Four of Pentacles · Pentacles · Earth

Pamela Colman Smith drew a man who has run out of places to put his money. He sits on a low grey stone seat, crowned in gold, in a deep red gown with a pale blue hem, a heavy black mantle over it. A yellow pentacle rests on the crown, balanced on its white-set rim. A second is clamped to his chest, both arms around it, the fingers of one hand up under his chin. The last two lie flat on the grey pavement, flattened into ellipses, one under each red boot. Behind him the town fills both edges of the card: grey battlements and red roofs on one side, ochre towers and dark green trees on the other, a pennant on a pole. The sky is empty, and he looks straight out at us.

Four coins, and not one of them in circulation.

Pentacles is the suit of earth, the things with weight: coin, land, the body itself. Four is the square, the number that stops moving, and here it stops hard. The Golden Dawn titles the card Lord of Earthly Power, Sun in Capricorn. The power is real. It is also fastened down.

Upright, the tradition reads holding: the boundary that keeps a thing safe. The warning sits in the same picture, security defended past the point where it protects anything, a crown that has become a shelf.

Reversed, readers split on which way the hands go. Some see them come open, the coins let go, the ground trusted at last. Others see the grip close further.

He is holding all four, and the town goes on without him. He cannot stand up without letting one fall.