When you've been studying and reading the tarot for a while, certain cards begin to resonate in a more personal way and for you, as a reader, forever after have deeper, more powerfully nuanced meanings. It's something akin to what Rachel Pollack refers to as "the Gates," certain minor arcana cards that open to hidden experiences in everyday things. For her, these cards "open a path from the ordinary world to the inner level of archetypal experiences" and they take on a "myth-like Strangeness which no allegorical interpretation can completely penetrate." For Pollack, the Gates contain layers of meaning that reveal greater significance upon further study and meditative contemplation. I believe that it is possible for all of us to develop our own Gate-like cards when the synchronicity between an experience in our lives and the appearance of a card within the context of a particular reading or spread suddenly clicks.
For me, one of those cards is the Nine of Pentacles.
Nine of Pentacles, Waite-Ryder Tarot
I learned to read tarot on the Waite-Ryder deck and anyone who is familiar with tarot has seen the image depicted on this card: a woman in a lovely dress, standing in a lavish garden with one hand on a pentacle and holding a falcon on the other. The simple interpretation of this card in a reading would be abundance, good management of material affairs, and success in the accumulation of wealth and comfort. On the surface, it's easy to see that in this card, and it does carry that meaning. However, if you consider what the card could represent on a deeper level, there is so much more to it than that.
In her book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack begins to explore some of what I mean:
As material cards Pentacles deal with success and what it means in a person's life. The woman depicted in the Nine of Pentacles is sharply aware of the good things in her life - her hand rests on the Pentacles, her thumb hooks on a grapevine. Awareness is one of the card's basic meanings, especially self-awareness and the ability to distinguish what matters in life, what goals truly demand our best efforts. The card signifies success - but not simply the material benefits; it means as well the sense of certainty that comes with knowing one has made the right choices and followed them with the necessary actions. The pentacles growing on the the bushes symbolize a life that is productive and alive.
Success here means not so much worldly achievement as success in "creating" ourselves out of the material given to us by the circumstances and conditions of our life. And certainty, in its strongest sense, means more than looking back and seeing that we have done the right thing. It also means the ability to know where others can only guess. The Nine of Pentacles stands as the emblem of this quality, the true mark of the evolved person.
For women, personal and professional success is often hard-won. While our feminist sisters and mothers who came before us paved the way for women of my generation to experience less of the sexual discrimination and inequality present in the workplace and in the world, for all of their hard work there are still cultural influences and institutionalized systems for keeping women not quite as equal as we should be. All one needs to do is to pay attention to the continual attacks on freedom of reproductive choice and to realize that women, on average, still only make seventy-seven cents to every dollar earned by men (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2005 Annual Social and Economic Supplement.) to know that our society still considers women as less deserving.
Achieving success, however we choose to define that for ourselves, often comes at great personal expense. While it was largely accepted for a long time that women could "have it all" - a well-paying, powerful job as well as a family and a fulfilling home life - more recently women are coming to accept how difficult, stressful and often impossible that life is to achieve. On the other hand, women who choose to stay home to raise their children risk losing the respect of peers who define success as holding a powerful job and accumulation of wealth, and in the worst case scenario, their own self-respect and sense of self worth when they compare themselves to others, even to other mothers whom they view as being better than they are.
Trust me, as an alumna of a prestigious all-women's college, I understand the pressure exerted upon us to live up to the examples of those who have achieved great success in their chosen fields. There is no allowance for "small" successes. Just today, I received an email from my college recognizing a woman in my graduating class for being elected to the “Forty Under 40 class of 2006," a list of women and men who have demonstrated their ability to make a difference in their community. This woman was recently named president of a high-tech software company that serves Fortune 100 firms nationwide and she has had a leadership role in a project to develop improved mental health services for children in her city and to eliminate the stigma of mental illness. I applaud her efforts and celebrate the recognition she is receiving for them. But a tiny place inside me twists and it gives me pause to look at what I'm doing with my life. It's difficult not to find my life small and inconsequential in comparison.
Looking at the reality of how we have come to define success in our culture, for someone who is striving to create broader-reaching qualifications for personal success that encompass a spiritual element and a certain level of intellectual enlightenment, Rachel Pollack's words serve as a powerful reminder that we women have the power within to create ourselves - to use what we've been given in life to carve a space from this world within which we can live and thrive and succeed - on our terms. Achieving success doesn't have to feel so hard or so bitter when we look at it this way.
In Rachel Pollack's discussion of the Nine of Pentacles, she goes on to make much of the fact that the woman stands alone in her garden. This, Pollack suggests, signifies that in order for this woman to achieve what she has, she as had to give up normal companionship. "In readings, this symbolism does not mean that the card inevitably advises giving up a relationship; but it does call for self-reliance and a certain loneliness in pursuit of goals." Here is where my views differ from Pollack's. I prefer to think not that the woman has had to give up companionship but that she has made choices in her life that were for her own best interest. She has refused to subjugate her will to that of a companion. Because it is only in the pursuit of her interests that she will she find the success that Pollack is describing. Many of us miss finding that success when we make choices based on what is better for someone else or what we think we have to do in order to stay in relationship. If that ultimately does not feed our soul's need then we do not achieve this success for ourselves.
