Seven of Pentacles: tarot card meaning

In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the Seven of Pentacles upright means: These are exceedingly contradictory; in the main, it is a card of money, business, barter; but one reading gives altercation, quarrel, and another innocence, ingenuity, purgation. Reversed: Cause for anxiety regarding money which it may be proposed to lend.

The picture

“A young man, leaning on his staff, looks intently at seven pentacles attached to a clump of greenery on his right; one would say that these were his treasures and that his heart was there.” A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1910

Upright

These are exceedingly contradictory; in the main, it is a card of money, business, barter; but one reading gives altercation, quarrel, and another innocence, ingenuity, purgation.

Waite's additional meanings: Improved position for a lady's future husband.

Reversed

Cause for anxiety regarding money which it may be proposed to lend.

Waite's additional meanings, reversed: Impatience, apprehension, suspicion.

In one line

Looking at what has grown: money, business, barter. (Esbat's own summary of Waite's meaning and picture.)

Where it sits in the deck

The Seven of Pentacles is the seventh card of the suit of Pentacles, one of the 56 Minor Arcana. The other Sevens: Seven of Wands, Seven of Cups, Seven of Swords.

In Esbat

Esbat deals a card of the day, face down until you turn it, and holds all 78 cards in the 1910 pictures with Waite's meanings, upright and reversed. The Seven of Pentacles can be shared as a picture. All 78 tarot card meanings.

Sources

Meanings and picture descriptions: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: Rider, 1910), public domain, checked against the Wikisource transcription. Picture: Pamela Colman Smith, 1910, public domain. Like the app, this page records what the book says; it does not promise outcomes.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

Esbat: Tarot & Book of Shadows, on Google Play

A card of the day, face down until you turn it, and all 78 cards in the 1910 pictures with Waite's meanings, upright and reversed. For Android.

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