4 of Pentacles: Capricorn III
Hermetic title: Power/Earthly Power
Decan ruler (Chaldean): Sun
Corresponding majors: The Sun (Sun) and The Devil (Capricorn)
Dates: January 10 - January 19

Meet the Lord of Power. Money is on his mind, in his heart, beneath his feet. He faces forward unflinchingly, for if he blinks, someone might filch a coin! People often say that wealth is freedom, as in "financial independence". Does he look free to you?

The occultists of the Golden Dawn called this card "Earthly Power." As if, our kingly friend retorts, there were any other kind! But we modern readers are often quick to see the Scrooge in the 4 of Pentacles. As always, there is more to explore than initially meets the eye.

In the 2 ("The Difference Engine") and 3 of Pentacles ("Time and Materials"), we witnessed the cardinal launch of industry; a factory getting in gear. The Lord of Change brought forces of constriction and expansion into play, like a compressed spring. The Lord of Work got the production line going, productively churning out inventory. And here we securely warehouse the goods (or the revenue we receive from them, which amounts to the same thing). These are assets, real and illiquid; the principal on which the interest grows. It is the hoard beneath the mountain, the treasure under lock and key.

Unfathomably valuable, also cursed: the Lestrange vault from Harry Potter. — Unfathomably valuable, also cursed: the Lestrange vault from *Harry Potter.*

Time is Money
As we've observed previously here in Goat season, Capricorn is the day sign of Saturn. And where we find slow Saturn with his glacial, geologic time scale, matters of time inevitably arise. Delays, time-consuming complications, 40-year mortgages - time is the great gift he gives you whether you want it or not.

Timepiece of Saturn, timepiece of the Sun.

But the Sun, ruler of the decan, is a timekeeper too. In the Orphic Hymn to Helios, we come across this line: ἔργων σημάντωρ ἀγαθῶν, ὡροτρόφε κοῦρε (roughly, guide of good works, bringing on the seasons.) If Saturn watches over the long-term cycles of our lives as we ease into maturity, the Sun watches over the short-term promise of each day and what we make of it. There's a connection between seizing the day and fulfilling the life.

Let's try a financial metaphor: as everybody knows, the precious metal of the Sun is gold. Most commonly the metal of Saturn is thought to be lead - but you can find references to it as gold as well. If you can hold on to your gold for long enough without disturbing it, it will grow, accumulating interest with each solar turning.

In Picatrix, the image of this decan is that of "a man holding a book which he opens and closes, and before him is the tail of a fish. And this is a face of riches, the accumulation of money and the ascent of business affairs tending toward a good end." (Fish signify many things in many traditions, but among them are commerce and luck.) Agrippa describes "A woman chaste in body, and wise in her work, and a banker gathering his money together on the table. The signification of this is to govern in prudence, in covetousness of money, and in avarice".

In these commentaries two strands of meaning emerge: 1) good stewardship - the wise handling of resources, and 2) miserly tendencies and actual greed. The fear of scarcity drives both. And indeed, the same financially conservative manager might be viewed by some as prudent and others as stingy. The word "bank" comes to us through a long line of European variations on terms meaning "bench" (in one of those rare cases where Romance languages took a cue from Germanic languages rather than Latin), the idea being that money-changers historically did their work on a flat, stable surface with four legs - just as we see in the Astrolabium Planum image.

Speaking of fours, my own keyword for "4" cards is "gathering," for in each of them we see the resources of the suit temporarily collecting. In the 4 of Wands, we encounter literally gatherings - celebrations where human spirits come together for a time. In the 4 of Cups, we see a figure collecting their emotions, and in the 4 of Swords, another collecting their thoughts. In the 4 of Pentacles, of course, it is material resources being pooled. Foursquare and unmoving, the Lord of Power is safe as houses, and as worldly as the day is long.

And while the 4 of Pentacles specifically focuses on steady monetary accumulation, its lesson goes beyond concerns of capital. Some things in life can only be learned through experience, and you may not even realize you're learning them. Day to day, you take risks, you make mistakes and you course-correct. Ten or twenty years later, what you learned from that process has settled invisibly in your bones, and you call it "common sense".

Radix malorum est cupiditas
You've heard the saying "Money is the root of all evil." But the original Biblical turn of phrase, radix malorum est cupiditas, has a slightly different nuance. It's not the money that's the problem; it's the cupidity - the excessive hunger or desire for the money. What happens when Virtue (3 of Wands) turns to Power (4 of Disks)? (Remember, both are solar cards.) How does wealth turn into avarice?

