4 OF PENTACLES
- Joshua Baird
- Aug 19, 2022
- 10 min read
Updated: Sep 30
THE TRADITIONAL TAROT
KEY IDEAS: Boundaries, Confidence, Conservatism, Control, Fear of loss, Frugality, Gift, Greed, Guardedness, Hoarding, Insecurity, Materialism, Savings, Scarcity, Security, Stinginess, Success, Wealth. REVERSED: Financial insecurity, Generosity, Giving, Reckless spending, Self-protection.
ALTERNATIVE NAME: "The Lord of Material Power"
WIKIPEDIA: "A spread containing the Four of Pentacles refers to a lover of material wealth, one who hoards things of value with no prospect of sharing. In contrast, when the Four of Pentacles is in reverse it warns against the tendency of being a spendthrift." [3]
THE BIDDY TAROT: "You are attentive to your long-term financial security, actively saving money and watching your expenses so you can accumulate wealth and live a comfortable lifestyle not just now but also in the future....However, the Four of Pentacles typically accompanies a scarcity mindset, especially with money and material possessions....The Four of Pentacles can also suggest that you are placing too much value on money and material possessions. You may be attached to material things, allowing possessions to become your life. You assess your self-worth based on how much you earn, the car you drive, how expensive your home is, and where you take your holidays....The broader lesson with the Four of Pentacles is to honour and respect money and wealth but don’t become so attached that you lose sight of what’s most important to you: friends, family, happiness and love....If you are struggling with your finances, then the Four of Pentacles comes as wise advice to manage your money and resources more carefully so that you do not live beyond your means. Make sure you do not spend more than you earn and that you have a budget and savings plan in place so you can reach your financial goals and live a secure and stable life....Beyond money and wealth, the Four of Pentacles appears when you are seeking out more control in your life. At work, you may be micromanaging or not letting others mess around with your area. In a relationship, you may be protective – even possessive – ensuring that no one else threatens what you built. On a personal level, you may have an inflexible attitude and resist change. You may even feel more inclined to hoard your possessions. After all, you already established a way of living that works for you! Change feels like a threat to your certainty, safety and security in life. Any suggestion of doing things differently is, therefore, going to be met with resistance. So, ‘playing it safe’ may be the way to go rather than taking any risks at this point." [2]
THE LABYRINTHOS TAROT: "The Four of Pentacles card is capable of generating both negative and positive perceptions. On one hand, the card signifies that you have successfully managed to accomplish much of your goals and you have managed to attain a significant material wealth in the process. However, on the other hand, there is a significant chance that you will start valuing things only for their material worth. You have worked hard to get to the point where you are now, and it is absolutely natural for your to desire to make sure that you remain stable. But this also has a chance to turn you into an overly possessive or greedy person who wants to ensure that no one is capable of taking away your own wealth....Be aware that without risk, there is no reward - if you spend too much of your time attempting to conserve, you may become a prisoner to your own material possessions. Wealth is a kind of energy as well, and we create what we express." [1]
ATTRIBUTIONS & ASSOCIATIONS
ALCHEMY: Earth
ASTROLOGY: Capricorn
CRYSTALS: Amethyst, Bloodstone
THE MORMON TAROT
DIGGING FOR TREASURE: “There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” —Mark Twain
ON FOLK MAGIC: Magic is a particular way of looking at the universe. Magic perceives the supernatural as inseparably interwoven with the material world while the pure "religion" of definition divorces the two, separating them into distinct dimensions. Magic detects supernatural entities throughout our natural environment, intermediaries between man and God, spirits both good and evil that can hurt or help men and women both materially and spiritually. To minimize harm and secure benefit, people who believe they dwell in a magical cosmos practice rituals intended to influence the spiritual beings, the supernatural entities. [5]
JOSEPH SEES SPIRITS: "Joseph Smith Jr. first come to my notice in the year of 1824. In the summer of that year I contracted with his father to build a fence on my property. In the corse of that work I aproach Joseph & ask how it is in a half day you put up what requires your father & 2 brothers a full day working together? He says I have not been with out assistance but can not say more only you better find out. The next day I take the older Smith by the arm & he says Joseph can see any thing he wishes by looking at a stone. Joseph often sees Spirits here with great kettles of coin money. It was Spirits who brought up rock because Joseph made no attempt on their money. I latter dream I converse with spirits which let me count their money. When I awake I have in my hand a dollar coin which I take for a sign. Joseph describes what I seen in every particlar. Says he the spirits are greived so I through back the dollar." [5] —Martin Harris
