Earth Day, Pentacles, and the body's tarot

My grandmother could read your body before you sat down. She'd look at the colour under your eyes, the way your shoulders held, whether your hands moved when you talked or stayed in your lap. By the time you got to the table she already knew most of what the cards would tell her. The cards were a way of letting you arrive at it yourself.

She read tarot, but she was a curandera first. In her house, on a small wooden table in Oaxaca, the deck lived next to dried rosemary and a small glass of water. She always pulled Pentacles first, and she'd look at the card and then at me, and she'd ask one question. Are you sleeping. Are you eating. Are you on the ground today.

Most of the modern tarot writing I read treats Pentacles like the boring suit. The work suit. The money suit. The suit you skim past on the way to the Cups and the Swords, where the drama is. I want to make a small Earth Day argument that this is wrong. The Pentacles suit is the suit of the body, and the body is the literal earth we live in. Read it that way and the whole deck changes shape.

The suit that doesn't speak loudly

Pentacles are quiet cards. They don't have the wild emotional weather of the Cups or the cutting clarity of the Swords or the fire of the Wands. They sit. They tend. They count things.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck the Pentacles figures are often outdoors, in gardens, in fields, in shops with their hands on the goods they make. A worker, a gardener, a parent, a merchant. There's a card of a man counting his coins. There's a card of a family in a doorway. There's a card of a woman feeding a rabbit. They don't look like cards of profound revelation. They look like cards of Tuesday.

That's exactly the point. The Pentacles are the suit of the ordinary, ongoing, physical fact of being alive. They're what's true about you when no story is being told. The other three suits ask what you feel, what you think, what you're moved to do. Pentacles ask what you are made of, and whether you're being kept.

If you've been ignoring this suit, you've been ignoring the suit your body is in.

What my grandmother taught me to ask first

When a client came in, my grandmother would shuffle and pull the first card, and almost always she'd pull Pentacles, partly because she'd built that pattern into her shuffle over forty years, and partly because she insisted on it. She wanted you to be in your body before she'd read for anything else.

If she pulled the Five of Pentacles, the card of people walking past a church with the snow on them, she'd put it down and ask if you were eating. If she pulled the Four of Pentacles, the figure clutching the coins, she'd ask if your shoulders had been up around your ears for a week. If she pulled the Eight, the apprentice hammering away at the same coin, she'd ask when you'd last slept a full night without checking your phone.

She wasn't reading the future. She was reading the floor under you. Her belief, which I've come to share, was that no reading you do on top of a body that isn't being kept will land. You can pull the Tower or the Star or the Wheel and they'll all just be ideas you'll forget in three days, because the body that was supposed to receive them is too tired to hold the message.

The Pentacles, read first, make the rest of the reading possible.

A spread for the body, not the bank account

Here's the spread I use when a client comes in carrying too much. Their job is hard. Their relationship is hard. They have a question. They want the cards. I tell them the cards will come, and we do this first.

Three cards. Use only the Pentacles if you want to be strict, or pull from the full deck if you want the answer to be wider. I've done both.

The first card: what is my body asking for that I keep refusing. This is the card of the small denial. The walk you've been meaning to take. The meal you've been meaning to cook instead of order. The sleep you've been postponing. The card will name it. Sit with it.

The second card: what am I being kept by that I haven't thanked. This is the card of the small grace. The friend who texts. The room that's warm. The light through a window at four in the afternoon. The card will point at the thing. Most clients tear up here, because they didn't know they had it.

The third card: what would tending to the ground change in everything else. This is the prediction card, sort of. Not what's coming, but what becomes possible when the body is no longer at war with the rest of your life. It's often a Cup, in my experience. Sometimes a Wand. Almost never a Sword, which tells you something.

I had a client three years ago who came in with a long question about her career. We did this spread first. The body cards came up, she put her hand on the second card, and she said, "Oh. I haven't sat down in three months." We didn't get to the career question. We didn't need to. She came back a month later and the question had answered itself.

A small confession about the suit I almost missed

I should say, because the rule of this blog is that we tell on ourselves a little, that I spent the first four years of my reading life skipping the Pentacles. I thought they were the literal suit. I thought they were about money and that I'd handle the money parts myself. I treated them the way some readers treat the Page cards. As junior, as obvious, as not where the work was.

I was wrong, and I was wrong in the specific way most modern readers are wrong. I'd absorbed a culture that treats the body as a problem to be managed instead of a teacher to be consulted. I'd absorbed a tarot subculture that treats the spiritual as separate from the material. I had to unlearn both.

The thing that fixed it wasn't a book. It was sitting at my grandmother's table again, in my thirties, watching her pull the Nine of Pentacles for me and tap it twice with her index finger. "You have everything you need," she said. "You're just not in it." That sentence took me a year to understand. The Pentacles suit is the suit of being in your own life. Not above it. Not next to it. In it.

What Earth Day has to do with any of this

Today is Earth Day. Most of the writing today will be about the planet, which is the right thing for it to be about. I'm going to make a smaller argument and let the bigger one speak for itself.

You cannot care for the earth from a body that isn't being kept. You can perform care. You can write the right posts. You can recycle the right things. But the long, slow, ordinary work of being on this planet without consuming more than your share, that work is done by bodies that are tended. By people who sleep. By people who eat. By people who walk on actual ground in actual shoes and feel the ground.

The Pentacles suit is the small daily liturgy of being a body on a planet. That's why my grandmother put it first. That's why I put it first.

So pull a Pentacle today. Any of them. Look at it. Then go put your hand on a tree, or a wall, or the small bit of soil in a pot on your windowsill. The reading will land. I promise you. Bodies remember being read to. So does the ground under them.