To answer this question, I think it pays for us to look again at the Devil. In a number of mystical traditions, there's a thread of Platonic thought concerning the Demiurge - a powerful figure, subordinate to the true Deity, who controls earthly events and the machinery of mundane power. Here's what Peter Mark Adams has to say about it in Game of Saturn, his wonderful work on the Sola-Busca deck:

At the core of the deck’s heretical cosmology stands the demiurge in his most archaic and violent form, that of the hypercosmic Ammon-Saturn, the lord of time and the cycles of creation and destruction… The inevitable consequence of this chain of logic was that ‘true religion’ involved the worship of the hypercosmic demiurge in his most archaic – and thus purest – guise: as the sun behind the sun, the hypercosmic Saturn – whether known as Mithras Helios, Sol Invictus, Phanes, Lucifer, or Ammon.” (p. 250)

According to Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, some Rosicrucian scholars also made a distinction between different aspects of the sun. Christ represented the sun of the soul; Lucifer the sun of the intellect: "Lucifer here represents the intellectual mind without the illumination of the spiritual mind; therefore it is "the false light." ... The secret processes by which the Luciferian intellect is transmuted into the Christly intellect constitute one of the great secrets of alchemy, and are symbolized by the process of transmuting base metals into gold."

Who doesn’t enjoy a leontocephaline demiurge?

Thus we have two opposing figures: a solar, redemptive savior and a saturnine, plutocratic demiurge. One sun may be mistaken for the other. In tarot, we can compare the Saturn-ruled, Capricornian Devil to the demiurge: Lord of the Gates of Matter and Child of the Forces of Time, the Devil is the master of the rules and he abides in the details. Absolute power absolutely corrupts, and we can see that iconographically both in the miser's tortured crouch and the visual echo of the devil's binding chains. (Incidentally, "misery" and "miser" are cognate." The sun may represent freedom and agency, but this king cares mainly about the agency and freedom bought by wealth. Visually, he has adopted the furs of the Beast; his stone seat recalls the stony block of the Devil, which he perhaps mistakes for the sheltering stone wall of the Sun. He is imprisoned on this block, even as he claims it as a throne. Everything he touches turns to gold, and he has yet to recognize this for the curse it is.

The Matter-Spirit Inversion
Let's talk about pentagrams, shall we? The five-point star is a familiar sacred symbol. As everybody knows - or should - there's a difference between the upright and the averse pentagrams: the upright star represents "Spirit over Matter" - 1 point over 4 points. Therefore, the averse or upside-down star represents "Matter over Spirit". In the Waite-Smith deck, it is only on the Devil card that we see the averse pentagram. Cupiditas has overcome the Devil's chained minions; matter has triumphed over spirit.

We can see something similar going on in the 4 of Pentacles, if we examine King Midas' pentacles more closely: one by the head, one over the heart, two beneath the feet. The 4 coins are positioned like the bottom of an upside-down Tree of Life.

Malkuth (which corresponds to Earth or Saturn) normally is the lowest point on the Tree; above it in the heart is golden, solar Tiphereth, and far above that the Crown of Kether. From the king's topsy-turvy point of view, the most mundane sphere has taken the place of the most divine. The Kingdom has taken the place of the Crown; the thing ruled now governs the ruler. The radiant sun has been replaced with cold, hard, shining lucre.

In Book II, Chapter 41 of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Agrippa describes a solar talisman: " a king crowned, sitting in a chair, having a raven in his bosom, and under his feet a globe; he is clothed in saffron-colored clothes...this image rendereth men invincible and honorable, and helps to bring their businesses to a good end...." This image abounds with solar references - the king, the crown, the saffron robes. But as the raven implies, it is also Saturnine. And given what we've now learned about the 4 of Pentacles and Capricorn III, it also sounds more than a little demiurgic.

The Family Aegis
Look into the cartomantic history of the 4 of Coins, and you will find presents, gifts, donations, inheritances. In what seems like an uncanny throwback to the Picatrix observations from eight centuries earlier, Waite himself wrote: "the surety of possessions, cleaving to that which one has, gift, legacy, inheritance." In the Marseille tarot, the 4 of Coins differs from all other minors in one important respect: there is a shield, a coat of arms, right at its center where we would normally expect more of the leaf-and-flower arabesques seen elsewhere in the pips.

This shield, which comes in many different designs, signifies to me the security of belonging to a family. Families - particularly powerful ones - provide shelter and protection from shifting tides of fortune. The majority of families, whether wealthy or not, will tend to their own first - blood is thicker than water. Perhaps the last message this final decan of Capricorn would like to share is this: Safety within the walls! Deprivation outside it. What deprivation looks like will become clear in the 5 of Pentacles.

The Everyday 4 of Pentacles
I draw the 4 of Pentacles a little less than other cards (1% of the time as compared to the average 1.3% draw). Still, it turns up in ways that are easy to understand. There are 4 of us in my immediate family, so it sometimes appears when all four of us are doing something together. (Interestingly enough I've found the 4 of Wands likes to count 4 friends hanging out, rather than family.) Because 4 pentacles look a lot like 4 wheels, I've drawn this on days when our car drew attention to itself, as well as one time when I was teaching my daughter to bike (two bikes, four wheels!). And - in a virtuosic nod to several meanings of the card - it turned up the day we signed our solar loan at the bank.

Occasionally I've experienced its reversal as very specific insults to stability: one time, my son got in an accident hydroplaning on wet roads (4 tires losing traction). And on another, I learned about the practice, in densely populated regions, of digging up family crypts to make room for the growing community of the dead!