ON EVERY FARM FOR MILES AROUND: "The Smith's dug for money on nearly every farm for miles around; their excavations can be seen to-day. Some are on the farm on which I now live. The digging was done at night with most absurd superstitious acts. It was done by a gang of men and women of low reputation." [7] —Samantha Payne, Schoolmate of Joseph Smith
THE CAMEL SADDLE: "The general employment of the family, was digging for money. I had frequent invitations to join the company, but always declined being one of their number....Joseph, Sen. told me that the best time for digging money, was, in the heat of summer, when the heat of the sun caused the chests of money to rise near the top of the ground. You notice, said he, the large stones on the top of the ground -- we call them rocks, and they truly appear so, but they are, in fact, most of them chests of money raised by the heat of the sun....At another time, he told me that the ancient inhabitants of this country used camels instead of horses. For proof of this fact, he stated that in a certain hill on the farm of Mr. Cuyler, there was a cave containing an immense value of gold and silver, stands of arms, also, a saddle for a camel, hanging on a peg at one side of the cave. I asked him, of what kind of wood the peg was. He could not tell, but said it had become similar to stone or iron." [10] —Peter Ingersol, Smith family friend
A MAN IN A GOLD CHAIR: "They [The Smiths] were pretty good fellows in their way, but they were shiftless and money diggers were in the money digging business....I saw them dig in a hill...Joe could look in his peep stone and see a man sitting in a gold chair. Old Joe said he was king i.e. the man in the chair; a king of one of the [tribes] who was shut in there in the time of one of their big battles. This digging was a mile from Smiths. Don't know as there was ever anything in the cave. The cave was on our place. This was in 1826. The cave had a door to it. We tore it off and sunk it in a pit of water where they got dirt to cover a cole pit...." [8] —Lorenzo Saunders, A Palmyra aquantance of the Smith family
JOE WAS IN HIS CAVE: "Joe Smith was not at the office at all. I never saw him except once or twice during the preparation, seven months. All the business was done by proxy. Joe Smith was in his cave or room where the translating had been done, getting new revelations, I suppose, from the angel....As I understood it, these golden plates were taken from the mountain to Smith's house and put in a bag. He was so frightened at first after he had recovered them from the guardianship of the angel, that he hid them for a day and then took them to his house. Later the alleged plates were carried to a cave for translation....In that cave it is supposed they really went over the manuscript." [7] —John Gilbert, Typesetter for the Book of Mormon
THE SHERIFF DISCOVERS THE CAVE: "I was often in Palmyra, and was well acquainted with Jo Smith, who became the Mormon prophet. When a young man he claimed to receive revelations from the Lord where treasures were buried. He told Peter Rupert and Mr. Cunningham, a blacksmith (simple-minded old men), that there was a chest of gold buried on my brother-in-law, Henry Murphy's farm, under a beech tree....He said he paid Jo for the information. I told him he ought not to believe Jo, for he was liar and imposter. He said Jo would put a spell on him and that he would have to stand still two weeks. He said Jo had perfect command over men.....Many of Jo's victims were from New Jersey and believed in witches and ghosts. He could not fool the New England or York State Yankees. Jo Smith and his adherents dug a cave in a hill in Manchester, N.Y., and used to go there, he said, to consult with the Lord. He had a door at the entrance fastened with a padlock. The sheriff took possession and found much property which had been stolen from farmers about there. Jo had left for Ohio. It was believed that Jo intended to remove the property....Jo, the prophet, pretended to tell fortunes for pay. He could read the character of men readily and could tell who he could dupe." [9] —Joseph Rogers, Smith family acquaintance in Palmyra
