, Alexandria. Prolific Moment. Routledge, 2018.
(My Tarot deck is Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot by Barbara Moore and illustrated by Eugene Smith)