pentacles
No image of this card
Lady Frieda Harris painted the deck between 1938 and 1943; it was first published in 1969, seven years after her death in 1962. The paintings remain in copyright until 2032 in the UK and EU and 2064 in the United States, so no card images or substitutes appear here.
See the deck at its publisher ↗The Prince of the Chariot of Earth
Suit: Disks Minor Arcana Element: Earth
Also known as King of Coins, King of Disks, and King of Denaries.
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: 5 traditional , 3 modern
The Book of Thoth remains in copyright. The catalogue therefore gives the deck's titles, ranks and numbering beside the Golden Dawn material it inherits, while citing Crowley by page without reproducing his text.
This deck calls the card Prince of Disks; it is filed here as King of Pentacles.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
The card is indexed as the King of Pentacles; Book T ranks it Prince, while the Thoth deck prints Prince. Its Golden Dawn place is Prince / Vau · Air of Earth. Book T titles it The Prince of the Chariot of Earth. This deck calls the suit Disks rather than Pentacles.
Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, Thoth — Part Three: The Court Cards.
King of Pentacles
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.
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 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's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Prince of the Chariot of Earth
Book T's formal title for this court card.
Earth · Pentacles
Pentacles express the powers of Earth: material conditions, labour, resources, embodiment and practical consequence.
Prince / Vau · Air of Earth
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.
20° Aries to 20° Taurus
The twelve King/Knight, Queen and Prince/King cards bridge zodiac signs; the four Princess/Page cards instead rule polar quadrants.
Practical intelligence increases and consolidates matter reliably, but may become selfish or overly material.
A concise paraphrase of Book T's well- and ill-dignified characteristics.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
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.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Suit and element | Earth | 1888 CE |