The Fours

The Fours are the fourth card of each suit of the Minor Arcana. Four is the number of the square, the table with four legs, the walls of a house: it stands up on its own. So the Fours are cards of stability. What began with the Ace, met in the Two and grew in the Three is now settled and secure — which can be a home and a rest, or a holding still that has started to go stale.

What the number means

Most readers see the Fours as a pause on firm ground. The question each Four asks is whether that firmness is supporting you or keeping you in place.

• The Four of Wands is a celebration under a garland: a homecoming, a milestone reached, a secure base to build from.
• The Four of Cups is contentment gone flat: someone sitting with folded arms, not seeing the cup being offered.
• The Four of Swords is rest: a figure lying still, recovering, the mind allowed to stop.
• The Four of Pentacles is holding tight: security kept by clutching, careful with money and with change.

Wands and Swords tend to show the gift of stillness — celebration, recovery — and Cups and Pentacles its risk: apathy, possessiveness. That double edge is typical of the Fours, and it is why the Five that follows breaks them open.

In the Golden Dawn

The Golden Dawn placed the Fours in Chesed, Mercy, the fourth sephirah of the Tree of Life. Book T describes the Fours as "perfection, realization, completion, making a matter settled and fixed."

Each Four takes the last ten degrees (20°–30°) of the cardinal sign of its element, its third decan. With the Fours, the cardinal signs — the openings of the seasons — are finished, and the series moves on to the fixed signs.

Crowley's Thoth deck calls them Completion, Luxury, Truce and Power.

The Major Arcana of the same number

By number the Fours echo IV, The Emperor — order, structure, authority, the walls that keep a realm safe. Readers who add the digits of larger numbers also link them with XIII, Death: the end that clears ground. The pairing is a modern numerological habit rather than a Golden Dawn attribution, but it captures both faces of the Fours — the structure that holds, and the reminder that nothing held for ever stays alive.

Several Fours in one spread

The traditions gave each count its own meaning:

• Waite: four Fours mean "journey near at hand", three "a subject of reflection", two "insomnia". Reversed, four mean "walks abroad", three "disquiet", two "dispute".
• The Golden Dawn's Book T: four Fours are "rest and peace", three "industry".

These are old keywords and they disagree. In broad terms, a spread with several Fours is often read as a settled, perhaps static, period: foundations in place, a time to consolidate or recover — and a gentle question about whether something has stood still too long.

In a reading here

When a spread is interpreted here, two, three or four numbered cards of the same rank are picked out as a pattern and given Waite's meaning for that number and count. A pair is noted only in a spread of seven cards or fewer, where it is rarer and says more.

Related

• Numbered cards (pips)
• The Threes
• The Fives
• The Emperor
• Four of Cups
• Tree of Life