Coins

Coins (also called Pentacles or Disks) is one of the four suits of the Minor Arcana, the fifty-six numbered and court cards that make up the larger part of a tarot deck. In the elemental scheme of the Western esoteric tradition the suit is attributed to the element of Earth, and its cards concern money, work, the body and the material world; possessions, craft, health and practical security.

The suit and its element

The tarot began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, its four suits matching those of ordinary Italian playing cards. The elemental correspondences read here, Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Coins to Earth, were formalised much later, chiefly by French occultists of the nineteenth century and by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, who wove the suits into a wider system of magic and astrology.

The suit is described here within that documented interpretive tradition; the elemental attribution is a convention of Western occultism rather than a feature of the game from which the cards descend.

The tarot suits are inherited from ordinary playing cards, which reached Europe in the later fourteenth century with their four suits already in place.

The suit that did not change

A surviving Mamluk pack in the Topkapi Palace collection in Istanbul carries cups, coins, swords and polo-sticks. Coins passed into the European Latin suits with no alteration at all, which makes it the most conservative of the four. Where the polo-stick had to be reinterpreted as a baton by copyists who did not recognise it, a coin needed no translation anywhere.

The suit is still called deniers in French Latin-suited packs and denari or oro in Italian and Spanish ones, all of them plain words for money.

Pentacles is a later name

The name Pentacles, and the five-pointed star drawn on the disc, are not part of that inheritance. They belong to the nineteenth-century occult reworking of the tarot, in which the suit was assimilated to the disc or pentacle of ceremonial magic and to the element Earth. Decks in the Golden Dawn line use the newer name and older Latin-suited packs do not.

This atlas records the suit under its older name and notes the newer one, because a reader meeting Pentacles in a modern deck and Coins in a Marseille pack is looking at the same suit under two names from two different centuries.

Sources The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake CityMichael Dummett with A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult TarotRonald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett