King of Pentacles
King of Pentacles · Card 78 of 78
work, body, resources
Tarot Reading →Upright keywords
- prosperity mastered
- steady stewardship
- business acumen
- abundance shared
- paternal strength
Reversed keywords
Upright meaning
A king enthroned amid ripe vines, pentacle at his feet. The King of Pentacles is mastery of the material: ventures made good, resources stewarded, success that feeds a household and a community rather than a ledger alone. This card favors business judgment, patient investment in people and projects, and the generosity of the truly established. Waite credits him with realizing intelligence, gifts that actually cash out. His shadow is worth naming from the throne: abundance can become its own anxiety, guarding replacing enjoying. Build, steward, and share. The vineyard is at its best when the whole table eats.
Reversed meaning
Reversed, the granary turns fortress. Prosperity pursued past the point of pleasure into possession, worth measured by holdings, control exercised through resources, generosity replaced by leverage. This position asks the king's shadow question, what is the wealth for, and whether insecurity is quietly managing the portfolio. Rigid risk-aversion lives here too, the astute judgment ossified until no opportunity clears the bar, and stagnation follows the hoard. If someone else's materialism is holding your situation ransom, name the dynamic and get counsel where money is concerned, records over resentment. Real abundance circulates. Even kings are remembered for tables, not vaults.
Classical excerpt — The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), Part III §2
Divinatory Meanings: 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.