Knight of Pentacles.
The slowest knight, and the one that finishes.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
The horse is standing completely still. A heavy black animal in front of a ploughed field, and on it a knight holding a coin out flat on his palm at eye level.
This is the slowest movement in the deck. Knights are supposed to be the motion of their suits, and this one is the one who finishes, the one nobody writes stories about. If something of yours is going to get done, it will get done at this pace by this figure, and nobody will write about that either.
Four things people go to on this card
- the horse
You went to the horse. All four feet on the ground, standing square, and it is the only knight's horse in the deck that is not moving.
Somebody who will not be hurried and is not pretending otherwise. Every other knight is in motion. This one has stopped in a field with the thing he is carrying, and the horse has stopped with him.
He is the least glamorous figure of the four and the only one you would lend money to. Slow is the method here, not a fault in it. What you are trying to hurry at the moment would be better done at this pace, and some part of you already knows that and is embarrassed by it.
What are you trying to hurry that would be better done at this pace?
- his palm
You went to the coin. He is holding it out flat on his palm, level, the way you hold something you are checking.
Inspection. He is not brandishing it or guarding it. He has stopped his horse to look at a thing properly, and the horse has all afternoon.
That habit is the whole of his value. Deciding quickly is a skill and so is checking slowly, and they are not the same skill. If something in your life needs checking rather than deciding, this is the figure the deck is offering, and he will not be rushed into a verdict before he has turned it over.
What needs checking properly, rather than deciding quickly?
- the furrows
The ground behind him is a ploughed field in long furrows, running to the edge of the card.
The unglamorous evidence of work done in rows. Somebody went up and down that field. It took the time it took, and it looks like this from a distance: red-brown, striped, finished.
This is the suit's plainest promise. The boring method works. Nothing about a furrow is interesting and the field is nonetheless ploughed. Something in your life is only going to yield to going up and down the rows, and you have been looking for a way round that.
What in your life is only going to yield to going up and down the rows?
- the sprig
On the helm, a sprig of green oak growing out of the top of it, and another on the horse's head.
The card will not let him be entirely a machine. Something is alive on the armour and on the animal. He is dull, not dead, and the difference is drawn in leaves.
That distinction matters if this figure is a person in your life. Reliability read as coldness is one of the commonest misreadings of somebody who is simply doing the work. Somebody near you is steadily working and you have been reading them as cold, and the sprig says look again.
Who in this have you been reading as cold when they are just steadily working?
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Knight of Pentacles on Tiphareth, beauty, in Assiah, the world of earth: the knights of all four suits sit there, one to a world. It is the sixth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Which zodiac signs does the Knight of Pentacles cover?
Twenty degrees of Aries to twenty degrees of Taurus: the last third of Aries and the first two thirds of Taurus, which the Sun crosses about 10 April to 10 May each year. Book T gives every knight thirty degrees across two signs like this, which is why a court card belongs to no single sign. The three decans inside it are Four of Wands · Five of Pentacles · Six of Pentacles, so a birth in any of them carries the Knight of Pentacles as well as its own card.
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.
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