Nine of Pentacles

The picture

A woman stands in a walled vineyard in a heavy yellow gown patterned with red marks. Grapes hang thick on both sides of her. Nine coins are set among the vines.

A hooded falcon perches on her gloved left hand. Her right rests on one of the coins.

A manor house stands at the right edge of the card, small and some way off.

On the path at her feet, bottom left, there is a snail.

Upright

Comfort that was earned, being enjoyed alone on purpose.

The hooded falcon is the detail the card turns on. It is a hunting bird, and it is hooded — a wildness owned, kept, and currently held still by a piece of leather. She is not a person without appetite. She has it on her hand.

This is self-sufficiency. The garden is hers, the work that made it is behind her, and the solitude is a preference rather than a circumstance. Very few cards in this deck are simply comfortable and this is one of them.

There is a snail on the path

It is easy to miss and it is not an accident. Pamela Colman Smith put a snail in the corner of a card about a walled garden and a house in the distance.

A snail carries its house. It moves at the only speed it has, it does not leave anything behind, and it cannot be hurried by anybody. Set that against the falcon on her hand — a creature built entirely for speed, hooded so it will not use it.

The card has two animals in it and they are opposites, and she is holding the fast one still while the slow one gets on with crossing the path. Whatever produced this garden, it was not done at the falcon's pace.

The vines are heavy with fruit and none of it is being picked. Nine coins hang in a cropping vineyard in full leaf, and the woman standing in it has a bird on her hand and both feet on the path. This is the middle of a season, not the end of one.

Reversed

The garden less owned than it appears. Comfort resting on somebody else's money or somebody else's labour, and known to be, which is the part that spoils it.

Self-sufficiency can also harden into a defence. Independence that began as a preference becomes a policy, and then becomes something nobody is permitted to test, and the hood never comes off.

Commonly mistaken for

Loneliness. The card shows independence and the reader supplies the sadness. Nothing in the picture is sad — she is standing in a vineyard in good clothes on a warm afternoon.

A second reading takes it as inherited wealth. The vines are cultivated, pruned and cropped. Somebody grew this, and the snail suggests how long it took.

In a reading

Comfort and autonomy, in an outcome position, and both at once rather than one paid for with the other. As counsel: enjoy what has been built instead of immediately starting the next thing.

With the Ten the contrast is personal against generational. With the Hermit, two cards about chosen solitude, one cold and one extremely comfortable.