← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 106/121
Numbered cards (pips)
The pips are the forty numbered cards of the Minor Arcana: Ace to Ten in each of the four suits. Two things shape each one's meaning. The suit gives the setting — will in Wands, feeling in Cups, thought in Swords, material life in Pentacles — and the number gives the stage a matter has reached. Knowing the numbers is one of the quickest ways to read a card you do not yet know well.
The numbers, Ace to Ten
These are broad themes, not fixed rules, and each suit colours them in its own way:
- Ace — the root and seed: the suit's element in pure form, a beginning or an offer.
- Two — meeting and balance: partnership, a choice between two things, holding opposites.
- Three — first growth: something takes shape, is shared or bears early fruit.
- Four — stability: a foundation, rest, structure — or a holding still that can turn into stagnation.
- Five — disruption: conflict, loss or strain that unsettles the Four's stability.
- Six — recovery and harmony: give and take, moving on, a balance found again.
- Seven — testing: assessment, challenge, choices, standing one's ground.
- Eight — movement and effort: work, momentum, or the feeling of being caught.
- Nine — near completion: the suit's experience at its fullest, for good or ill.
- Ten — completion: the end of a cycle, with its rewards and its burdens, before a new Ace.
So the Fives share a theme of upset, met as competition in the Five of Wands, grief in the Five of Cups, a hollow victory in the Five of Swords and hardship in the Five of Pentacles.
Illustrated and unillustrated pips
In Marseille-pattern decks the pips show only their suit symbols, so readers work from number and suit together. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck of 1909 gave each one a scene by Pamela Colman Smith, and many modern meanings come from those pictures as much as from the numbers.
The Golden Dawn's pips
The Golden Dawn placed the Aces at Kether, the crown of the Tree of Life, as the roots of their elements, and the Twos to Tens on the next nine sephiroth, from Chokmah (Two) to Malkuth (Ten). It also gave each of the thirty-six pips from Two to Ten a decan — a ten-degree third of a zodiac sign, ruled by a planet in the Chaldean order, beginning with Mars in the first decan of Aries for the Two of Wands. These are the Golden Dawn's attributions, which most English-language decks follow.
In a reading
When several cards of the same number appear, the tradition gave them a meaning together — Waite lists one for three or four of a kind, and the Golden Dawn's own list differs. More simply, a cluster of low numbers tends to suggest a situation still beginning, and a cluster of Nines and Tens one that is coming to a head.