As warm and idyllic as Pamela Coleman-Smith's concept of this card may be, it doesn't visually convey much meaning, other than suggesting how nice it probably feels to be a rich lady with hired landscaper.
But in Tarot cards, all surface details, no matter how banal, have meaning. You just have take a moment to ruminate on them. For example, observe what Arthur Edward Waite (in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot) describes as "a bird upon her wrist." That's right, even the man who co-created this deck sees little going on in the Smith's drawing except this:
He seems to have completely overlooked the fact that this woman is a falconer. She's clearly wearing a large heavy glove on her bird arm, and the fowl itself (puny as it may be) is hooded. So what we're looking at is actually thematically closer to this:
That discovery became a window which allowed me to gaze very deeply into this card. At a glance it seems almost like Coleman-Smith is copy-catting her own Empress card, but in truth the two are vastly different. The Empress (Arcanalogue examples here) is an emissary of the forces of nature, which we see fruiting in unkempt splendor all around her.
There is little "nature" on display in the Nine of Coins. Rather, we see a woman who has harnessed the laws of nature and put them to work in a way which produces abundance. For example, consider her arbor: cultivating grapes suitable for wine-making is an obsessive, almost scientific discipline. So is training a bird of prey to hunt game. Suddenly this woman, fancy as she may be, does not seem nearly as frivolous as she first appeared. In fact there's something almost stony about her... she's probably daydreaming about hunting wolves in Mongolia.
Since I'm not a lady of leisure and means, I was forced to draw what I know. This is a picture of my tip jar at work. I've written a little bit about waiting tables here on the site already; I can never seem to get past how impossible the job seems while I'm doing it. When the restaurant is completely packed, every table full, with a line of people out the front door waiting to sit down, there is this wave of despair that washes over me. How in the world am I going to handle this, I wonder. I always manage to scramble and sweat and grin my way through it somehow, leaping through the hoops in an adrenaline-soaked frenzy. And not only that, I return week after week, well aware of what lies in wait for me. Instead of being horrified, I am awed by the discipline I've discovered in myself. Where exactly does it reside, and how do I tap into it and apply it to other goals?
The overflowing tip jar that greets me at the end of each shift has become a sort of magical talisman to me, it provides an immediate sense of validation (way more than, say, a direct deposit paycheck-stub). I leave the restaurant feeling like an alchemist, all of my physical exertion and mental pyrotechnics transformed into literal gold. Staggering home, I look like a revenant and smell like enchilada sauce -- but I feel like the woman in this card. Capable. Accomplished. Tested. Ready. Fabulous.
