One number, four suits

The Aces in tarot

Four openings. An Ace is not a first step, it is the thing being offered before anybody has stepped anywhere.

An Ace is the pure form of its element, handed over. Waite's images all show the same thing: a hand out of a cloud, holding a single object. The Ace of Wands is a branching staff still in leaf, the Ace of Cups a chalice overflowing with five streams, the Ace of Swords a blade crowned and upright, the Ace of Pentacles a coin held over a walled garden. Nothing has happened yet in any of them. Something is available.

That is the distinction worth holding on to. The Two is the first move; the Ace is the offer. Read as a first step, an Ace makes a reading sound further along than it is, and readers who do that end up describing progress that has not started.

Aces sit outside the zodiac scheme for the same reason. Every other numbered card belongs to a decan, a ten-degree slice of the year. An Ace is the element itself, so it belongs to no particular part of it.

In a spread, more than one Ace means several things opening at once, which feels like momentum and is actually a lot of unfinished beginnings.

The four Aces

The same idea in four elements. Reading them side by side is the fastest way to see what the number is doing and what the suit is doing.

The rest of the sequence

Ace through Ten, then the four court ranks. Reading down this list is reading the minor arcana as one story.

Number crossed with element

This is the whole trick to the minor arcana. Forty numbered cards look like forty things to memorise and are really ten numbers crossed with four suits. Learn what a Five does and what Cups are, and the Five of Cups is constructible before you have ever read its page.

WandsCupsSwordsPentacles

The lesson on the numbers, Ace through Ten teaches the sequence properly, and the one on the court cards covers the sixteen that need their own study.