Pentacles vs. Coins: What's the difference?

Open a Rider-Waite-Smith deck and lay out the Ten of Pentacles. The card shows an old man under an archway, two dogs at his feet, a family gathered around him. The scene is wealthy, settled, dynastic. Now open a Marseille deck. The card called Ten of Coins shows ten disks arranged in a pattern, no people at all. Same suit, different name. Pentacles and Coins refer to the same suit in the Minor Arcana, but the difference between them is not cosmetic: it traces a shift in how Western occultism understood matter, money, and the human body. One name comes from the Italian playing card tradition. The other was invented in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite to change what the suit meant.

What Are Pentacles and Coins in Tarot?

The suit of Pentacles (also called Coins, Disks, or Deniers) is one of the four suits of the Minor Arcana. It corresponds to the element of Earth and governs material life: money, work, physical health, inheritance, property, the body itself. The Marseilles tradition calls the suit Deniers (Coins). Waite renamed it Pentacles in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck to break the suit away from pure commerce and attach it to ceremonial magic, alchemy, and the body as a site of spiritual work.

The question is not which name is correct. Both are. The question is what each name reveals about the tradition that uses it.

Where Do the Coin Suits Come From? A History Rooted in Playing Cards

The tarot originated as a trick-taking card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest known decks, the Visconti-Sforza cards from Milan around 1450, used four suits: Cups, Swords, Batons, and Coins. These were the same suits used in ordinary playing cards of the period, adapted from Mamluk cards that reached Europe through trade. The Mamluk suits had cups, swords, polo sticks, and coins. Polo sticks became batons. Coins remained coins.

For three centuries, the suit was always Coins. The cards showed disks engraved with crosses or heraldic devices. The card meanings were game-based: a Ten of Coins was a high card in play, not a symbol of inheritance. No one used tarot for divination. The suit meant coins because that is what the object on the card was.

The shift began in 1781 when Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde Primitif, claiming tarot was a survival of Egyptian Book of Thoth. He had no evidence, but his theory stuck. Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) published the first tarot divination manual in 1783 and assigned specific meanings to each card. Coins became about money, gifts, and profit. The suit started to mean something.

Why Waite Changed the Name to Pentacles

Arthur Edward Waite was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a ceremonial magic order founded in 1888. The Golden Dawn had its own tarot system, and in that system the suit of Coins bothered them. Coins were secular money. They carried the taint of trade, of the mundane, of the market. The Golden Dawn wanted a suit that represented the material world as spiritual matter, not as currency.

They chose the pentacle. A pentacle in ceremonial magic is a disk inscribed with a five-pointed star and other symbols, used to call spirits or contain magical force. It appears in grimoires like the Key of Solomon, where the magician stands inside a circle while holding a pentacle to command demons. The object had weight in magical tradition. It was ceremonial, protective, and charged with intention.

Waite, working with artist Pamela Colman Smith, redesigned the suit for the 1909 Rider deck. Coins became disks with pentagrams engraved on them. The Seven of Pentacles shows a farmer leaning on a hoe, looking at a vine heavy with pentacles. The Ten of Pentacles shows a family under a gate carved with the same symbol. The cards kept the gold color of coins but changed the object itself.

The effect was deliberate. Waite wrote in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) that the pentacle represented “the materialization of force” and that the suit “has to do with our position in the outer world.” He did not want readers to see a coin. He wanted them to see a talisman. A coin is earned. A pentacle is consecrated.

What Changed in Practice: How the Name Affects Reading

Is there a difference between reading a Pentacles card and a Coins card? Practitioners who use Marseille decks say yes. Those who use Waite-derived decks say no. The suit is the same. The reading changes because the symbol changes.

The visual difference matters. In a Marseille deck, the Ten of Coins shows ten identical disks arranged in two rows. The image is abstract, numerical, pure quantity. A reader might interpret it as wealth, accumulation, or the structure of money itself. In the Rider-Waite-Smith Ten of Pentacles, you see an old man on a throne, a woman seated, a child, two dogs, a beggar outside the gate. The image is relational. The card becomes about legacy, family, and what passes between generations.

The Marseille tradition treats Coins as the most physical suit. It governs the body as a thing of appetite, labor, and decay. Crowley described the suit of Disks (his term) as “the grossest of all the symbols” and said it dealt with “matter, solid, concrete, and tangible.” He did not mean this as praise. He meant that the suit was hardest to spiritualize.

