King of Pentacles
The king of pentacles in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a king on a throne carved with bulls’ heads, holding a pentacle. A. E. Waite read it as valour, business and practical intelligence.
Meaning
Waite describes the card: "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."
What does the King of Pentacles mean?
Waite's meanings are "valour, realizing intelligence, business and normal intellectual aptitude, sometimes mathematical gifts and attainments of this kind; success in these paths"; reversed, "vice, weakness, ugliness, perversity, corruption, peril". His list of additional meanings adds "A rather dark man, a merchant, master, professor", and reversed, "an old and vicious man".
In older decks
In Italian packs the suit is danari, money: the earliest suit marks, the British Museum's catalogue of 1876 records, were coppe, danari, bastoni and spade, "cups, money, clubs, and swords". Waite noted that "in many old Tarot packs this suit stood for current coin, money, deniers". Papus reads it as "a fair man, inimical or indifferent".
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Lesser Arcana; Some Additional Meanings of the Lesser Arcana
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Divining Tarot, second lesson: the minor arcana
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), General history: the marks of the suits
Last reviewed September 28, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research