Advent Tarot Day 5: 3 of Pentacles Reversed
Of course it would happen sooner or later: a repeated card. This is the beauty of Tarot: it gives us an opportunity to dwell longer on an image and its story. I want to focus on an Advent lyric from the Exeter Book as it’s about foundations and cornerstones, as well as harmony between the self and the Divine, which are essential to the story in this card.
The poem is the first Advent lyric written down in Old English in the Exeter Book. Though the poem’s beginning was ruined, we can still glean from it that the poet was using an extended metaphor about buildings (Kennedy q’ted in Craig Williamson’s translation, The Complete Old English Poems 304). The poet speaks first to a past rejection of the Divine, then moves through praising the beauty of the “breadth and binding” of the “miracle” of “beautiful form” (lines 12, 9, and 11 respectively). The poet contrasts the Divine’s beauty with human “world of rubble and wreckage” (line 15); we live in a state of ruin, always declining toward decay (as Eleanor Parker points out in Winters of the World, Old English poets revel in the ruin of winter and often portray the world as moving “from winter into winter”…lovely!). The Divine can “rescue the weary” from “torment and woe” (lines 21 and 23).
One part that particularly strikes me about this poem is the last line, updated into Modern English as stating a sort of plea that begins a couple of lines up: “Now may the Lord of life…Redeem the ruin as he has so often done” (lines 21 and 24) This redemption has been done before and can be done again, each year even: at Midwinter, when the world is most visibly in decay and in the clutches of death. Harmony and balance don’t happen just once, but must continue to be striven for again and again as the season of life and season of death come and go. The sculptor in the 3 of Pentacles can’t simply keep balance and harmony as he finds and reveals the spirit of life in stone, but must do the work of maintaining it, such as attending to a lack of self-awareness.
The story of the cards reveals how participatory we are with our own spirituality. As we are created, so we are creators. Without our participation, we stagnate, as the reversal of this card reminds about. The first Advent lyric speaks of the same stagnation: we reject the Divine (“You are the wall-stone the workers rejected” line 2) yet through participating in the act of creation with our longing for beauty, we “know the miracle” (line 9) of new light.
The Complete Old English Poems, trans. Craig Williamson. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2017.
Parker, Eleanor. Winters in the World, A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. Reaktion Books Ltd, London. 2022.
Photograph of page 304 of a printed PDF version of The Complete Old English Poems through Purdue University Fort Wayne, https://users.pfw.edu/flemingd/OE2020/WOEP.pdf.