King of Pentacles: tarot card meaning

In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the King of Pentacles upright means: 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.

The picture

“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. The sign of this suit is represented throughout as engraved or blazoned with the pentagram, typifying the correspondence of the four elements in human nature and that by which they may be governed. In many old Tarot packs this suit stood for current coin, money, deniers. I have not invented the substitution of pentacles and I have no special cause to sustain in respect of the alternative. But the consensus of divinatory meanings is on the side of some change, because the cards do not happen to deal especially with questions of money.” A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1910

Upright

Valour, realizing intelligence, business and normal intellectual aptitude, sometimes mathematical gifts and attainments of this kind; success in these paths.

Waite's additional meanings: A rather dark man, a merchant, master, professor.

Reversed

Vice, weakness, ugliness, perversity, corruption, peril.

Waite's additional meanings, reversed: An old and vicious man.

In one line

Valour and business sense: success along these paths. (Esbat's own summary of Waite's meaning and picture.)

Where it sits in the deck

The King of Pentacles is the fourteenth card of the suit of Pentacles, one of the 56 Minor Arcana. The other Kings: King of Wands, King of Cups, King of Swords.

In Esbat

Esbat deals a card of the day, face down until you turn it, and holds all 78 cards in the 1910 pictures with Waite's meanings, upright and reversed. The King of Pentacles can be shared as a picture. All 78 tarot card meanings.

Sources

Meanings and picture descriptions: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: Rider, 1910), public domain, checked against the Wikisource transcription. Picture: Pamela Colman Smith, 1910, public domain. Like the app, this page records what the book says; it does not promise outcomes.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

Esbat: Tarot & Book of Shadows, on Google Play

A card of the day, face down until you turn it, and all 78 cards in the 1910 pictures with Waite's meanings, upright and reversed. For Android.

Get it on Google Play

Keep reading