The 56 Minor Arcana: the everyday life of tarot

Everyone starts with the Majors. They have the big names, the big images, the big fears. Then you open the rest of the deck, you land on fifty-six cards, fourteen to a suit, and discouragement sets in fast: how do you ever remember all of that? The honest answer: you don’t. You learn to read it, and that’s a very different thing.

The 56 Minor Arcana are the part of tarot that looks most like an ordinary deck of playing cards, and for good reason: fifteenth-century tarot took shape when its trumps were added to a suited deck that already existed. Four suits, cards numbered from ace to ten, court figures. Where the 22 Majors set the weather of a reading, its chapter, the Minors give you the lay of the land: the everyday, the small adjustments, the texture of the days. The complete guide to tarot lays out the whole structure; here, we learn the language of the Minors, and above all the method that spares you the memorizing.

What do the four tarot suits mean?

Each suit carries a way of being in the world, and tradition tied them to the four elements very early on.

The wands are fire: momentum, the urge to act, work that runs hot, the creation that itches to come out. When wands dominate a reading, it speaks of projects, of energy, of wanting, sometimes of impatience: something wants to burn, and the only question is what to feed.

The cups are water: connection, feeling, what flows between people and what spills over. A table full of cups speaks of love, of friendship, of nostalgia, of what the heart holds onto or lets go.

The swords are air: thought, speech, decision, and so conflict too, because ideas and words are how we wound each other most precisely. The swords name what plays out in the head: the clarity still to be won, the rumination to set down.

The pentacles are earth: the tangible, the body, money, the long view, what gets built stone by stone. The pentacles always bring you back to the plainest question of all: what actually exists, right here, in the substance of your life?

Four suits, and already a compass. Before you know a single card, just knowing that a question about love is lit by the cups and that a work knot plays out between wands and pentacles puts a quarter of the reading in your hands.

The ladder of numbers, from ace to ten

The other half of the compass is the numbers. From ace to ten, each suit traces the same curve, one that every school shades a little differently but that all of them recognize in its broad strokes.

The ace is the suit in its pure state: the raw gift, the seed. The two meets: the other appears, balance starts looking for itself. The three bears its first fruit: what was only intention takes form. The four stabilizes, sometimes to the point of standstill. The five brings the crisis: the middle of the road, the discomfort that forces you to move. The six restores the exchange, the grace of a middle regained. The seven weighs and chooses: the clear-eyed effort. The eight reorganizes, brings craft and structure. The nine nears fullness, with all the too-much that fullness can sometimes carry. The ten completes, and every completion tips over: the end of one cycle already holds the ace of the next.

Ten steps, four staircases: there are your forty numbered cards. Not forty separate meanings to learn, but a single curve played out in four kinds of matter.

You can see it for yourself by setting the four fives side by side. Five of Wands: the crisis of momentum, the rivalry, energy scattering into skirmishes. Five of Cups: the crisis of connection, the grief, the gaze drawn toward what has fallen. Five of Swords: the crisis of thought, the bitter win, the word too many. Five of Pentacles: the crisis of the tangible, the cold of being shut out in the snow, the season of going without. Four cards, one number, and already the whole logic of the system laid out in front of you.

What do the court cards mean?

That leaves the sixteen figures: page, knight, queen and king of each suit (page, knight, queen and king in the Rider-Waite-Smith). The simplest way in is to read them as degrees of maturity in the suit’s energy. The page is still learning: discovering the element, handling it with curiosity and a little clumsiness, often carrying a message or a beginning. The knight rides off on a quest: the energy in motion, sometimes too fast. The queen inhabits the element from within: an intimate mastery, a quiet magnetism. The king governs it outward: the responsibility, the decision that commits others.

In Tarot for Your Self (1984), Mary K. Greer offers a reading that changed how a lot of people practice: the figures aren’t only people in your circle, they’re roles you yourself play. A Queen of Cups in your spread might point to a watery person who matters to you, but just as often, and often more truly, to the part of you that welcomes and feels. So the question to ask in front of a court card is this: is this someone, or is it me in that costume?

How do you read tarot cards for beginners?

And here is the key that spares you the memorizing. A Minor card is a number crossed with a suit. Nothing more, and that is everything.

Take the Five of Cups: five, the crisis, the uncomfortable middle; cups, connection, feeling. Cross them, and you get a crisis of connection: a grief, a disappointment, something of the heart asking to be looked at. You memorized nothing; you reasoned it out. Now open a Rider-Waite-Smith deck: the scene shows a figure in mourning, cloaked in black, before three spilled cups, with two cups still standing behind that they haven’t turned to see. The picture confirms the reasoning and adds its own twist: in the loss, something is still standing, if only you turn around.

Another example, the Three of Wands: three, the first fruit; wands, momentum, the project. A project that gets past the talking stage, a creation that finds its footing in the real world. Waite has it drawn as a figure seen from behind, standing on a rise, watching their ships head for open water: the momentum has left the harbor, it’s under sail.

This is the habit I’d suggest you build: in front of every Minor, name the suit, name the number, and put it into a sentence in your own words. The Marseille, which doesn’t illustrate its Minors with scenes, forces you into exactly that exercise, and that is its gift; the Rider-Waite-Smith hands you the picture as well, and that is its own. Greer, for that matter, suggests starting from your own associations before you open any book: the card you’ve reasoned through and felt is yours in a way the one you’ve merely recited never will be.

Majors and Minors work together

One last word, to put the 56 back in their rightful place, which is neither above nor below the Majors: alongside them. In a spread, the Major Arcana give the chapter, the Minors give the scene. Death surrounded by pentacles speaks of a concrete, material shedding of skin: a move, the end of a contract, a rhythm of life that changes. The same card surrounded by cups moves that shedding toward the heart. Without the Minors, the Majors hover; without the Majors, the Minors scatter.

Start small: pull three Minors, just the three, and tell the scene. The suit gives you the matter, the number gives you the moment on the curve, and you are the one who finds the words. That’s how the everyday life of tarot becomes readable: not by learning fifty-six definitions, but by learning to braid two threads together.