MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Knight of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Hard work, routine, steady progress.
REVERSED
Boredom, stagnation, laziness.
The card
The Knight of Pentacles is one of the four court cards of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
In the Golden Dawn's scheme each court card is an element within its suit's element: the Knight of Pentacles is Air of Earth.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Prince of Disks. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Knight.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
He rides a slow, enduring, heavy horse, to which his own aspect corresponds. He exhibits his symbol, but does not look therein. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Utility, serviceableness, interest, responsibility, rectitude—all on the normal and external plane. REVERSED inertia, idleness, repose of that kind, stagnation; also placidity, discouragement, carelessness.
FURTHER MEANINGS An useful man; useful discoveries. REVERSED A brave man out of employment.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Cavalier (the knight) of Deniers (coins).
Learn more in the lessons
- Reading the Court Cards · 16 min
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.