Knight of Coins

The four tarot traditions do not agree on how many kinds of court card there are or what to call them, and the Knight of Coins is a useful case for seeing the disagreement plainly. The Tarot de Marseille has four ranks, Roi, Dame, Cavalier and Valet, King, Queen, horseman and page in English, essentially the same four positions Waite kept under English names. The Golden Dawn and, following it, Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck restructured the court into Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, with the mounted Knight promoted to head the suit in place of a king and the seated Prince taking a position roughly equivalent to Waite's King.

Within Waite's own four-rank scheme, the Knight of Coins is read as the earth suit's active or questing force, and Pamela Colman Smith gave him the stillest horse of the four knights, standing rather than moving, in a ploughed field rather than open country. The contrast with the other three knights, Wands at a gallop, Cups at an ambling walk, Swords at full charge, is deliberate: the sequence of horses across the suits is usually read as a graded scale of pace matched to each element, fire fastest and earth slowest.

Crowley's Thoth Knight of Coins abandons Smith's genre scene for an armored figure in a chariot drawn by a bull, part of Harris's consistent geometric reworking of the small court cards, and keeps the sense of methodical, unhurried force.

Upright the Knight of Coins is read as reliability, routine and hard work carried through without drama; reversed, as stagnation, an inflexibility that has stopped serving anyone, or work so cautious it never actually advances.

Court cards carry a double reading that the numbered pips do not: as a person, and as an influence or approaching quality rather than a person at all. As a person, the Knight of Coins is conventionally read as dependable to a fault, a colleague or partner who finishes what he starts but rarely surprises anyone; as an influence, the same card describes a period defined by patient, unglamorous progress rather than by any single event.

This is also the court card most often cited in discussions of the suit's reputation generally, since earth-suit court cards as a group are read, across all four ranks, as the most literally practical of the sixteen, concerned with money, work and material competence rather than ideas, feeling or action for its own sake. Where the Knight of Wands is read as impulsive and the Knight of Swords as reckless, the Knight of Coins is their opposite case, and readers commonly use him specifically to signal that a matter will be resolved by steady application rather than by a decisive stroke.

His reversed reading is correspondingly a caution against mistaking caution itself for progress, plodding work that has quietly stalled while still looking, from a distance, like diligence.