King of Pentacles

The King of Pentacles is the richest man in the deck. He sits on a throne carved with bulls, wearing a robe covered in grapes and vines, a coin on his knee, a castle behind him and a garden overflowing at his feet. He's the successful businessman, the landlord, the patron, the one who made it and means to keep it.

Shelley's radical young poem asks a question that sounds as if it was written for this card: "Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?" (Queen Mab III.118). His answer was political. Kings and their courtiers live off the work of the people who build their palaces. Franky's is biological. Look at the rusts.

The rust fungi are the largest group of plant-disease fungi in the world, with something like seven or eight thousand known species. In nature they live only on living plants; a few have been coaxed onto a lab dish, and they sulk there. Out in the world they need the real thing, a green leaf making food in the sun. Many of them have the most complicated life cycles of any fungi, with up to five kinds of spore, and many move between two unrelated host plants, as the Two and Five showed. Where a leaf banks sugar, a rust can move in and make the leaf pay out in orange.

This is the oldest empire in agriculture. The Romans had a god of rust, Robigus, and every April they held a festival, the Robigalia, to beg him to spare the wheat. The wheat belts of the twentieth century fought the rusts with barberry eradication and plant breeding. Coffee growers are still fighting. Nobody has won.

So when the King shows up, he's the fortune that's been built and the system that keeps it running. The opportunity is real mastery of the material world: knowing how money moves, and being the one who sets the terms. The risk is to forget what the rust never forgets. The King eats at somebody else's table. Every empire is a leaf somebody else is lighting. Ask who's doing the photosynthesis in your life, and what they'd say about your crown.