Four of Coins

The Four of Coins is the fourth card of the earth suit and the last of the three Capricorn decans that the Golden Dawn's Book T assigns to the beginning of the Pentacles sequence: the Two, Three and Four of Coins correspond in turn to the first, second and third decans of Capricorn, this card falling under the Sun and carrying the title Earthly Power.

The Rider-Waite-Smith picture, a seated figure gripping one coin to the chest, standing on two more and balancing a fourth on the head, is entirely Pamela Colman Smith's composition; nothing resembling it appears in the Marseille pattern, where the Four of Coins is, like every numbered pip in that tradition, four coins arranged in a symmetrical lattice with no human figure at all. The posture Smith chose, a body locked rigid around its possessions, is her own reading of the number rendered as gesture, and it is considerably more editorial than most of her pip inventions: earlier cartomancers reading a bare four of coins gave meanings closer to a settled, fixed material state, without the anxious grip her figure adds.

The Thoth deck keeps the Golden Dawn title Power and, characteristic of Frieda Harris's treatment of the small cards, drops the human figure for a geometric design, four coins locked into a rigid quartered square, a shape chosen to picture stasis rather than to illustrate a person holding anything. Crowley's own commentary is notably harsher than Waite's card, describing the configuration as power that has curdled into miserliness, a reading nearer to the card's later reputation than to its Golden Dawn title alone would suggest.

Upright the Four of Coins is read as security sought through control and saving; reversed, as the grip loosened into either generosity or anxiety about money, depending on which way the reader takes the release.

This is one of several small cards where the Rider-Waite-Smith image and the older cartomantic tradition point in almost the same direction without having arrived there the same way. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century cartomancers, working from number and suit rather than picture, generally gave the earth-suit four a meaning of settled, static possession, neither growing nor being spent; Smith's clenched figure sharpens that stasis into something closer to fear, and it is her picture, not the older number-based reading, that gives the card its now-standard association with hoarding rather than simple stability.

Waite's own published meaning for the upright card is comparatively neutral, gift, legacy, inheritance, and it is later twentieth-century readers, working from the picture more than from Waite's text, who pushed the card toward miserliness and control. This is a useful case for a general point about the deck: a card's illustration and its earliest printed meaning do not always agree, and where they diverge it is very often the picture that wins out over time, since it is what most readers actually look at.

Read carefully, the card is less a moral judgment on saving than a description of what saving costs when it hardens into a defense against loss.