Ten of Pentacles

The picture

An archway opens onto a courtyard and a town beyond it. Ten coins are laid across the whole picture in the pattern of the Tree of Life, over the figures and the architecture alike.

At the left, an old man in a robe covered with grapes and vines sits with two white dogs. In the middle, a man and a woman stand talking to each other. At the right, a small child reaches down toward one of the dogs.

Nobody in the card is looking at the coins. Nobody is looking at the old man either.

Upright

Wealth that outlasts whoever assembled it.

This is the suit's completion and it is generational rather than personal. Not a fortune — a household, an establishment, an arrangement with enough continuity in it that it now includes people who had no part in building it.

The old man sits at the edge, unaddressed, in a robe with the harvest printed all over it. That is the card's melancholy and also its accuracy: what he made is working, and the working no longer requires his attention or anybody's gratitude.

A dog connects the oldest to the youngest

The two dogs are the only things in the picture touching more than one generation.

One is at the old man's knee, under his hand. The other has crossed the courtyard and is being reached for by the child. The couple in the middle are talking to each other and to nobody else.

That is a precise and slightly bleak account of how continuity actually runs through a family. It does not pass down through the conversation in the centre. It goes round the outside, through something nobody planned and nobody administers, from the person at the end of it to the person at the start, via an animal.

The coins overhead are laid out in the pattern of the Tree of Life, which is the most structured arrangement in the deck. Underneath it, the actual mechanism is a dog.

Reversed

The inheritance complicated. What was built failing to pass on cleanly — the will, the succession, the business nobody in the next generation wants and nobody can say so about.

Or a family held together by money and not by much else. That works, and it works for a long time, and it is discovered only when tested.

What it is not

Riches. The card is about permanence rather than amount, and a great many modest households are exactly this picture.

It gets read as unambiguously good fortune. The figure at the edge is part of the image, and he is drawn with as much care as anyone.

In a reading

Something lasting and shared, in an outcome position. As counsel it asks what is being built that will outlive the building of it, which is a question most people answer badly on the first attempt.

With the Four of Wands, two homes — one new, one established. With the Five, inside a house against outside one, and the wall between them is thin.