Nine of Coins

The Nine of Coins is the second of the three Virgo decans in the Golden Dawn's zodiacal scheme for the earth suit, falling under Venus and carrying the title Material Gain. It sits between the Eight, ruled by the Sun, and the Ten, ruled by Mercury, the three cards together working through Virgo's decans in the Chaldean planetary order Book T uses for every suit.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, an elegant woman alone in a flourishing garden with a hooded falcon on her glove, has no equivalent in the Marseille pattern, where the Nine of Coins is nine coins in a formal lattice and nothing more. It is also one of the few Rider-Waite-Smith minor cards that scholars have suggested may echo the Sola Busca deck's figure of a solitary standing woman, though the resemblance is general rather than a documented copy, and most historians of the deck treat it with the same caution they apply to any claimed Sola Busca borrowing outside the small handful of cards where the source is clearly established.

The falcon is a hunting bird, trained rather than tamed, and the detail is usually read as the point of the whole image: the woman's abundance is disciplined, not inherited or accidental, closer to mastery than to luck. The Thoth deck keeps Crowley and Harris's title Gain and renders the card as a geometric design built from the astrological glyphs for Venus and Virgo rather than any garden scene, consistent with the deck's general avoidance of narrative imagery in the small cards.

Upright the Nine of Coins is read as self-sufficiency and comfort earned by one's own effort; reversed, as an independence purchased at the price of overwork, or a luxury that depends on someone else's labor rather than one's own.

Waite's printed meaning for the card leans toward prudence, discernment and material provision achieved through good sense, and says relatively little about solitude. The emphasis on independence and self-reliance that most contemporary readers now give the card is a later development, one that tracks the twentieth century's changing sense of what a solitary, propertied woman in a garden represents; readers of the 1970s and after, reading the image rather than Waite's older text, increasingly saw the card as being about a woman answering to no one, a reading the picture supports but that his own companion book does not spell out.

The card's reversed meanings are correspondingly unstable across sources. Waite gives roguery, deception and a bad bargain for the reversed card, which has little to do with the overwork or dependency many modern readers assign it; this is one of the clearer instances in the deck where present-day practice has moved well past its stated nineteenth-century origin, largely because the picture itself, rather than the printed keyword list beneath it, has become the primary text most readers actually consult.