Also known as King of Coins, King of Disks, and King of Denaries.
Core interpretation
King of Pentacles: material mastery expressed through stewardship and practical intelligence. The card joins the earth nature of Pentacles to its courtly role.
The card's place in the historical Minor Arcana sits beside its Golden Dawn correspondences and Waite's account of Pamela Colman Smith's image. Each reading keeps the source and deck that gave it shape.
8 sourced claims:5traditional
, 3modern
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
What the card shows
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.
Divinatory meaning
Upright
Valour, realizing intelligence, business and normal intellectual aptitude, sometimes mathematical gifts and attainments of this kind; success in these paths.
A richly robed king sits among vines and carved bulls, holding sceptre and pentacle with a fortified town behind him.
A concise visual description of Pamela Colman Smith's 1910 design, checked against Waite's card entry and the public-domain scan.
Divinatory meaning
Modern
Upright, Waite associates the King with courage, business ability, practical intelligence and success. Reversed, he can indicate weakness, corruption, perversity or material power placed in danger.
Waite treats these as historical divinatory allocations and explicitly warns that they vary by context and are not a universal symbolic canon.
Court-card structure
Court cards are organised by rank, suit and elemental composition in Book T.
They are listed separately because the source does not assign them to the
numbered sephiroth in the way it assigns the pip cards.
Book T uses King for the mounted figure now usually called Knight, Prince for the figure now usually called King, and Princess for the Page or Knave. The source's role is preserved here rather than silently modernised.
Sources (1)
Book T, Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Sixteen or Royal Cards, pp. 11–12; The Prince of the Chariot of Earth, pp. 12–21
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
Historical context
One of the fifty-six suit cards in a standard Tarot pack: four suits of ten pip cards and four court cards.
The Met documents this structure in surviving fifteenth-century Tarot: Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins, each numbered from one to ten with king, queen, knight and knave. Occult correspondences developed later.
Sources (1)
Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards, Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — paragraphs 2–4