Four of Pentacles

The Four of Pentacles is the miser. A crowned man sits on a stool clutching a coin to his chest. There's one coin balanced on his crown and one under each foot, and a city at his back that he's clearly not going to spend any of it in. It's the card of saving, holding, and hoarding, the fine line between security and a fist that can't open.

Ergot is a fungus of rye and other grasses. A spore lands on an open flower and takes over the ovary. First it oozes a sweet, sticky honeydew full of spores that insects carry to other flowers. Then, where a grain should have formed, it grows a hard, dark purple-black body called a sclerotium, shaped like a curved spur. (The name "ergot" comes from the old French word for a rooster's spur.) The sclerotium is a sealed store. It drops to the ground, sits through the winter, and in spring it sends up tiny stalked heads that release spores just as the rye comes into flower again.

Humans met the sclerotium mostly through bread. Ground in with the flour, it is loaded with alkaloids that constrict blood vessels and affect the mind. In medieval Europe that caused outbreaks of ergotism, known as St. Anthony's fire: burning limbs, gangrene, convulsions. In 1938 the chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD from an ergot compound while looking for a circulatory drug. The fungus's savings account had a lot in it.

The opportunity of the Four is a real one. Not everything should be spent now. The sclerotium is how ergot survives a winter that would kill everything else, and there's wisdom in keeping a dark pearl for the bad months. The risk is that the hoard replaces the harvest. Where the pearl sits, there's no grain. Ask what you're holding on to and what's not getting to grow because you are. And ask what happens to the people who eat from your stores without knowing what's in them.