The Six of Coins is the second of the three Taurus decans in the earth suit's zodiacal sequence, falling under the Moon and carrying the Golden Dawn title Material Success, flanked by the Five under Saturn and the Seven under Saturn again at Taurus's third decan.
Pamela Colman Smith's scene, a merchant weighing coins on a balance while he hands alms to two kneeling figures, is a considerably more moralized image than the Marseille card, which shows six coins in an unpeopled lattice, read by number alone in the older cartomantic manuals. The balance the merchant holds is doing real work in the composition: it is the same instrument used to weigh Justice's scales elsewhere in the deck, and the pairing invites a reading of charity as an act of measurement as much as generosity, giving exactly enough and no more.
Waite's own text is candid that the card can be read from either side of the transaction, as the giver or as one of the kneeling recipients, and that the balance itself is morally neutral: it can represent fair dealing or an exchange that only looks even. The Thoth deck keeps the title Success and, per Harris's usual method for the small cards, replaces the merchant with a purely geometric arrangement of six coins and a balance motif worked into the card's colour scale rather than into any figure.