Fifty-six cards across four suits

The Minor Arcana

The fifty-six suit cards: ordinary life at its actual scale. The majors describe the weather, and these describe the week you are having in it.

About the minor arcana

The Minor Arcana is the larger and quieter part of the deck: fifty-six cards divided into four suits of fourteen. Each suit runs Ace through Ten, then four court cards, Page, Knight, Queen and King.

If the majors are the deck's argument about fate, the minors are its account of daily life. They cover the things that fill an ordinary week: what you want, how you feel, what you are thinking, and what it costs. Beginners tend to skip them because there are so many and they look repetitive next to The Tower. That is backwards. Most of the useful reading you will ever do happens in the minors.

The structure is what makes fifty-six cards learnable. Every minor is one number crossed with one element. Learn ten numbers and four suits and you can construct a workable reading for any of the forty pip cards before you have memorised a single one.

All 56 cards

Every card links to its full meaning: upright, reversed, love, career, money, spirituality, health, symbolism and history.

The structure: number crossed with element

The suits carry the domain and the elements: Wands are fire and drive, Cups are water and feeling, Swords are air and thought, Pentacles are earth and material life.

The numbers carry the stage. Broadly: Aces are an opening, Twos a pairing or a choice, Threes a first result, Fours a stabilising or a stall, Fives a conflict or a loss, Sixes a recovery, Sevens a test held alone, Eights a movement or a grind, Nines a near-completion with its cost showing, and Tens the end of the line for that suit, for better or worse.

The card is the intersection. Five is loss; Cups is feeling; the Five of Cups is grief. Five is loss; Pentacles is material; the Five of Pentacles is hardship. It is the same number wearing a different element, and once you see it that way the forty pips stop being forty separate things to remember.

Why they are easy to under-read

Two habits get in the way.

Treating them as filler between the majors. A spread of minors is not a weak spread. It is a situation you have leverage over, which is usually better news than a spread full of trumps.

Reading each one cold. The most information in a minor sits in its relationships: the same number in another suit, the card either side of it in its own suit. Those comparisons are on every card page here for that reason.

The same cards, read across the suits

All four Fives together, all four Queens together. This is the cut that makes forty numbered cards learnable.

The rest of the deck

Learning this properly

Reading every card page in one sitting is the slowest way to learn the deck. The course covers the structure first, which is what turns 78 things to memorise into four suits, ten numbers and twenty-two archetypes.

How the deck is structuredAll 78 card meanings

About the minor arcana

Straight answers, without the mystique.

  • Fifty-six: four suits of fourteen. Each suit has ten numbered cards, Ace to Ten, plus four court cards.

  • Wands are fire: drive, ambition and creativity. Cups are water: emotion and relationship. Swords are air: thought, truth and conflict. Pentacles are earth: work, money and the body.

  • No. Each numbered minor is one number crossed with one suit, so ten number meanings and four suit meanings will get you a workable reading of any of the forty pips. The sixteen court cards are the part that genuinely needs its own study.