Minor Arcana · Pentacles · Number 6
Six of Pentacles
giving and receiving, with the balance uneven
Element
Earth · money, body, craft, land and the slow accumulation of things
The card in tarot
What Six of Pentacles means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A merchant in fine clothes holds a set of scales in one hand and drops coins into the hand of a kneeling beggar with the other. A second beggar kneels beside the first.
In a reading
Giving and receiving, with the power difference visible. Read as charity, a loan, patronage, or fair pay. The scales are the question: readers usually ask which of the three figures the querent is.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
giving and receiving, with the balance uneven
Reversed
generosity with strings; a debt becoming visible
Reversed, readings are strings attached, a debt held over someone, or generosity that is really control.
The suit
Six of Pentacles is a Pentacles card
Pentacles are the suit of the material world, and the suit least interested in drama. They cover work that pays, health, skill built over years, property, food and the plain question of whether something is sustainable. It is the deck's most patient suit: several of its cards are about waiting for a thing to be ready.
The suit is not only about money, and a difficult Pentacle is more often about scarcity thinking than about actual poverty. It reads the relationship with material things as much as the things.
Pentacles is the suit of Earth, and it is the suit that became Diamonds in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Pentacles
The number
What the Six does
Across all four suits, the Six is recovery, exchange and movement away from the Five.
Six is the answer the deck gives to Five. In all four suits something is given, carried or crossed.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Six of Pentacles is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.