Six of Pentacles

Arcana

Minor Arcana — one of the fifty-six

Suit

Pentacles — the Earth suit

The suit covers

money, the body, craft and material security

Rank

Six — the recovery

Place in the suit

sixth of fourteen

Pip or court

Pip card — one of the forty

Numbered alongside

The Lovers (VI), the Major sharing this number

Upright

Generosity, fair exchange, giving and receiving

Reversed

Strings attached, charity that humiliates, a debt standing in for a gift

Listing position

card 70 of 78 as the deck is written out

Nothing on this page is calculated from your birth details or your name — the readings below are the traditional attributions for the Six of Pentacles, written plainly. The one part of it that is arithmetic, and exact, is how often a card of this kind actually turns up; that has its own section further down.

What the Six of Pentacles means

Giving and receiving in the right proportion. Generosity that does not make anyone smaller.

The Six of Pentacles is the sixth of the fourteen Pentacles cards, and in the numbering every suit follows, the Six is the recovery: the way out of the five, in the suit's own manner. Pentacles is the Earth suit, so the question a Six puts — how does this suit put itself back together — is answered here in terms of money, the body, craft and material security. That pairing is the whole card. Change the suit and the recovery lands somewhere else entirely; change the rank and money, the body, craft and material security are still the subject but at a different point in its life.

Read the keyword line — generosity, fair exchange, giving and receiving — as the short form of that, not as a separate meaning. It is the Earth answer to how does this suit put itself back together, compressed to fit a table cell.

The Six of Pentacles reversed

Strings attached, charity that humiliates, a debt standing in for a gift

A reversal is a shift of emphasis, not a negation. Upside down, the Six of Pentacles is still the recovery and it is still about money, the body, craft and material security — what changes is which way that is moving. One common habit is to hear a reversal as the stage not fully arrived at, which would put the reversed Six of Pentacles nearer Five of Pentacles — hardship, exclusion, help not asked for; the rank before it in Pentacles — than to its own upright line. That is a habit rather than a rule; several of the fifty-six read more comfortably reversed than upright, and which side the Six of Pentacles falls on is something the cards beside it settle.

Whether you read reversals at all is a house rule rather than a fact about the deck. If you do not, the Six of Pentacles carries its upright sense — generosity, fair exchange, giving and receiving — and the cards either side of it do the work of saying how welcome that is.

Where the Six of Pentacles sits in Pentacles

The Pentacles run reaches the recovery at the Six, immediately after the Five of Pentacles and immediately before the Seven of Pentacles. Those two are the useful context: money, the body, craft and material security arrive at this card already carrying hardship, exclusion, help not asked for, and what follows it is patience, tending, waiting on growth. The Six of Pentacles is the turn between them, not a standalone verdict.

A Six in the other three suits

Every suit passes through the recovery, and comparing the four is the fastest way to see what Pentacles in particular contributes. In Earth the Six reads as generosity, fair exchange, giving and receiving; the same number in the other three elements is recognisably the same stage put to a different subject. Because the Six is numbered 6, it is also the rank that answers to The Lovers (VI) in the Major Arcana — the same number one storey up, where the subject is a chapter of a life rather than money, the body, craft and material security.

Reading the Six of Pentacles in a spread

In a three-card spread read as setting, situation and direction of travel, the position changes the weight of the Six of Pentacles rather than its meaning:

• First — the setting. money, the body, craft and material security as the ground the question already stands on, with the Six saying the matter had reached the recovery before you asked.
• Second — the situation. the recovery as the live issue right now, in the Earth terms Pentacles deals in: money, the body, craft and material security.
• Third — the direction. Where money, the body, craft and material security are heading: the way out of the five, in the suit's own manner, arriving rather than already here.

In a love reading

Where the Six lands in a love question depends on what Pentacles covers there — the practical frame around a relationship — money, a home, time, who is carrying what — rather than the feeling inside it. Put the recovery into that frame and the Six of Pentacles is asking how does this suit put itself back together about the relationship in those specific terms.

In a career reading

A Six in a career question is read through what Pentacles governs at work — pay, security, skill and the material result of the work, which is the most literal reading a career question can get — and the Six says which point of that a question has reached, which here is the recovery. So the Six of Pentacles answers a career question about money, the body, craft and material security rather than about the job in general.

How often the Six of Pentacles actually comes up

This is the part of a card page that can be checked, so it is worth stating exactly. Three cards drawn from seventy-eight means any named card — the Six of Pentacles included — appears in one three-card spread in 26, or 3.8% of the time. No card in the deck is rarer than another, and any page telling you its own card is unusual to draw is wrong about arithmetic rather than about tarot.

• At least one Pentacles card turns up in 45.2% of three-card spreads, and the Six of Pentacles is one of the fourteen it could be.
• At least one of the four Sixes turns up 14.8% of the time — roughly one spread in 7 — and three times out of four that card is not this one.
• At least one of the forty pip cards appears in 88.9% of spreads, so a draw with no pip in it at all is the unusual one.
• At least one of the fifty-six Minor Arcana appears in 98.0% of three-card spreads — the near-certainty that the widely quoted Major Arcana figure obscures.

Reversals do not change any of that. Whether the Six of Pentacles lands upright or reversed is a separate coin from whether it lands at all, which is worth remembering when a reversed card feels like it was aimed at you.

The full set of these figures, including what the most-feared cards actually add up to, is on the tarot page.

Six of Pentacles — common questions