Six of Coins

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.

Upright the Six of Coins is read as generosity and the flow of giving and receiving, aid offered or accepted in fair measure; reversed, as generosity with strings attached, or an imbalance in which one party holds power over the other through what is given or withheld.

This is one of the few pip cards where Waite's own reversed meaning maps closely onto later practice rather than diverging from it: he gives jealousy, envy and inequitable arrangements for the reversed card, close to the debt and imbalance most readers still name today. The continuity is unusual because the deck's guiding image, the merchant's balance, straightforwardly supports both readings without needing later reinterpretation the way several other cards in this run do.

The older cartomantic tradition, working from a bare six of coins with no picture attached, gave a plainer meaning of a present or gift received, without the moral weighing the Rider-Waite-Smith scene introduces; the ethical question of who holds power in an exchange of aid is very much a product of Smith's specific composition rather than of the number six or the earth suit generally.

In practice, readers who slow down on this card usually ask not whether help is being given but on what terms, since the picture insists the balance is being watched by someone even as it is being used.