Taurus I: I had the most absurd nightmare. I was poor and no one liked me.

The Five of Pentacles / Taurus I: The Lord of Worry Decan Walk

“You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.” — Billy Ray in Trading Places

In late April we’ve moved out of the fiery, Mars-ruled energy of Aries and into the grounded, Venusian Taurus. And the first decan doesn’t ease us in gently. In the northern hemisphere, it’s not all roses and sunshine yet. The weather is unreliable. The ground is still hard. The seeds we’ve started planting may or may not yield anything, and there’s no way to know yet. This is the labor that precedes abundance — and the dread that comes with it.

The Picatrix describes this decan as “a woman with curly hair, who has one son wearing clothing looking like flame, and she is wearing garments of the same sort. This is a face of plowing and working on the land, of sciences, geometry, sowing and building.” In a separate talismanic chapter, it adds a more explicitly Venusian note: “The first face of Taurus is of Venus, in which an image made to place love between man and wife.”

Agrippa leans into the labor: “A naked man, an archer, harvester, or husbandman, and goeth forth to sow, plough, build, people and divide the earth, according to the rules of geometry.”

Hard work, uncertain return, and love as the force underneath it all. The Golden Dawn named it plainly: the Lord of Material Worry.

To understand why it’s all so hard, look at the major arcana associated with the ruling planets — the Magician for Mercury, who rules this decan, and the Hierophant for Venus, who rules Taurus. The Magician maneuvers. He’s cunning, resourceful, morally flexible — less a wise sage than a street huckster working every angle to get ahead. He reminds me of Billy Ray in Trading Places — a con man and a commodities broker unwittingly used as pawns in a bet by two wealthy brothers, who end up turning the game back on them.

Billy Ray was street smart, morally complicated, and had always lived outside the system, making his own rules; the Magician. The Duke brothers, on the other hand, were old money, institutional fixtures who lived and died by established order and its expectations; the Hierophant.

And what happens when Mercury — the trickster, the one who never belonged to the institution in the first place — meets the Hierophant’s world? You get the Five of Pentacles.

Five of Pentacles Tarot Card

The conventional read of the Five of Pentacles is that these two figures are outcasts — cast out, or unable to get in, trudging through the cold with nowhere to go. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Look again. There isn’t one figure but two. They’re together. Moving in the same direction. One leaning on the other. These aren’t people who’ve been rejected and are wandering alone in their shame. These are people who looked at that warm lit building and kept walking. Together.

Maybe they couldn’t go in. Or maybe they chose not to. Because the Hierophant’s warmth comes at a price. Conformity. Submission to the institution and its order. And these two, battered as they are, have each other instead.

This isn’t just an outcast card. It’s also a partnership card. And that changes everything about what it means to pull it.

We come to the Five on the heels of the Four — the lord clutching his coins, frozen by having too much to lose. He chose the institution. He chose accumulation. And it has him completely.

The Five may be the rejection of exactly that. The choice to forego material security because the cost of keeping it is too high. The path is harder. The cold is real. But so is the freedom.

T. Susan Chang, in her “Sacred Doubt” decan walk, captures something essential about this decan: the specific dread of the farmer who has done everything right and still doesn’t know if it will be enough. The seeds are in the ground. And now there is nothing left to do but wait, and watch the sky, and wonder.

That’s the liminal space of the Five of Pentacles. These two have already walked out into the cold, and it’s that moment of awful uncertainty after the decision has been made. Did I do the right thing? Will it be enough? Was it worth it?

And this is where the partnership becomes critical. The two figures in the card are still moving — battered, bent against the cold, but moving. Together. That’s not incidental to the image. That’s the whole point.

Which brings us back to Billy Ray and Louis. There was no easy rescue for them either. No institution stepped in. No safety net appeared. They had to outmaneuver the Dukes entirely on their own terms — using Mercury’s tools, wit and cunning and a willingness to work outside the rules, to turn the system back on itself. Two people, different knowledge, shared cold, same direction.

That’s the Five of Pentacles. Not a card of defeat. Not a card of rescue. A card of endurance, partnership, and the particular Mercury-flavored resourcefulness of people who have learned to trust each other more than they trust the institution at their backs.

The worry is real. The ground is hard. The fruit is months away. We plow and plant anyway.