The Five of Coins opens the Taurus decans in the Golden Dawn's zodiacal scheme for the earth suit, Mercury's placement here unusual among Book T's small-card rulers since Mercury elsewhere governs communication and speed rather than hardship; the assignment follows strictly from the suit's fixed Chaldean sequence rather than from any thematic fit, the Six of Coins taking the Moon at Taurus's second decan and the Seven taking Saturn at its third.
Pamela Colman Smith's scene, two ragged and visibly injured figures trudging through snow past a lit church window whose leading shows five coins, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Cinq de Deniers is five coins in a formal lattice with no figures, no snow and no church at all; older cartomancers reading that plainer card worked the earth suit's five, like every suit's five, as a number of disruption, unsettling the stability the four had reached, without Smith's specific imagery of exclusion from shelter that is visibly close by.
The stained glass is generally read as the composition's deliberate cruelty, since the help the figures need is a few steps away and unseen by either of them; the detail has no equivalent in the Marseille pattern or in the Golden Dawn title itself, both of which speak only to trouble in general. The Thoth deck keeps Crowley's title Worry and, in Harris's usual method for the small cards, replaces the figures with a jagged, anxious geometric arrangement rather than any scene of exclusion.