Bohemian Gothic Tarot

QUEEN OF PENTACLES

Lighter or more conventional meanings

A practical, domestic woman, or man * Feeling happy and secure about your home and family * Someone who is a natural carer * A good manager, in both financial and practical ways.

Darker, shadow or more hidden meanings

Paying too high a price for "security" * Wondering if you have somehow ended up in a gilded cage * Suspecting that all, in a domestic situation, is not as calm and respectable as it seems * A woman, or man, who married or got into a relationship for money.

This is another card that seems like just one scene from a long story. We catch this young woman at the moment when she notices the disturbing content of a large painting. The setting is a sumptuous house and the woman herself is exceptionally richly dressed. But she might just be beginning to suspect that perhaps all is not well.

The Queen of Pentacles is the practical home-maker of the tarot. She is usually prosperous, and if not rich she will at least be well off in terms of comfort and a well-appointed domestic situation. She is generally the least conceivably Gothic of any of the tarot Queens, being far too practical and homely to have any darker side to her character. However, in The Bohemian Gothic Tarot we see a scene in which she finds herself in a frightening setting and begins to wonder if sheer practical common sense will see her through. It's reminiscent of Gothic heroines like the dauntless Mina (Bram Stoker's Dracula). Her domesticity, her conservatism - she finds her friend Lucy's emancipated flirting positively shocking - and, above all, her type-writing skills, of which she is extremely proud, make her a perfect model of the Queen of Pentacles, and yet, to save her husband, she has to expose herself to the bite of the vampire and enter a world of magic, nightmare and dark desires.

As our Queen looks at the picture in front of her she may well be regretting her visit to this place. Or, if she is in fact the lady of the house, she might suspect she has made a bad decision in her marriage. This isn't quite a Bluebeard scene, the picture in front of her shows a woman, not a man, with a skull. But one way of reading this image is to see it as the moment when this well-dressed young lady begins to have serious doubts about her situation. Possibly her small safe and comfortable world is about to change in ways that she could never have imagined.

Some further ways to consider this card

The painting on the wall is very curious. How could its symbolism add to an interpretation?

The picture lay face upwards on the table where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very nearly drop the candle on the floor, and he declares now if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was indubitable - rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.
- M.R. James, "The Mezzotint", Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.