72-Nine of Pentacles – Upright Rider Waite Deck

Your Chosen Card – Nine of Pentacles Upright Rider Waite Deck

When upright, the Nine of Pentacles depicts the discerning virgin of the sign Virgo, a self-contained maiden modeled after Astraea/Dike, the goddess of purity and justice who held a grain of wheat in her left hand. Under Astraea’s rule, the human race enjoyed peace, prosperity, perfect weather, and eternal youth. Unfortunately, the increasing vileness of human behavior caused the discerning goddess to flee to the heavens where she became the constellation Virgo, isolated from the wickedness of humankind. The Nine of Pentacles is a card of accomplishment, refinement, material fortune, and enjoyment of the fruits of the harvest. It indicates being rewarded for discretion, hard work, meticulous care, and prudent planning.

Keywords Upright: Gain, accomplishment, fulfillment, discernment, fruition, discretion, refinement, favor, elegance, meticulous care, material security, financial reward, self-sufficiency, solitary satisfaction, valuable time alone, self-reliance, pregnant with ideas or with child, fondness for small animals, enjoying the bounty of the harvest.

Timing: 10 Virgo–20 Virgo. Tropical, 2 September–11 September. Sidereal, 27 September–6 October.
Astrology: Lovely and affectionate Venus (debilitated) in the second decan of earthy Virgo, realm of the Knight of Pentacles (Fire of Earth) and the Hermit (Virgo). Venus is linked to the Empress.
Number Symbolism: 9 – the final single digit, culmination, fruition, attainment.

Rider Waite: A woman, with a bird upon her wrist, stands amidst a great abundance of grapevines in the garden of a manorial house. It is a wide domain, suggesting plenty in all things. Possibly it is her own possession and testifies to material well-being. Divinatory Meanings: Prudence, safety, success, accomplishment, certitude, discernment; (R) roguery, deception, voided project, bad faith.

When Nine of Pentacles is upright you can pretty much take it that life is going well but that’s when life takes us by surprise.  If Nine of Pentacles is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is Nine of Pentacles is trying to tell you.  If you had a particular issue in  mind, or want to seek clarification on something else, you can also choose again to get more guidance.

This chosen card is part of your upright card reading for Nine of Pentacles using cards from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck. You will find many more tarot pages that will be of great help if you need tarot card meanings. Use the search at the bottom of the page. We have some amazing tarot books for you to browse. Please see below.


Here are some snippets from a few of my favorite books

Complete Book of Tarot
Book Details
Complete Book of Tarot: When upright, the Nine of Pentacles depicts the discerning virgin of the sign Virgo, a self-contained maiden modeled after Astraea/Dike, the goddess of purity and justice who held a grain of wheat in her left hand. Under Astraea’s rule, the human race enjoyed peace, prosperity, perfect weather, and eternal youth. Unfortunately, the increasing vileness of human behavior caused the discerning goddess to flee to the heavens where she became the constellation Virgo, isolated from the wickedness of humankind. The Nine of Pentacles is a card of accomplishment, refinement, material fortune, and enjoyment of the fruits of the harvest. It indicates being rewarded for discretion, hard work, meticulous care, and prudent planning.

Tarot Books

Creative Tarot: It’s not just visual artists who were drawn to the tarot. Writers have used the cards as a storytelling technique for centuries now. That ranges from the hokey (a young adult protagonist visits a fortune-teller who reveals her true fate via the cards, which sends her off on a grand adventure, and so on) to the more sophisticated.

Complete Book of Tarot: Unfortunately, complete sets of these early tarot cards no longer exist. The Pierpont-Morgan Bergamo deck, produced in 1451, originally consisted of seventy-eight cards. The Cary-Yale deck, which may be the oldest extant set of tarot, probably contained eighty-six cards in all. At some point, card makers decided to limit the ‘standard’ tarot deck to seventy-eight cards comprised of twenty-two trumps, forty numbered pip cards, and sixteen court cards, as we have today.

  • Do get in touch if you looked for Nine of Pentacles and we don’t have it listed. We would be more than happy to source the information for you. We hope you visit again for more online tarot information!

Tarot Triumphs: Here is how my own Tarot collection and my relationship with the Tarot progressed. After I had bought my first two packs, the Marseilles and the Rider-Waite Tarots, I went on the hunt for more. Over the next few years, general interest in Tarot blossomed, and more packs were beginning to appear in the shops. Living in London in the early seventies, I haunted Watkins Books, long a home of esoteric books and now of Tarot cards too. I bought practically every pack I could find with the idea of forming a collection. The choice was still very limited though; I acquired a Swiss Besançon pack, the Richard Gardner/Insight Institute pack (a hybrid of Rider-Waite and Marseilles), and a gilded version of the Oswald Wirth pack. I bought other Tarots that were too fanciful for use, and some double-ended packs that were really just for card games. It wasn’t long before my collection, now into double digits, divided itself clearly between packs I could use for Tarot study and divination and those that were just curiosities. As the world began to take up Tarot, I found the proliferation, quite frankly, bewildering, and I decided to limit my collection and enjoy what I had there already. However, I did make occasional additions; a special find in Venice were two beautiful reproductions of historic Tarocchi packs. By this time I had decided to limit my interests mainly to traditional Tarot. Here, I felt, lay the true story.