How the tarot deck works

The shape of the deck

A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards. Its structure gives you a useful starting point. It does not replace looking closely at the card.

Major and Minor Arcana

Major Arcana

The Fool through The World cover major turning points and familiar human experiences: beginning, choosing, creating, losing, enduring, awakening, and completing. A Major is not automatically more important than another card, but it often gives its position a broader significance.

Minor Arcana

Four suits cover ordinary life. Each suit contains an Ace through Ten and four court cards. The Minors deal with conversations, work, money, desire, fatigue, conflict, care, and daily decisions.

The four suits

Tarot readers often use shadow for the less constructive expression of a card or suit: where its qualities become blocked, excessive, avoided, or used against yourself or other people. Shadow does not mean evil, and it is not the same as a reversed card.

Wands — Fire

Drive, appetite, creativity, enterprise, courage, and the use of energy.

In shadow: Burnout, haste, domination, scattered effort, or inspiration without follow-through.

Cups — Water

Feeling, relationship, receptivity, imagination, intimacy, and emotional memory.

In shadow: Projection, avoidance, emotional flooding, fantasy, or care without boundaries.

Swords — Air

Thought, language, truth, judgement, planning, conflict, and necessary distinction.

In shadow: Rumination, cruelty, abstraction, self-division, or winning an argument at too high a cost.

Pentacles — Earth

Body, work, resources, home, craft, health, money, and what can be sustained.

In shadow: Stagnation, scarcity thinking, overwork, possession, or valuing only what can be measured.

Numbers from Ace to Ten

• Ace: Seed, opening, concentration of the suit before it has taken form.
• Two: Polarity, encounter, choice, balance, or the first division of the Ace.
• Three: Development, expression, collaboration, and a pattern becoming visible.
• Four: Structure, stability, enclosure, rest, or the point where security can harden.
• Five: Disruption, friction, loss, testing, and the instability that forces movement.
• Six: Adjustment, exchange, passage, repair, and a new balance after the Five.
• Seven: Assessment, strategy, faith, resistance, and deciding what deserves continued effort.
• Eight: Movement, power, repetition, skill, limitation, and consequences gathering pace.
• Nine: Ripening, independence, intensity, and the last test before completion.
• Ten: Culmination, inheritance, overflow, burden, and the end that carries the next beginning.