Ace of Pentacles

The suit of this card is older than tarot. European card players took up a system of four suits (coins, cups, swords and clubs) from cards that reached Italy and Spain from the Islamic world in the 1370s, and the Italian name for the coins suit is denari. The Topkapı pack, a surviving Mamluk set, has a suit of coins alongside polo-sticks, swords and cups. The first Italian record of playing cards is a Florentine ban of 1377.

When trump cards were added to northern Italian packs from about 1440, the four suits stayed. In the surviving Visconti-Sforza decks the coins suit is drawn as circular emblems. In the Cary-Yale deck the denari show the front and back of a gold florin minted for Filippo Maria Visconti in 1442, which is one reason some scholars date that deck to the 1440s. Other early packs, such as the Pierpont Morgan Bergamo deck of about 1451, decorate their numbered cards with flower and vine patterns.

The sources used here do not describe the ace of coins in these early decks in any detail. In the later Tarot de Marseille pattern, whose earliest known cards date from 1639, coins are drawn as separate objects. In Italian packs the suit was never called pentacles: that name came later, in occult tarot.

William Rider & Son published the Waite deck in December 1909, with Pamela Colman Smith as the artist. Earlier decks mostly gave numbered cards simple designs, while Smith drew a scene for every card of the minor suits. For several cards she is thought to have drawn on the Sola Busca tarot, an Italian deck of about 1491 that is illustrated throughout. Photographs of it were shown at the British Museum, and Smith probably saw them there.

In Waite’s own description the ace is a hand coming out of a cloud and holding up a pentacle, the same pattern he gives for the other aces. Waite wrote his descriptions after the pictures were drawn, and a modern writer, Robert M. Place, argues that he sometimes misread them. The suit’s name also changed: where Italian packs have coins, Waite’s deck calls them pentacles.