Seven of Pentacles, the Rider-Waite-Smith card drawn by Pamela Colman Smith (1909)
Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Minor Arcana · Pentacles · Earth

Seven of Pentacles

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

Read to know yourself, not to surrender yourself: relate to the card; never obey it. These are what two traditions wrote, not predictions.

In Waite's words: The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911)

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 (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), public domain.

In the Golden Dawn's Book T (1912)

Lord of Success Unfulfilled

A WHITE Radiating Angelic Hand issuing from a cloud, and holding a white rose branch. Seven Pentacles arranged like the geomantic figure Rubeus. There are only five buds, which overhang, but do not touch the five uppermost Pentacles. Above and below are the Decan symbols, Saturn and Taurus respectively.

Promises of success unfulfilled. (Shewn, as it were, by the fact that the rosebuds do not come to anything.) Loss of apparently promising fortune. Hopes deceived and crushed. Disappointment, misery, slavery, necessity and baseness. A cultivator of land, and yet a loser thereby. Sometimes it denotes slight and isolated gains with no fruits resulting therefrom, and of no further account, though seeming to promise well.

Netzach of ה (Unprofitable speculations and employments; little gain for much labour).

Therein הרחאל> and מצראל are ruling Angels.

Correspondences

Decan: Saturn in Taurus (the 3rd decanate of its sign).

Sephirah: Netzach in Assiah (the Material World).

Book T as printed in The Equinox I(8), 1912, public domain (notes in square brackets are Crowley's). The correspondences are this site's compilation from Book T. Open it in the Golden Dawn deck.

Images: Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), public domain. Texts: Waite (1911) and Book T (1912), public domain. Selection and arrangement CC-BY-SA-4.0 (PlayfulProcess). Data: github.com/PlayfulProcess/recursive-tarot.