Understanding Tarot’s Acolyte Cards
Part 2: The Devil, The Tower & Six of Pentacles
Psst! This quarter’s class in Tarot in Community is Understanding and Undoing Tarot’s Acolytes. Learn more and join here.
image: a black person with a short afro in a tan suit looking straight at the camera. they're holding a tablet and leaning on a desk.
As we covered in the first part of Understanding the Acolytes, acolyte cards are the images in Smith-Rider-Waite tarot decks that show two subordinate figures beholden to a dominant figure.
These cards formally include The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, The Devil, The Tower and Six of Pentacles.
Today, I’ll talk about the remaining acolyte cards, as well as when and how they show up in conversation with the three we’ve already covered.
Ah, The Devil. It’s one of the only cards that really spooks me, because it points to a serious (often internal) problem that hides from view.
It has the potential to offer the most trouble of the feared tarot cards: Death, The Tower, The Devil, Ten of Swords, Three of Swords. As an acolyte card, once The Devil digs in its heels, it can be difficult, although rarely impossible, to uproot.
That’s because everybody’s Devil is unique. It points to the things that specifically keep us chained. We are the acolytes on the card, bound in service to what no longer serves us.
The Devil and The Tower come back to back in the sequence of the Major Arcana.
It’s the tension between hopelessly believing you cannot change and being catapulted out of those thoughts. Both the bondage and the escape have the potential to be traumatic.
The difference between the two stances is that if the course prescribed by The Tower is followed to the letter, one need never be bound to the same Devil twice.
The Tower’s relationship to the acolyte cards is less straightforward than the previous entries, but no less dominating a force.
The Tower shows a king and another figure propelled into the sea from the cracks in a flaming building.
The Tower has been struck by lightning. It was an act of God. What was can no longer be.
The figures have no time to think before they are in the water, faced with the reality of drowning or floating, but with only the barest control over which fate will befall them.
The Tower marks those times in life where God, The Universe, pure force, all that is, has total control over human life. Resistance is completely futile, embarrassing even.
If what’s happening could be prevented, delayed, or otherwise controlled, The Tower would not have shown up.
This is pure fate—the whirlwind, the brushfire, the eviction, the accident, the attack, the merger—and it’s up to you to figure out what’s next. It will take a while to pick up the apple cart and reassemble your life.
Nothing about The Tower can be avoided, only postponed. You have to take the leap or burn up with the ghost of the life you imagined as it is completely destroyed.
You can see how The Devil and The Tower act as a pair. The Devil is ruled by Capricorn, and as such is avaricious, calculating, and mercenary.
The Tower is Mars ruled; it strikes without a second thought, every move an act of war. Together they can point to violence, something that requires both control of someone else and generally some surprising act.
Psst! This quarter’s class in Tarot in Community is Understanding and Undoing Tarot’s Acolytes. Learn more and join here.
When they roll together, whatever is hidden will make itself known in a dramatic and undeniable fashion.
This is true regardless of what acolyte they join up with. I remember one summer I pulled The Lovers and The Devil. The effects were unforgettable.
That level of romance, fate, and unhealed trauma was intoxicating, unpredictable, and ultimately, completely unsustainable. It pointed to every wound and flaw in me.
It glazed my view of the other person’s truths. It was a doozy and twelve years later I’m still processing those lessons.
The acolyte cards are strong medicine.
They all concern fate in some way, if only as an idea, and limit our personal power to dispense their wisdom.
The final acolyte card, the Minor Arcana’s Six of Pentacles, is the most literal about those lessons. It’s a financial card, pointing to philanthropy and charity, but it can also talk about give and take in a business or personal relationship.
When the Six of Pentacles comes around, you are less controlled by capital “F” fate, and more by an individual or circumstance.
The Six of Pentacles shows a wealthy man giving alms to the poor. You could be the wealthy man, in which case you should think of the ways you could stand to be more generous with the people around you.
If you show up as one of the people in need, this card should be thought of with its neighbor, the Five of Pentacles.
The Five of Pentacles is a scene where someone suffers despite help being close at hand. The people on the card are walking by a church, but they don’t seek shelter or food.
Theirs is an embarrassed silence; they could go in and ask for help, but they do not, regardless of their needs.
The Six of Pentacles shows them finally ready for help. This is often in the form of financial help, whether it be awards, medicaid, WIC, mutual aid, or a microgrant.
It can also be a sign that the conditions are right for deepening a relationship, because they will help you with practical matters or conditions are secure to begin a love affair.
All considered, the acolyte cards remove any ambiguous thinking about how power shows up in a particular question.
These cards can demystify who’s in charge in a situation, and forces the querent to think about where they are in control or being controlled.
Psst! This quarter’s class in Tarot in Community is Understanding and Undoing Tarot’s Acolytes. Learn more and join here.
Further Thoughts
hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