51 CITIZENS OF PALMYRA: "Eber D. Howe's 1834 book, Mormonism Unvailed, was written and published at a considerable distance away from the Ontario digs, but Howe's associate, D. P. Hurlbut, in 1833, managed to collect a few scraps of useful information in the Palmyra area. In a statement signed by 51 citizens of Palmyra, those local folks certified that the Smiths "spent much of their time in digging for money which they pretended was hid in the earth; and to this day, large excavations may be seen in the earth, not far from their residence, where they used to spend their time in digging for hidden treasures."William Stafford, a Manchester resident interviewed by Hurlbut, testified that the Smiths "would say, also, that nearly all the hills in this part of New York, were thrown up by human hands, and in them were large caves" and that in these hidden hill chambers were "large gold bars and silver plates." In examining the 1833 statements collected by Hurlbut, the modern reader gains the impression that the Mormon Smith family asserted that practically every pile of glacial gravel in their neighborhood was an ancient Nephite mound, full of secret chambers, accessible only by tunneling in from the outside." [12]
HURLBUT'S PREMISE: "Hurlbut was a Mormon apostate who, in 1833, zealously collected affidavits in Palmyra and Manchester, New York, from people who described the Smith family's treasure-seeking. Hurlbut's affidavits (and subsequent anti-Mormon writers) implied that treasure-seeking was an ignorant superstition whose devotees were either credulous dupes or cunning con-men equally driven by materialistic greed. Convinced that the Smiths were neither credulous nor devious, Mormon historians long denied that the family sought material treasure with occult methods. In the process, they implicitly accepted Hurlbut's premise that actual treasure-seekers were indeed deluded by superstition or driven by greed (Nibley 1961). This acceptance is readily understandable given that over the course of the nineteenth century, most Americans came to live in a disenchanted world that discredited magic; by the late nineteenth century, treasure beliefs seemed too incredible, too fantastic for anyone but fools or con-men to pursue. Consequently, the recent rediscovery of conclusive evidence that the Smiths were deeply involved in treasure-seeking is disconcerting for those Mormons who accepted the equation of treasure-seeking with ignorant superstition and cunning greed." [5]
THE CAVE IS REDISCOVERED: "In the first week of September 2015, Greg Pavone and I unearthed Miner’s Hill cave in Manchester New York. This cave may have originally been dug by Joseph Smith Jr., founder of Mormonism in the 1820s, and may have been one of the locations of the Book of Mormon’s translation and/or manuscript preparation. We exposed the cave entrance and dug down the cave floor to its original level, but further excavation, research, and restorative work still needs to be done." [11] —Read more here: https://archival.link/mormoncave/sources
A FOOL AND DUPE OF EVERY KNAVE: "When we see a miserable creature like Smith, all at once putting on the garb of sanctity, and guided by pretended inspiration, digging into the side of a hill, and there secluding himself for months, and then coming forth with the pretence that he has found a new revelation, which revelation is nothing more nor less than a piece of imaginative writing left in a manuscript by a deceased clergyman, and when we see such a fraud believed in, and adopted by enlightened men, and spreading more rapidly than any system of truth ever did, we are amazed. What is man and all his boast of intelligence, and what has the knowledge of the present day made man, but a fool and the dupe of every knave! It is easy to see that if the Supreme Ruler should but withdraw his care from our world, delusions might spread abroad which would involve the human race in the deepest horrors. All that divines have said of the battle of Armageddon might be speedily realized." —The New York Journal of Commerce
THE BOX WITH THE BROKERN CORNER: "Three of us took some tools to go to the hill and hunt for more boxes of gold or something, and indeed we found a stone box. We got quite excited about it and dug carefully around it, and by some unseen power it slipped back into the hill. We stood there and looked at it and one of us took a crow-bar and tried to drive it through the lid and hold it, but the bar glanced off and broke off one of the corners of the box. Sometime that box will be found and you will see the corner broken off, and then you will know I have told you the truth" [12] —Martin Harris
NOTES:
2. https://labyrinthos.co/blogs/tarot-card-meanings-list/four-of-pentacles-meaning-tarot-card-meanings
4. The New York Journal of Commerce, New York City, Monday, Dec. 13, 1841
5. Taylor, Alan. "Rediscovering the Context of Joseph Smith's Treasure Seeking". Dialogue Vol. 19, No. 4, Page 18-28
6. Zigler, Lou. The Times Union, Rochester, N.Y., april 25, 1974.
7. John H. Gilbert interview, 23 June 1893, in New York Herald, 25 June 1893, 12, quoted in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 2:552
8. Lorenzo Saunders, Interviewed by William H. Kelley, 17 September 1884, 1-18, E. L. Kelley Papers, RLDS Church Library-Archives, Independence, Missouri.
9. Joseph Rogers, Statement to Arthur B. Deming, 20 Mar. 1885, in Naked Truths About Mormonism, Apr. 1888,1
10. Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville Ohio: Telegraph Press, 1834) p 233
13. "The Last Testimony of Martin Harris," by E. Cecil McGavin in The Instructor, October, 1930, Vol. 65, No. 10, pp. 587-589.
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