Ace to Ten: the shape of a number

Forty numbered cards sounds like a lot to learn. Here is the good news: you don't learn forty. You learn four suits, which you've already met, and ten numbers. Put the two together and most of the numbered cards will tell you what they mean before you look them up.

Suit tells you what kind of thing is going on. Number tells you where it is in its life.

Why the numbers matter so much

In the oldest tarot decks the numbered cards had no scenes at all. The Five of Cups was simply five cups arranged on the card, much as a five of hearts is today. Readers of those decks worked almost entirely from suit and number, and many still do.

The deck in these pictures, painted by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, was one of the first to give every numbered card a scene. That's a big help to a beginner, because you can read the picture. But the scenes were designed around the numbers, so knowing the numbers helps you understand why each picture looks the way it does.

A convention, not a law

Before the list, a word of honesty. The meanings of the numbers come from older traditions of number symbolism, mostly going back to Pythagoras, and later occult systems added more. Every tarot author tells the story slightly differently, and some readers keep personal meanings of their own: one author says that in her own readings a Seven means joy, because of what the number meant to her as a child.

So treat what follows as the common thread most writers share. Once you've read for a while, you may find a number means something a little different to you, and that is allowed.

The ten positions

• Ace: the seed. A beginning, a gift, the suit's energy in its purest form. Most writers read an Ace as the best its suit has to offer, not yet shaped by anything.
• Two: the meeting or the choice. Two of something means a relationship, a balance, or a decision between two options.
• Three: the first result. Something has grown. A plan takes shape, a group forms, a feeling is shared.
• Four: standing still. Stability, a foundation, rest. Sometimes too much of it: a Four can be safety that has gone stale.
• Five: the shake-up. The stable four is disturbed. Conflict, loss, struggle, or a challenge that forces change. Fives are often the hardest card in their suit.
• Six: finding balance again. Recovery after the trouble of the Five. Harmony, help given and received, moving on to calmer ground.
• Seven: the test. Something to assess, defend or choose between. Sevens often carry uncertainty: options, doubts, a position to hold.
• Eight: effort and movement. Work, focus, getting somewhere. Sometimes leaving something behind, sometimes feeling stuck while you wait for the next move.
• Nine: almost there. Nearly complete, and feeling it strongly. That can be deep satisfaction, or, in the hard suits, the strain just before the end.
• Ten: the end of the road. The suit carried as far as it will go. Fulfilment, or a load you can't carry further, and either way the turn into something new.

There's a rhythm under the list that many writers point out. Odd numbers tend to move things on, and even numbers tend to settle them. The Four settles, the Five breaks it open, the Six settles again, the Seven unsettles. If you lose your place in the list, that rhythm will often find it for you.

One suit from start to finish

Here is the whole run of Cups, the suit of feelings, from Ace to Ten.

Follow the story across the two rows:

• The Ace of Cups is a hand from a cloud holding a cup that overflows: a feeling starting.
• In the Two, two people pledge to each other: the feeling is shared.
• In the Three, three friends raise their cups together: it becomes a celebration.
• In the Four, a young man sits under a tree, arms folded, ignoring a cup offered from a cloud: contentment has gone flat.
• In the Five, a cloaked figure mourns three spilled cups and hasn't yet noticed the two still standing: loss.
• In the Six, two children share cups full of flowers: sweetness and memory return.
• In the Seven, cups float in the clouds full of visions: too many dreams to choose from.
• In the Eight, a figure walks away from eight stacked cups by moonlight: leaving what no longer feeds you.
• In the Nine, a contented man sits before a row of nine cups: wishes met.
• In the Ten, a family stands under a rainbow of cups: the feeling fulfilled, shared with the people who matter.

You can see each number's job inside the pictures: the Four's standstill, the Five's loss, the Six's recovery, the Seven's choices.

One number across four suits

Now hold the number still and change the suit. These are the four Fives.

Every one of them shows a shake-up, but each in its own suit's territory. In the Five of Wands, five young men spar with staves: conflict that is half competition. The Five of Cups is the mourner from the row above: a loss that is felt. In the Five of Swords, a man gathers up swords while two others walk away beaten: a quarrel someone "won" at a cost. In the Five of Pentacles, two figures struggle through the snow past a lit window: hard times, money or health.

That is the method in miniature. Five means the stable thing is disturbed. Pentacles means the material world. Five of Pentacles: material hardship. You'll be right far more often than not.

Making sentences

Try it with a few cards you haven't studied yet:

• Three of Pentacles: a first result, in work. Something built together starts to show.
• Eight of Swords: effort, in the mind. Thinking hard, and perhaps thinking yourself into a corner.
• Ten of Wands: the end of the road, for drive and ambition. All that energy has become a heavy load.

When you meet the pictures, check yourself. The Three of Pentacles shows a stonemason at work in a church while two others look over the plans. The Eight of Swords shows a bound, blindfolded woman among swords, with a way out she can't see. The Ten of Wands shows a man bent over under a bundle of ten staves. The suit and the number got you most of the way there.

Some readers also connect each number to the Majors that share it. The Sixes are linked with VI The Lovers, for example, and the Eights with VIII Strength. That is a later refinement. For now, suit plus number is enough.

What to take from this

• Suit says what kind of thing; number says how far along. That one sentence reads most of the forty numbered cards.
• The ten positions run from seed to completion. Ace begins, Four settles, Five disturbs, Six recovers, Ten finishes.
• The meanings are a shared convention. Learn the common thread, then let your own sense of the numbers grow.

Next, the court cards: sixteen people, and the question every reader faces when one turns up — is this someone else, or is it you?