The Four of Coins is the fourth card of the earth suit and the last of the three Capricorn decans that the Golden Dawn's Book T assigns to the beginning of the Pentacles sequence: the Two, Three and Four of Coins correspond in turn to the first, second and third decans of Capricorn, this card falling under the Sun and carrying the title Earthly Power.
The Rider-Waite-Smith picture, a seated figure gripping one coin to the chest, standing on two more and balancing a fourth on the head, is entirely Pamela Colman Smith's composition; nothing resembling it appears in the Marseille pattern, where the Four of Coins is, like every numbered pip in that tradition, four coins arranged in a symmetrical lattice with no human figure at all. The posture Smith chose, a body locked rigid around its possessions, is her own reading of the number rendered as gesture, and it is considerably more editorial than most of her pip inventions: earlier cartomancers reading a bare four of coins gave meanings closer to a settled, fixed material state, without the anxious grip her figure adds.
The Thoth deck keeps the Golden Dawn title Power and, characteristic of Frieda Harris's treatment of the small cards, drops the human figure for a geometric design, four coins locked into a rigid quartered square, a shape chosen to picture stasis rather than to illustrate a person holding anything. Crowley's own commentary is notably harsher than Waite's card, describing the configuration as power that has curdled into miserliness, a reading nearer to the card's later reputation than to its Golden Dawn title alone would suggest.