For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The card of the King of Pentacles portrays a swarthy man with dark brown hair and beard, solidly built, and obviously contented with his powerful worldly position. He is seated on a golden throne whose arms are engraved with the heads of goats. Behind him rises a fortified castle, built of stone and draped with vines. In front of the castle his menials and attendants stand ready to serve him. In his hands he holds one golden pentacle, while beneath his feet lies a heap of golden coins — tiny pentacles, his accumulation of worldly wealth. He is richly but tastefully robed in gold brocade, and wears a golden crown. On the grass beside him, a brown goat grazes.

Minor Arcana ~ The King of Pentacles

Here, in the card of the King of Pentacles, we meet the active, dynamic dimension of the element of earth. This is embodied by the mythic King Midas, a pleasure-loving king of Macedonia. In his infancy, a procession of ants was observed carrying grains of wheat up the side of his cradle and placing them between his lips as he slept - a prodigy which the soothsayers read as an omen of the great wealth that would accrue to him.

Midas ruled as a wise and pious king, and his kindness to the drunken satyr Silenos, tutor of the god Dionysos, earned him the gratitude ofthe unpredictable god. Dionysos offered to grant Midas one wish, to which Midas replied without hesitation: ‘Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.’ The king soon regretted this indiscretion, for not only stones, flowers, and the furnishings of his house turned to gold, but when he sat down to table, so did the food he ate and the water he drank. Midas soon begged to be released from his wish, because he was rapidly dying of hunger and thirst. Dionysos, highly entertained but compassionate, told him to visit the source of the River Pactolus, where Midas washed himself and was at once freed from the golden touch, but the sands of the River Pactolus are bright with gold to this day.

Midas, the King of Pentacles, is an image of human ambition. He is our aspiration to status and worldly achievement, our desire for power and recognition in the eyes of others, our need for material security and our pride in having worked to earn what we have. This ambition is also a dynamic spirit, for it is not content with comfort, but must have challenges. In the myth, Midas earns the reward of the god Dionysos through an act of kindness, sympathy for the drunken old satyr whom everyone else despises and ridicules. This hints at an important truth about worldly success: It depends not only upon hard work and cleverness, but also upon recognizing and understanding those aspects of human behaviour which are lazy, indolent, drunken and bestial.

Only by tolerating and containing these things, portrayed by the old satyr, can the foundations of worldly power and authority be secure, for otherwise the individual can be corrupted simply because he is unconscious of his own potential for corruption. The King of Pentacles has reached the top because he has the right qualities of leadership, authority, realism and discipline to overcome the obstacles in his path. But as the myth suggests, he must also leam a hard lesson about his own greed. Midas already has enough and more; he is a rich and powerful king, and does not exactly go about in threadbare clothes. He is entitled to be ambitious, but his ambition cannot be put before everything, or he will die of hunger and thirst. Having learned his lesson, the king is content to bask in his rewards. He is an unashamed materialist, and when we encounter this figure in ourselves we encounter our own materialism, even if previously we had believed ourselves to be idealists with contempt for such crassness. This king is healthy and strong. Although, as with every card in the Tarot, one cannot remain stuck in a single facet of life, the encounter with material ambition and its challenges and rewards can be a productive and healing one - even if it means one must, in some form, experience Midas’ hard lesson.

When the King of Pentacles appears in a spread, it is time for the individual to take up the challenge of worldly things. But inner movements often need a catalyst, and therefore the King of Pentacles may enter one’s life as an earthy, strong, successful individual - one who has the ‘Midas touch’, who has the gift of manifesting creative ideas in the world. But such an individual is a catalyst for one’s own developing material self-confidence.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]