If you have no idea what the Iron or Pearl Pentacles are, you might want to skip this chapter or buy my book Circling the Star .

It is said that the work of the Iron Pentacle is the work of a lifetime, while the work of the Pearl Pentacle is the work of many lifetimes. There are so many pathways one could explore with this statement. We could speak of the polishing of souls over multiple incarnations. We could speak of the long-term evolution of culture.

What calls me the most is an interpretation that we are speaking of relationships. Pearl energy is not a solitary pursuit, but one that emerges in connection with others. With Iron, we draw upon the hot, passionate energy of our “animal” nature and differentiate its energy into five qualities, naming them, giving them form, opening communication between our conscious and unconscious selves. What we might consider “base” becomes elevated, suffused with the energy of our divine self, and a quality through which we can express our whole being.

It’s such a beautiful transformation. When treated as undignified, “primitive,” or otherwise as objects of disgust, these qualities are ones we tend to simultaneously suppress and become obsessed with—power, sex, pride, passion, and our sense of self. Once named, explored, and claimed, they become energies we can cultivate and use with ever-increasing skill. The intensity of repression or obsession ebbs.

Before getting to Pearl, a further quick aside on this. Recently I was spending time with a friend’s children and got to see a nighttime ritual that astounded me. They keep a tin of miscellaneous sweets and every night their oldest is allowed their choice of one of those sweets. I was put in charge of administering this sweet and the young one asked me to pour them all out so they could look at their options.

If it were me, I would’ve taken three. If I were that kid, I would’ve tried to con the adult into saying it’s okay.

Instead, this kid looked, chose one, and said thank you. I put all the rest of the sweets back. End of story.

My complex, which this kid does not have, is that my craving for candies is split by shame and self-judgment. One part of me says sweets are bad and I’m unhealthy for wanting them. Another one wants them so much, and sneaks as many as it can get away with, because there’s a polarization in me between indulgence and restraint.

This kid, though, has had it modeled that it’s totally okay to enjoy a sweet, and there will be more. So they don’t have hangups about it. They have the one they want, and they know they’ll have more later. My complex says either I should deny myself completely, or I should have a bunch because I’m at risk of denying myself.

This is the kind of splitting that the Iron Pentacle starts to heal within us around these qualities. Because we have so much shame, judgment, and competition, most of us have some kind of similar splitting around at least one of these things, and culturally we see all kinds of polarizations between whether sex is good or evil, whether power is righteous or immoral, whether passion is the only thing that matters or a dangerous abyss, whether the self is the most important thing in the world or something to be annihilated, or whether we must have pride because “either you’re on top or you’re on the bottom” or we must abase ourselves because “pride goeth before a fall.”

Coming into right relationship with ourselves, and being in relationship to others doing this work, allows those Pearlescent qualities of love, law, knowledge, wisdom, and liberty to emerge in affirming ways. When we cease to be at war with ourselves, we learn how we can be in connection without coercion.

We learn what love is when we feel it toward another, or we experience it from another. And some of us cannot tolerate the intimacy of being loved by another until we have taken the time to build the capacity for love within ourselves. And some of us cannot know what is lovable within ourselves until we see ourselves through the perspective of someone we love. Don’t get hung up on arguing about the reductive meme statements. Loving and being loved is mutual, and we can grow in either capacity, and growing in one gives us more opportunities to grow in the other.

While in Love I open my heart to those in my life, I do not look to them as the only source of energy, passion, and connection. If they need to step away, I can know I’ll be okay and don’t need to chase them in terror. If they come at me with big energy, I know my own relationship to my self and my power so I do not need to run away, but I could have a firm boundary.

The agreements of our relationship emerge as their own kind of Law. Rather than following some prescribed model of what relationship is supposed to look like, we can negotiate our needs between us and find what works for us. For some, that could mean a deeply intertwined life with shared home and a shared business. For others, that could mean a very spacious relationship in which there are multiple partners or living in different cities without a need to move in together.

These Laws reflect our actual emotional needs and likely vary from relationship to relationship. I have friends who I know to be consistently late to things and I’ve accepted that as something not personal that I can use in planning our time together. In other relationships, I experience lateness as a sign of disrespect and lacking care for my time or energy. This may seem inconsistent but these reactions emerge from the larger context of relationship—how communicative does this person tend to be? Do I feel respected in other ways or is this detail a sign of a larger pattern of disrespect? From one friend, I can allow grace without feeling compromised, but from another friend I might feel consistently compromised and realize this is one place where I need to draw a boundary and insist on timeliness.

This Law takes Liberty for granted, that I neither wish to control nor be controlled by the people in my life, but to be connected we need to have shared understandings. We need to have a common center and container in our relationship because too much Liberty is a centripetal force that spins us away from each other, but our shared Laws keep us connected. Making agreements from a place of self-knowledge, mutual love, and valuing our respective freedoms also helps mitigate resentments—resentment is a sign that something needs to be renegotiated.

That’s the Wisdom that emerges from this state of being. Instead of seeing emotions and ambivalence as flaws to be corrected, we can use them to guide our actions wisely. Knowing that agreeing to something will bring up resentment, and resentment is a relationship killer, helps me to be clearer when I need to say no or see if there’s another option.

Knowledge, too, compliments Wisdom in the engagement of our higher faculties of reason and contemplation to gain more precise and nuanced definitions of reality and relationship. Knowledge offers new possibilities for action and relationship that were not available before. If I’ve never experienced another country, I might think my life is normal and all there is. When I know things can be different, then I have choices. I have room for negotiation.

None of these qualities of Pearl remain stable if they are purely emerging from the individual. I can know myself intimately but still founder in relationships where the other person is unknown unto themselves or unable to tolerate honesty, intimacy, and clear communication.

Abuse, deception, manipulation without clear boundaries that protect our Iron energy makes it impossible and perhaps even unwise to keep hold that Pearl energy. What kind of Law is tenable when one person will always do what keeps them in power and refuse accountability? What kind of Liberty can we have when others in our lives require us to be small and meek in the face of their unchecked anger?

Only the Liberty of cutting those chains and getting free, and that’s often easier said than done. Better to go back to our Iron, cultivating strength and the knowing we deserve better, and find our way back to Power.