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
In Waite's words: "The figure calls for no special description", and "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
The Italian suit is danari, money, among the marks of the earliest cards in the British Museum's catalogue of 1876. 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."
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe FoolThe tarot trump with no number, or 0 in Waite's deck: a young traveller at the edge of a cliff. A. E. Waite's list of meanings starts with folly and extravagance.
- The same shape in Historical flagsBennington flagA flag of thirteen stripes, white at the top and bottom, with “76” under an arch of stars in the blue canton, long said to have flown at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. The Bennington Museum, which owns it, dates it to between 1812 and 1830, because it is made entirely of cotton.
See also
The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers.
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
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, letters and numbers, squares and rectangles or stars.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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