Minor Arcana · Pentacles · Court card
Knight of Pentacles
steady progress, unglamorous and reliable
Element
Earth · money, body, craft, land and the slow accumulation of things
The card in tarot
What Knight of Pentacles means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A knight in armour sits on a heavy black horse that is standing completely still, holding a coin out. The field behind him is ploughed in even rows. He is the only Knight whose horse has all four feet on the ground.
In a reading
Reliability. Read as steady work, a plan followed exactly, a person who is slow and finishes. The stationary horse is the deck's joke and its compliment at once.
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
steady progress, unglamorous and reliable
Reversed
stalling, or stubbornness dressed as persistence
Reversed, common readings are stagnation, stubbornness, or thoroughness used as a reason not to start.
The suit
Knight 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 Knight does
Across all four suits, the Knight is the suit at full tilt, committed and not yet wise.
The Knight is the only court figure in motion. Each one moves at the speed its element moves at, from the Swords' charge to the Pentacles' plod.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Knight 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.