The minor arcana has four suits, and each suit, very broadly, represents a different facet of our lived experience.
- Cups: Emotions/Love (water)
- Swords: Ideas/Thoughts (air)
- Wands: Feeling/Judgement (fire)
- Pentacles: Sensation/Materialism (earth)
Because of that last bullet point, pentacles are often associated with money.
The reason for this post, however, is to look into a strange detail that exists throughout the entire tarot deck.
Specifically, look at cards 2, 4, 6, and 8. These four cards have the foreground and background separated by an unnaturally straight horizon, as if the background is a flat back drop and the foreground is a stage.
This exists throughout the major and minor arcana, though I haven’t yet looked into patterns across the arcanas. As I’ve pulled cards and noticed that detail, I’ve started to think of the line as a division, with the foreground and background existing in different realms.
This could mean that you’ve essentially got two cards in one. In the Four of Pentacles, we have a dude with a bunch of pentacles and, behind him, a city-scape. These two symbols exists symbolically together, but are not literally arranged like they’re shown.
Another way to look at it could be one part external reality, and one part internal reality, kind of representing how you internally deal with the symbols on the card.
I started thinking about this because I pull a card most mornings asking the question, “what do I need to know today?” Today’s card was the 8 of Pentacles.
8 represents rhythm, and the card shows an artisan producing many of the same thing. Behind him, in another realm, is a city.
This shows a guy who understands that production, creation, repetition, and work are parts of this physical existence. We shouldn’t aim to avoid these things, since they’re the reason we’re here; we are in a material existence and our job is to experience materiality.
But, this symbol is shown to us separated from the city, separated from physical reality. This is happening in your head. It’s about understanding the deeper truth of material reality. The material exists because of the immaterial.
So for me, today, this card was a reminder that commerce is, for better or worse, an essential part of our society, and there’s no use in being afraid of money. I’m infamously a bad salesperson. Even when I need the money, I go out of my way to not accept money from other people. When I was running a small business, this would show itself as me creating an item to sell and listing it for a price, then, over time, lowering the price because I was sure nothing I could make would ever be worth money to anyone, and finally not selling the item/cancelling the service/etc.
This isn’t about actually working and producing for me today, but instead, it’s about how my brain works with those concepts. This tarot card showed me that I had an illogical and unnecessarily hurtful set of emotions tied to money, and it reminded me that I need to consciously work to release that belief.
So far, my theory is that the backdrop is a signal that the card is dealing with something meta, like, how your mind is doing something.
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