King of Pentacles
wealth · business mastery · security · a provider
Card art: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909, for A. E. Waite. Public domain.
The suit of Pentacles
In a few words
- wealth
- business mastery
- security
- a provider
A king among vines and coins, bull heads on his throne. Wealth built well, business mastered, a provider who stays.
Upright
- Everything
- A king among vines and coins, bull heads on his throne. Wealth built well, business mastered, a provider who stays.
- Love
- A steady, generous, grounded partner. Security offered, and meant.
- Work
- Leadership through competence and results. A business at its strongest.
- Money
- Financial mastery. Assets, property, a reputation that brings money to the door.
- Myself
- You have earned your place. Keep the humility that built it.
Valour, realizing intelligence, business and normal intellectual aptitude, sometimes mathematical gifts and attainments of this kind; success in these paths.The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), p. 254
Reversed
- Everything
- Wealth turned to greed, or a provider who controls with money. Or a fortune slipping through mismanagement.
- Love
- Money as power in the relationship. Or a partner who provides and never shows up.
- Work
- A boss who bullies with the purse. Or stubbornness sinking a good business.
- Money
- Corruption, bad investments, gambling with what should be kept. Step back.
- Myself
- Measuring yourself by your net worth. The bull is not the man.
Vice, weakness, ugliness, perversity, corruption, peril.The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), p. 254
The card, as Waite described it
The figure calls for no special description; the face is rather dark, suggesting also courage, but somewhat lethargic in tendency. The bull's head should be noted as a recurrent symbol on the throne. The sign of this suit is represented throughout as engraved or blazoned with the pentagram, typifying the correspondence of the four elements in human nature and that by which they may be governed. In many old Tarot packs this suit stood for current coin, money, deniers. I have not invented the substitution of pentacles and I have no special cause to sustain in respect of the alternative. But the consensus of divinatory meanings is on the side of some change, because the cards do not happen to deal especially with questions of money.The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), p. 254
The plain-word meanings on this page were written for ShreeJyoti and are still under review.