Pentacle

pentacles

Within the depth-psychology Tarot corpus, the Pentacle occupies a contested yet semantically rich position as the suit-symbol most thoroughly identified with the element Earth, material reality, the Jungian sensation function, and the alchemical aspiration to spiritualize matter. Authors diverge sharply on its elemental assignment — Jodorowsky resists the conventional Pentacles/Earth equation while acknowledging its material valence, whereas Pollack and Place accept it as foundational. The term’s iconographic complexity compounds these disputes: Greer traces the name itself to Eliphas Lévi’s rebranding of coins as pentacles, linking the figure to the talisman and the archetypal. Jodorowsky reads the pentacle’s concentric circles as a three-tiered map of self-discovery — ecological, solar, and elemental — while for Pollack it anchors a meditation on the hidden magic within the quotidian world. Hamaker-Zondag applies it clinically, making the Ace of Pentacles a marker for concentration on concrete reality and the dawning of project-consciousness. Across these voices runs a persistent tension: the Pentacle is simultaneously mundane currency and sacred cipher, material obstacle and spiritual foundation. Its depth-psychological significance lies precisely in this paradox — that the most apparently terrestrial symbol in the deck encodes the alchemical dream of matter redeemed.

In the library 19 passages

the pentacle consists of three circles: an outer one that flowers and pushes its branches toward the world, a second (middle) that bursts like an inner sun, and a red third (central), bearer of the universal secret, which gives birth to four petals like the four elements of matter

Jodorowsky presents the pentacle’s concentric-circle structure as a cosmological and self-developmental map encompassing ecological, solar, and elemental dimensions.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis

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The Pentacle is the symbol of material life; this is why it can be found in the depths of the Earth and why, once it has been crafted, it can serve as money for exchange.

Jodorowsky establishes the pentacle as the fundamental symbol of materiality, grounding it in both chthonic depth and economic exchange.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis

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depicted coins as pentacles in his own deck, probably based on Eliphas Lévi who declared that the pentacle was the perfect (we might say ‘archetypal’) talisman.

Greer traces the term’s origin to Lévi’s identification of the pentacle as the archetypal talisman, explaining the suit’s renaming from coins.

Greer, Mary K., Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for the Inward Journey, 1984thesis

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CHAPTER TEN PENTACLES Our culture has a long history of despising the physical world. We see Adam’s creation out of clay as a humiliation – ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. We insult people by ‘treating them like dirt’. Emotions and abstract thoughts are s

Pollack introduces the Pentacles suit by situating it against Western culture’s inherited denigration of the physical, establishing its psychological rehabilitation of matter as the suit’s central theme.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980thesis

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The apparent stability of the Four of Pentacles conceals sacred instability. If the Four does not commit itself to action, it will gradually petrify. The Four of Pentacles guarantees daily life but not spiritual life.

Jodorowsky argues that the pentacle’s material security harbors a hidden spiritual imperative — stasis without inner movement is petrification.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis

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This suit was originally called coins. It represents the element earth and psychologically the sensation function, which deals with physical reality.

Place confirms the standard depth-psychological alignment of pentacles with Earth and the Jungian sensation function.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting

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In the Tarot we see the four elements as Fire-Wands (Staves), Water-Cups, Air-Swords, Earth-Pentacles (Coins). Different writers sometimes give variations on this listing, most often switching Wands and Pentacles.

Pollack documents and defends the conventional elemental assignment while acknowledging the persistent scholarly dispute over Wands and Pentacles.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting

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The four Suits of the Tarot are not the four elements of alchemy or other systems (Sword/air, Cup/water, Pentacles/earth, and Wand/fire), and even less, as claimed by Eliphas Levi, influenced by the Arthurian legend, can the Sword be attributed to the earth and the Pentacles to air!

Jodorowsky explicitly contests both the conventional elemental schema and Lévi’s attribution, positioning his own reading against the esoteric tradition.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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He is holding an active wand in his left hand, while in his right he holds a receptive pentacle. This yellow coin, a miniature sun, symbolizes perfection and truth, but it also tells us that The Magician does not overlook the daily necessities.

Jodorowsky interprets the Magician’s pentacle as a solar symbol of perfection that simultaneously grounds the archetype in practical, material awareness.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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Three of Pentacles. This card can symbolize a material investment that has produced its first return … or its first loss. It is also fertilization, in which a male cell and a female cell have created a third being.

Jodorowsky reads successive pentacle cards as a developmental sequence moving from material risk through biological fertility to economic and existential consequence.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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With his two pentacles, one raised in the air and the other buried, he is questioning his place in the world, his body, his financial means.

Jodorowsky reads the Page of Pentacles as an image of existential and economic indecision, with the buried pentacle representing material impediment and the raised one aspiration.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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I, the Queen of Pentacles, place my desire for going beyond not in the beyond, but right here, in the heart of matter.

Jodorowsky’s personification of the Queen of Pentacles encapsulates the suit’s ethos: transcendence sought through intensified immanence rather than escape from matter.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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the craft worker is sitting at a bench and using a small hammer to chase the stars on the metal pentacles. When he is done, he hangs them from a board to display them for sale.

Place documents the Eight of Pentacles as an image of skilled material craftsmanship, emphasizing the pentacle as a product of disciplined labor.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting

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Compare the Five of Pentacles with the Hierophant, number 5 in the Major Arcana. There two supplicants submit to a doctrine that guides them in all situations. Here the people have rejected such doctrines, or have simply found them irrelevant.

Pollack draws a structural comparison between the Five of Pentacles and the Hierophant to illuminate the suit’s recurring tension between institutional authority and individual survival outside its protection.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980aside

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We see confirmation here of what we saw in the central dots of the Ace of Pentacles: activity toward the Earth and receptivity toward the Heavens.

Jodorowsky uses a cross-suit comparison to reinforce his thesis that the Ace of Pentacles encodes a polarity of terrestrial activity and celestial receptivity.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004aside

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