Minor Arcana · Pentacles · Court card
King of Pentacles
provision built over years and shared
Element
Earth · money, body, craft, land and the slow accumulation of things
The card in tarot
What King of Pentacles means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A king sits on a throne carved with bulls, wearing a robe printed with grapevines, one hand on a coin and the other on a sceptre. A castle rises behind him and the ground at his feet is thick with flowers.
In a reading
Material mastery. Read as wealth that is managed rather than spent, a business owner, a provider, a person whose judgement about money and land can be trusted. The flowers say the ground has been worked for a long time.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
provision built over years and shared
Reversed
provision hoarded, or security standing in for a life
Reversed, common readings are wealth as identity, control of others through resources, or a provider who has confused providing with loving.
The suit
King of Pentacles is a Pentacles card
Pentacles are the suit of the material world, and the suit least interested in drama. They cover work that pays, health, skill built over years, property, food and the plain question of whether something is sustainable. It is the deck's most patient suit: several of its cards are about waiting for a thing to be ready.
The suit is not only about money, and a difficult Pentacle is more often about scarcity thinking than about actual poverty. It reads the relationship with material things as much as the things.
Pentacles is the suit of Earth, and it is the suit that became Diamonds in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Pentacles
The court rank
What the King does
Across all four suits, the King is the suit held outwardly: authority, mastery and responsibility for others.
The King is the element turned into a position. What he governs, and how well, is the suit's final question.
The same rank in the other suits
Why King of Pentacles is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.