Editor’s Note: Regular participants in this page are familiar with the contributions of Sarah Taylor. For years I’ve been wanting to run a feature on tarot, and when I found out that in addition to being an excellent writer, Sarah is a professional card reader, I asked her to step up — and she did. This is her second article, which looks at organizing the symbols. Future editions will cover how to work with cards on your own, how to choose a deck and specific cards. We will take direction from readers who comment, so please let us know what you think. You can visit Sarah’s website at this link. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Now that we have been introduced to tarot by way of its use of symbols, we are going to look at how we organise those symbols to form a coherent picture — namely, a tarot reading. But first, let’s recap and expand on what we already know so that we have a solid foundation of understanding.
Not all decks follow these rules, but for our purposes we are working with a standard deck of 78 cards comprising 56 minor arcana and 22 major arcana: two distinct decks within a larger deck.
The minor arcana resemble playing cards and are divided into four suits, each with a particular quality:
Cups (hearts) — emotions
Coins (pentacles, diamonds) — tangible objects, possessions
Swords (spades) — thoughts, mental processes
Wands (rods, clubs) — creativity, spirit, enterprise
There is also an extra court card, often a Knight, in addition to the King, Queen and Page/Jack. (Both suits and court cards differ between decks. For example, in my Thoth tarot deck (also called the Crowley deck) the King and Page are replaced by Knight and Princess, respectively; and in the Xultun tarot deck, coins are jades.) Collectively, the minor arcana represent the people, places and things in a tarot reading. They tend to represent mundane situations, events and encounters.
The major arcana, on the other hand, are the repository of archetypal content: the themes underlying the life of the querent (the person to whom the reading is being given) and the qualities that he or she embodies, both consciously and unconsciously. The minor arcana are to the major arcana what day-to-day life is to the soul: they demonstrate how the inner world is manifested in the outer, physical world.