Minor Arcana

The Minor Arcana, if not as complex in their symbolism as the Major Arcana, have their own importance in the uses of Tarot. Where Major Arcana showed us archetypical images and situations, Minors show us other face, closer to us, more mundane. This is seen more clearly in the decks where instead of the traditional arrangement of cups, wands, discs or swords, we have more elaborated designs that stimulate interpretation. Decks where we can find this are the Rider Waite (and all it's versions), the Gendron Deck, the Cosmic Deck or the Vertigo Deck, among others.

Separation into different suits is believed to have originated in an attempt to show all four social classes present at the time of the card's origin: wands for the peasants, cups for clergy, swords for noblemen and coins or discs for burguesy. Traditionally each of them is assigned an element, and the qualities or areas of the material world that are associated with it:

Wands:	Fire	Action
Cups	Water	Emotions
Swords	Air	Intelect
Discs, or Pentacles	Earth	Material Aspects

In the Minor Arcana we can quickly separate two groups: number cards and court or figure cards. When dealing with the numbered cards, a quick way of remembering their divinatory uses is to consider each number depicting a particular situation, and each card as a way the suit would have of dealing with it, or how it would be affected by it, according to it's particular character. For instance, fives are cards of conflicts, becoming evident if we see the different versions of it on the suits: wands tells of a light conflict, cups of forego, swords of defeats and discs of poverty.

Court cards show us, instead, personality types, and traditional interpretations associate pages to children, knights to young men, queen to women and kings to men, though there are many decks (becoming more as we talk) that instead of pages have princesses, giving a better gender balance. Suits also gives us, again traditionally, physical information: for instance, wands would show fair hair and eyes. Another classification assigns each suit with the Solar Sign corresponding to it's element, for instance, Aquarious, Libra and Gemini would belong to the court cards of the suit of Swords. Personally, I try to avoid getting too rigid with this classifications, as I consider personality and behaviour the key, not outter facts like hair, eyes and skin colour, or date of birth. As a mnemotechnic rule, we could keep in mind that each figure is associated with an element: pages to Air, knights to Fire, queens to Water and kings to Earth, and crossing them with the primary elements we could get a general idea of the type of behaviour obtained. For instance, a Knight of Wands (fire as a knight, fire as wands) would have quite a precipitated and impulsive behaviour, which coincides with traditional meanings.

This is of course a very wide generalization, because every author gives punctual different meanings to each card. For a more detailed study, I suggest you go through the bibliography, where you will find a wide list of possible options.

Index