The Spiritual Meaning of the Ten of Pentacles Tarot Card

The Ten of Pentacles is a tarot card that generally represents legacy and the experience of coming to the end of a satisfying journey. And yet there’s something a little off about this card too. It has chaos and dissatisfaction sitting in its shadow. The classical Rider-Waite-Smith version of this card generally shows an older man with his back to the viewer. He is looking toward a couple and their child, and he has two dogs at his feet. The scene is overlain with an image of the Tree of Life made of pentacles. So, what is the spiritual meaning of the Ten of Pentacles?

Coming to an End

One way of reading this card is as a joyful scene. A patriarch has come to a point in his life where he can sit back, relax, and watch the next generation grow and thrive within his legacy. He has worked hard to get where he is and he has everything he could possibly want. The Tree of Life has many meanings, but one of them is about the journey a human spirit makes throughout life. This card implies completion.

But the man’s back is to us, which gives it a little bit of a sense of melancholy and loss. In some decks he (or she) looks happy, while in others he looks exhausted. One of the younger figures is turned away from him while the other is facing him. We don’t know if this is a family or a community of people coming together with different viewpoints and perspectives.

In the Tarot of the Divine, the 10 pentacles are the round faces of children, all screaming and laughing and looking in different directions. In the Dreamkeepers Tarot deck, a headless woman is holding 10 green balloons on a beautiful green path. But her attention is pulled downward, towards a small broken thing just off the path.

Lessons About Money and Legacy

Tens are the end of one phase of the Tarot’s story. Each of the four suits in a standard deck of tarot cards are numbered from ace to 10, then move into the court cards, which each have their own meaning. Tens can be a culmination of the lessons of that suit—for good or for ill.

Pentacles or coins are about material reality. This can include money and career, but it’s also about the body, the material vehicle that takes us through life. It is related to the element of earth and the root chakra; everything that has to do with stability and security in our lives. The Ten of Pentacles, then, means coming to a peak of the lessons of those elements.

This patriarch has worked his whole life for money, security, and family legacy. But is it enough? Does he look on all that work with satisfaction or disappointment?

"Incomplete Completion"

The phrase that comes to mind when I see the Ten of Pentacles is incomplete completion. The work is done. The patriarch in the card has devoted his life to get to this moment. Maybe he’d like to do more, but he’s elderly, coming to the end of his life, and he can’t. Maybe the people he looks on feel fulfilled and supported, or maybe they feel stuck in the structures he created. For better or for worse, the work is done and it’s time to let it go.

When this card appears for you, it’s letting you know that you’ve done all you can and something is coming to an end. This card has a resonance with the World card, the 21st Major Arcana card that indicates endings—usually happy, but sometimes otherwise. The message here may be to allow the ending to be happy enough.

You may not feel finished with a certain journey. Maybe you’re being forced to retire before you really want to, or you need to let go of a project that has run out of time. Maybe a relationship has come to its end and there’s no more you can do to repair what’s been broken. You’re being encouraged to recognize the good of what you’ve done and let it end. Continue on your path, whatever may have been broken along the way.

Sometimes we make amazing things because we never feel like anything is enough. We keep working, keep refining, and never see our work as “done enough.” That is the very quality that can make this ending feel so bittersweet. You may need to consider that it’s time to let something go, especially if this card is reversed in your spread. Remember the old adage, “Better done than perfect.”

The Relief of an Ending

One other way of looking at this card is as if every part of the card represents some part of you. There is an observing self, a self that turns away, a child self—even a dog self! Particularly when something is coming to an end, we may feel a range of different ways about it. There could be loss, but there’s also excitement or relief. From the perspective of the Tree of Life, a symbol that is in part about different things coming together to create a whole, we can take these types of experiences as lessons to honor and acknowledge the various parts of ourselves that may disagree with each other.

The card could also be referencing the whole scene—the structure that can hold all the different people and generations and even species that are represented on the card. When all can come together to create a whole, the whole is what it is, whether it is perfect or imperfect, enough or not enough. It just is, and there you are at a perfectly imperfect completion.

Interested in learning more? Watch my YouTube video discussing the Ten of Pentacles here.