Queen of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as practical care: someone who makes a home, manages resources well, and looks after others' needs. Waite tied her to opulence, generosity, and security.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as self-neglect, smothering, or work and home out of balance.
A question to sit with
How are you caring for your own body and space this week? Who would feel more secure because of your care?
The deeper reading
Traditionally earth mastered from within: care expressed through the body and the home.
What is drawn on the card
A queen sits on a throne in a flowering garden, holding a pentacle in her lap. Roses arch overhead and a rabbit sits in the corner of the card.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A queen whose face suggests a dark woman of greatness of soul and the serious cast of intelligence; she contemplates her symbol and may see worlds therein.
- Suit
- Pentacles
- Element
- Earth
- Domain
- Material world, health, wealth, work
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Queen of Pentacles is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.