Five of Coins

The Five of Coins opens the Taurus decans in the Golden Dawn's zodiacal scheme for the earth suit, Mercury's placement here unusual among Book T's small-card rulers since Mercury elsewhere governs communication and speed rather than hardship; the assignment follows strictly from the suit's fixed Chaldean sequence rather than from any thematic fit, the Six of Coins taking the Moon at Taurus's second decan and the Seven taking Saturn at its third.

Pamela Colman Smith's scene, two ragged and visibly injured figures trudging through snow past a lit church window whose leading shows five coins, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Cinq de Deniers is five coins in a formal lattice with no figures, no snow and no church at all; older cartomancers reading that plainer card worked the earth suit's five, like every suit's five, as a number of disruption, unsettling the stability the four had reached, without Smith's specific imagery of exclusion from shelter that is visibly close by.

The stained glass is generally read as the composition's deliberate cruelty, since the help the figures need is a few steps away and unseen by either of them; the detail has no equivalent in the Marseille pattern or in the Golden Dawn title itself, both of which speak only to trouble in general. The Thoth deck keeps Crowley's title Worry and, in Harris's usual method for the small cards, replaces the figures with a jagged, anxious geometric arrangement rather than any scene of exclusion.

Upright the Five of Coins is read as hardship, financial loss and a felt isolation, often with help nearby that has not yet been noticed or accepted; reversed, as recovery, support finally received, and the end of a lean spell.

Pre-Golden-Dawn cartomancers, including Etteilla's eighteenth-century system, read a bare five of coins from number and suit, a disruption of the material stability the four had settled into, without the specifically social exclusion Smith's picture adds; the church window unseen by the two figures is her own invention, and it is this detail, more than the older number-based tradition, that gives the card its now-standard emphasis on isolation rather than simple loss.

Waite's own printed meaning stresses material and emotional deprivation together, loss, poverty and a certain destitution of spirit as much as of purse, a reading the current practice of pairing this card with isolation and unnoticed support has largely kept faith with rather than revised.

The Golden Dawn's title, Material Trouble, and Crowley's blunter Worry both frame the card more narrowly around finances than Smith's picture strictly requires, since the figures' trouble in the image reads as physical and social as much as monetary; most contemporary readers use the broader picture rather than either occult title as their primary guide, reserving the reversed card's recovery for whichever kind of support the query concerns, financial or otherwise.