← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 104/121
Minor Arcana
The Minor Arcana are the fifty-six cards of the tarot that are divided into suits, much like an ordinary pack of playing cards. Where the Major Arcana speak of the great themes of a life, the Minors describe its texture: the people, moods, efforts, choices and events of ordinary days. Waite called them the Lesser Arcana.
Four suits
There are four suits of fourteen cards, each tied to an element and an area of life:
- Wands — Fire: will, ambition, creativity and enterprise.
- Cups — Water: feeling, love, friendship and imagination.
- Swords — Air: thought, speech, conflict and decisions.
- Pentacles — Earth: work, money, the body and the home.
They correspond to the clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds of a playing-card pack, and in French packs they are Bâtons, Coupes, Épées and Deniers.
Pips and courts
Each suit has ten numbered cards, the pips, from the Ace to the Ten, and four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen and King. The number of a pip gives one layer of its meaning and the suit another — so the Fives tend to share a theme of strain or upset, which the Five of Cups feels as loss and the Five of Wands as competition. The courts are most often read as people or as attitudes the querent can take up.
The pictures
In older decks, such as the Tarot de Marseille, the numbered cards show only their suit symbols in a pattern — five cups, eight swords — and the reader works from number and suit alone. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck of 1909 was among the first to give every pip a full scene, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, and much of the modern sense of what each Minor card means comes from those pictures. A few earlier decks had illustrated pips, notably the Italian Sola Busca of the fifteenth century, which Smith appears to have known.
Correspondences
In the Golden Dawn system the Aces are the roots of their elements, the Twos to Tens are given to the thirty-six decans of the zodiac — ten degrees each, with a planet ruling each one — and the courts are given elemental pairings such as Fire of Water. Most English-language decks follow this scheme. See the Golden Dawn attributions.
In a reading
Minor cards usually fill in the detail of a spread: what is happening, who is involved, and what can be done. A spread made mostly of Minors tends to describe a situation that is within the querent's reach to shape. When one suit dominates, the reading leans towards that suit's area of life; see each suit's entry for how the tradition read a majority.