Ten of Coins

The Ten of Coins is the clearest example in the minor arcana of occult doctrine being drawn directly into a card, and the evidence is in the arrangement of the coins themselves.

In Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 card the ten coins are not scattered or ranked in the usual pip arrangement. They are placed in the pattern of the Tree of Life, ten positions in three columns, the standard Kabbalistic diagram of the ten sephiroth. Behind them is a domestic scene: an old man with dogs, a couple, a child, and an archway bearing heraldry. The Marseille pip card has no such arrangement and no such scene; it has ten coins.

This is a deliberate act of encoding by a designer who knew exactly what he was doing, in a deck published in 1909 by a member of an order founded in 1888. It is real esotericism in a tarot card, and it is a century old rather than six. That combination is worth holding in mind whenever a modern deck is described as preserving ancient wisdom: the wisdom is often genuinely there, and it is usually Victorian.

The card reads as inheritance in the widest sense: family money, an estate, an establishment that outlasts the people in it, and security that was assembled by somebody else. Its distinctive note among the tens is duration. Its shadow readings run to a legacy that constrains, wealth that has become an obligation, and a family whose arrangements the querent did not choose.

Readers working a Marseille deck get none of this from the picture and read the card from its number and suit instead: ten of coins, the suit at its fullest extent. They arrive at much the same place, which is a reasonable argument that the meaning was not in the Tree of Life to begin with.

The Ten of Coins is read for permanence, and the interpretive work lies in deciding whether permanence is being offered as a reward or described as a condition.

The favourable reading is straightforward and common: wealth that will last, a family secure, a business established, an arrangement that no longer depends on any one person's effort. It is among the most materially positive cards in the deck and there is no reason to be coy about that.

The harder reading follows from the same picture. Everything in Smith's card is already built. The old man is at the end of something, the couple are inside an arrangement made before them, the heraldry on the arch belongs to a family rather than a person. Read that way the card describes a structure the querent has entered rather than made, and the question becomes whether they want it.

This is the card's most useful application in questions about family, and it is frequently the accurate one. A great many people consult oracles about situations whose terms were set by their parents.

A third reading, common in practical cartomancy, is simply property: houses, estates, contracts, the paperwork of ownership.

Waite's reversed meanings run to loss, a heavy risk and the failure of a project, which is a straightforward negation for once. Readers who do not use reversals note whether the surrounding cards suggest the structure is being built or being dismantled, and read accordingly. The distinction usually matters more than the orientation does.