Queen of Pentacles

The suit of coins comes from the Italian suit system of cups, coins, swords and batons. Playing cards probably reached Europe from the Mamluk world of Egypt, and the Mamluk pack also had a suit of coins. That pack had only three court cards per suit, none of them a queen, so the Queen is a European addition.

Italian and Spanish packs did not keep queens as a rule: before 1390 they replaced the older court with a Knight and a Fante or Sota (a knave or jack). Tarot decks of the fifteenth century were different. The Visconti-Sforza decks painted in northern Italy often include a queen among their court cards, though the surviving sets are incomplete and some had extra court figures, such as the Cary-Yale pack with six ranks. A surviving Queen of coins (denari) is not listed in the main Visconti-Sforza sets described in the sources used here, so nothing can be said about how that deck showed her.

A named Queen of coins first appears in the Sola Busca deck, an engraved Italian deck from about 1490 to 1491. There the Queen of coins carries the name Elena, linked by scholars to Helen of Troy. The numbered cards of that deck show scenes, while earlier packs mostly show plain pips.

Pamela Colman Smith drew the Rider-Waite-Smith deck for A. E. Waite, and William Rider & Son published it in December 1909. Its minor cards carry small scenes, a departure from earlier decks, where numbered cards were usually plain pips. Black-and-white photographs of the Sola Busca deck reached the British Museum in 1907, and Smith probably saw them there. Scholars see the Sola Busca scenes as a likely influence on her minor cards, though nobody has recorded her own view.

Waite and Smith call the suit Pentacles, not coins. Waite himself says he did not invent the change and that many old packs used the suit for coin and money. He describes the Queen of Pentacles as a dark-faced woman who studies her symbol, in his words a figure of greatness of soul and serious intelligence.