How many women have stayed in a marriage or a relationship for the security it affords them, only to lose themselves in the process? Ironically, though the Nine of Pentacles is in the suit that represents the material realm, what this woman has achieved in her world is her self. It may not have been without personal sacrifice and loss along the way. However, she did what she had to do, she accomplished a lot, and now that she's there she stands strong and confident, feeling all the happier achieving her success because she knows that she's done it for herself. She's always aware of what it took to get there but she never looks back, she never apologizes, and she never again loses herself.
I took a tarot class not too long ago because, although I'd been reading the cards for a while, I thought it would be instructional to learn another approach to reading and interpretation. My teacher had an interesting approach to interpreting the Queen cards and it is that slight interpretive shift that was the most significant learning experience I took from his class. Essentially, he taught us that the Queens represent the mature embodiment of the essence of each of the suits. The mantra of the Queen is: "I'm old enough, I'm wise enough, and I owe it to myself." This expression of what the Queens represent I believe is also what the Nine of Pentacles, as a "gate," has to teach us. As we move through the suits, the lessons offered by each of the Queens build upon the others to bring us to a completion of sorts - to the success that the Nine of Pentacles enjoys.
The essence of the Queen of Wands is of being and of self-actualization. She says, "I now have the maturity, the integrity and the dignity to live my truth." As the Queen of Wands, you don't feel that you have to prove anything to anyone. If they don't "get it" that is not your problem. Others' reactions don't matter any more. What you are experiencing and how you are living your life is just a part of who you are. You are old enough, whole enough, and you owe it to yourself to just live the truth of who you are.
The essence of the Queen of Cups is about recognizing the virtue of healthy and compassionate boundaries within relationships (something we uncover within ourselves). This is difficult in our culture because as women we're taught that sacrificing ourselves and our needs for the good of others is the best, most noble, thing we can do. The Queen of Cups tells us that to constantly go out of our way to accommodate another person we are actually doing a disservice to both, because we are reinforcing the message that by sacrificing oneself we can complete another. As individuals we can complement each other, but we cannot complete each other. The Queen of Cups invites you as an individual to recognize your own wholeness and to understand that it doesn't help another person to lose yourself.
"Being" the Queen of Cups is a challenge for many women. When we care about someone we want them to be happy and we tend to want to do all we can for them. We have to be able to be in the relationship but at the same time require the other person to work by participating in the process of making themselves happy. This is difficult because societal influences often make us feel guilty if we don't do more. We're painted as selfish if we choose to protect the integrity of our selves. Knowing where the boundaries need to be in order to be healthy and compassionate, going beyond them doesn't benefit anyone, least of all yourself. You don't have to change; it's up to the other person to meet you half way.
Another aspect to the integrity of the Queen of Cups is letting go of the fantasy of how we wish a relationship (and life) could be and truly wanting to experience it for what it really is. It's the flip-side of requiring others to hold up their end of relationship responsibilities; it's being mature enough to recognize that we cannot expect others to be any more than themselves and, again, recognizing that a relationship is better when both people are free to be who they really are. In this way, we see the progression and incorporation of the lesson of the Queen of Wands with that of the Queen of Cups.
Nine of Pentacles, Blue Rose Tarot
The Queen of Swords embodies the virtue of discretion or discernment. She says, "I have the maturity, integrity and dignity to analyze the pros and cons and to make a wise choice." The issue isn't one of compromise; it's about balance. The Queen of Swords appreciates that balance is the better choice. Discretion allows us to be open to a variety of possibilities for thinking and being in the world and to be open to other points of view. What gives the Queen of Swords her power is her ability to weigh her options and to know how to make the best choice for herself. Discretion being the better part of valor, our Queen has grown through the lessons of the Wands and Cups to the point where she can now make decisions and act within a personal paradigm arrived at through self-acknowledgement and respect.
The Queen of Pentacles is the embodiment of the virtue of responsibility and accountability. Once we create an environment that can support us, patiently working through the process, we attain the ability to embrace these virtues. We have a unique ability to tend to our needs because we now know what they are. Easier said than done! Responsibility and accountability are separate things. By the time we have reached the lesson that the Queen of Pentacles has to teach us, we understand the difference and have the means to hold ourselves and others to account. Once we examine and recognize what we have, both in a material and in a psychological sense, we can better utilize our assets to live the life we want. The very definition of success.
I think the Nine of Pentacles is such an important card because it represents the process of achieving success through the lessons the Queens have to teach us. While technically speaking, the Queens "outrank" the Nine of Pentacles, that's not really the point here. The Nine of Pentacles represents the culmination of the work a woman has to do to succeed for herself - to become the embodiment of the virtues of the Queens. To become a Queen herself.
Continue reading "Nine of Pentacles: Feminist Icon"
Posted by Angela-Eloise at 7:49 PM
| Comments (2)
Three of Chalices
by Susan Levitt, for example). I have two Celtic-themed decks; one depicts male Knights and Pages and the other depicts Princes and Princesses. There are a lot of artistic decks that follow the Waite-Rider model and depict Pages as male, but many Goddess-themed decks and other contemporary decks depict this Court card as feminine, whether she be a Princess or some other title. 
