A Thrill of Hope
Or, how the 5 of Pentacles is actually a more encouraging tarot card than we think
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Tell me our society has misogynistic roots without telling me our society has misogynistic roots. I’ll go first.
In Greek mythology, the transition between the Titans and Olympians as far as dynasties of deities go was not a smooth one. Prometheus, the Titan god of fire, wanting to add some pizzazz to the as yet unpopulated mortal realm, created man out of clay. (Fun fact: The full title of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, and now you know why!) Being the god of fire, Prometheus also gifted this light- and warmth-bearing substance to his creations to help them survive. This angered Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, who confiscated the divine fire and told Prometheus to fall in line. Prometheus, instead of obeying, handed fire right back to humanity.
At this point, Zeus completely loses his shit at Prometheus’s audacity and, as the ultimate punishment, creates…
Woman.
One named Pandora to be exact.
Pandora was like a specialty Barbie. She was beautiful, charming, smart, and came with a unique accessory! You may have heard of it. It was a box. Zeus filled Pandora’s box with all sorts of strife and suffering: illness, loneliness, poverty, grief, meetings that could have been an email, you name it. He warns Pandora never to open the box lest she unleash all of the woes tucked away inside it onto the mortal world.
You know, 5 of Pentacles style.
Pandora, of course, being a good-for-nothing woman, just can’t help herself. Dying to take a peek, unable to resist the temptation of what my idol J.B. Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote often chalks up to “female curiosity” when she is dealing with a chauvinist who can’t possibly fathom a woman with a brain, Pandora lifts the lid of the box and forever dooms what could have been a totally stress-free and blissful society.
Women, am I right?
But lo!
What’s that at the bottom of the box? Buried underneath all the murky and dark substances that come spraying and bounding and oozing out of Pandora’s box and into the atmosphere forever is hope. A tiny, subtle, yet glowing THRILL OF HOPE.
Zeus had a contingency plan it seems! A consolation prize. Or perhaps more mercy on Prometheus and his creation than he originally led on.
The story of Pandora is often told as the introduction of sorrow, anxiety, darkness, and despair into the world.
Same goes for the 5 of Pentacles.
But we can read the story of Pandora through a slightly more feminist lens and interpret it alternatively as the introduction of hope into the world.
And the same goes for the 5 of Pentacles.
In this tarot card, at least in the original Rider Waite Smith deck (that’s an affiliate link to help support indie bookstores), we see two figures trudging through the snow without proper attire, probably exhausted, hungry, and absolutely miserable. One of them is even on crutches. In snow! Nothing can be more miserable. Not even being on crutches at Universal Studios with your entire freshman cheerleading squad, trying to be a totally perky, optimistic, and not-dying-in-the-armpits-region-at-all team player as a weird way to apologize to what I now recognize as completely toxic coaches who blamed me for being knocked out of a human pyramid by somebody else and, having nobody to catch my fall since said somebody else also took out the guy whose hands I was previously standing on nary a second ago on her way down, crashed down onto the gymnasium floor at the weirdest possible angle and selfishly tore up every ligament in my ankle just two nights before competition.
Even more miserable than that.
But lo!
What’s that structure with the beautiful stained glass window in the background? These weary wanderers aren’t in a desolate snowy landscape marching to their frostbitten demise. Oh no. The Five of Pentacles specifically portrays the moment of their journey when they have finally reached a warm, welcoming place of refuge. They have found hope.
In fact, one of my favorite parts about working with tarot is similar to my work in mythology: the study of different depictions of the same tarot card (much like studying different retellings of the same myth) emphasizes certain nuances of the card and deepens our understanding of the message and ourselves. My more hopeful reading of the Five of Pentacles is perhaps even more apparent when you see this card in the Morgan Greer tarot deck, pictured below.
The female figure in the Morgan Greer version of the Five of Pentacles takes on a more comforting, almost motherly, role rather than just being a fellow sufferer in the snow. Has she been traveling with the injured figure, as we assume she has been in the Rider Waite version of the card, or has she perhaps come outside from the church or convent we see in the background to greet this weary traveler and welcome him inside?
Plot twist!
(One might argue that the Morgan Greer Five of Pentacles is more feminist since the female figure becomes the hero or savior of the card. On the other hand, how feminist is it to portray a woman as the stereotypical nurturing or caregiving type, there only to comfort a man? Welcome to grad school!)
In any event, I’ve been thinking about hope lately, and how uplifting it feels when even a glimmer of it shows up in our moments of fear or doubt or exhaustion. You never quite know when hope will sneak up on you either. I could be standing under a hot stream of water unable to even muster the motivation to shampoo my hair and then, for whatever reason, a little voice creeps into my head to whisper, “I know you have work tomorrow and your dad is undergoing surgery and you snapped at your husband again this morning and didn’t grade enough papers again yesterday and your new medication didn’t work and your headaches are back, but maybe you could go to a bookstore today. Or just sit at home - all day if you wanted! - with your dog and a hot cup of coffee and just write. Or browse clothes online. Or drop in on your nephew. I think things might be okay. I think you might be okay!”
The thing about hope is that we can’t really feel or explain the sensation of it without the presence of some kind of negative experience. Just as darkness is the absence of light (you can’t define it without calling to mind its opposite), hope necessarily includes the idea that something isn’t quite going the way we would like. Hope is the feeling that things can change for the better. That things can work out. It’s the magical tug at our soul that tells us to hold on. That things can and probably will get better.
In the words of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh,
Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.
So then, can we experience hope without experiencing difficulty?
Can we truly experience the life raft that is hope without first experiencing hardship?
Maybe Pandora’s story isn’t simply another version of Eve giving into the serpent’s seduction and taking Adam and the future of humanity down with her and forever equating woman with sin and suffering.
Maybe this Greek myth - like the Five of Pentacles - shows us that hope is a buried treasure. And to unearth it, we must necessarily excavate all the difficult, undesirable, and downright painful life circumstances that lay on top of it, blocking out its warmth and glow from our reality.
It is said that loss is a sign that we have loved. Perhaps hope is a sign that we will love again.
Below is a tarot spread to use when you need help finding the glimmer of hope buried beneath a difficult or challenging situation.