Waite’s Pentacles spiritualized it. A pentacle can be a tool of transformation. The Five of Pentacles shows two figures outside a church window, cold and barefoot, but the window is lit with pentacles. The image suggests that material poverty does not mean spiritual poverty. A coin card could not say that. It would just show two cold people outdoors.

The Elemental Correspondence Cannot Change

Both names share one fixed anchor: the element of Earth. In the Golden Dawn system, which all modern tarot descends from, Pentacles correspond to Earth. Fire is Wands. Water is Cups. Air is Swords. Earth is Pentacles. That correspondence does not shift with the name.

Earth in occult philosophy is not just dirt. It is the most dense of the four elements, the one that holds form, the one that receives the impression of the others. Paracelsus wrote in the 16th century that Earth is the “womb” in which all things grow. The suit of Pentacles or Coins carries that weight. It is the suit of patience, of slow growth, of the body that ages and the work that accumulates.

Aleister Crowley, who designed the Thoth Tarot in the 1940s with Lady Frieda Harris, called the suit Disks. He wanted to avoid both Coins and Pentacles. Coins were too commercial. Pentacles were too ceremonial. Disks was neutral. But the Thoth Disks show the same symbols: the Zodiac, the elements, the planetary seals. Crowley’s Four of Disks shows four disks stacked in a power structure, with a ram’s head and a lion’s head at the center. It is Earth organized, Earth controlled. The name changed again, but the element held.

What You Actually Do with Each

Reading a Marseille deck and reading a Waite deck are different disciplines. With Marseille, you rely on numerology and card position. The images are conventional, not narrative. A King of Coins sits on a throne holding a coin. You read him for stability, wealth, slow decision. With a Waite-Smith deck, the images tell stories. The King of Pentacles sits on a throne decorated with bulls and vines, holding a scepter and a pentacle, surrounded by grapes. You read him as a steward of land and wealth, an agricultural lord.

Marseille readers often call Coins “Deniers” from the French tradition. The term comes from a Roman silver coin, the denarius, and carries a whiff of the ancient marketplace. A denarius was a day’s wage. The King of Deniers is not a land steward. He is a successful merchant, a man who knows the price of things.

Readers of the Golden Dawn tradition use Pentacles as magical tools. Some practitioners keep a physical pentacle on their altar, a disk of metal or clay inscribed with symbols, used in ritual to represent the material world. When they draw a Pentacles card, they may read it as relating to that physical object: the body, the altar, the tangible work of magic. A coins reader has no such referent. A coin is just money.

Can You Swap the Names?

Sources disagree on whether Pentacles and Coins are interchangeable. Some argue that Waite’s renaming was an act of occult snobbery, stripping the suit of its honest connection to everyday life. Others argue that the pentacle is what the suit always meant, that the coin was a degenerate medieval copy of an older magical symbol.

The evidence supports the first view. The earliest tarot decks used coins because they were a card game suit, not because they encoded hermetic secrets. Court de Gébelin’s Egyptian theory has been disproven. But traditions are not built on evidence alone. They are built on use.

If you read with a deck that says Pentacles, read Pentacles. If your deck says Coins, read Coins. The difference matters most when you are learning. Experienced readers know that the suit is Earth, and Earth does not care what you call it.

FAQ

Do Pentacles and Coins mean different things in a reading? No, they belong to the same suit and share the same meanings. The difference is in the imagery: Pentacles emphasize the spiritual and ceremonial side of material life, while Coins stay closer to commerce and daily work.

Why do some decks call it Disks instead? Aleister Crowley renamed the suit Disks in the Thoth Tarot to avoid both the commercial and the ceremonial associations. Disks is a neutral term that keeps the elemental focus on Earth.

Is one name older than the other? Coins is older. The Visconti-Sforza decks from the 15th century used Coins. Pentacles was introduced by the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909.

Which deck should I use if I want the original Coins imagery? Look for a Marseille-style deck. The Tarot de Marseille (or reproduction decks like the Grimaud or Camoin-Jodorowsky) use Coins without the pentagram symbolism.

The Suit Remains Earth

The names Pentacles and Coins tell two stories about the same suit. Coins remembers the card table, the marketplace, the day’s wage. Pentacles remembers the circle, the inscribed talisman, the body as a vessel for spirit. Neither story is wrong. The suit itself does not change. It is the ten numbered cards and four court cards that govern money, health, labor, and the physical self. Call them what your deck calls them. The work of reading is the same.

Read about the other suits: Wands, Cups, Swords. Understand how Earth relates to the elements around it, and the suit of Pentacles will show you things a coin could never say.