Minor Arcana

Two of Pentacles from the Tarot de Marseille

The Minor Arcana, sometimes called the Lesser Arcana, are the suit cards in a Tarot deck. Minor Arcana cards first appeared in tarot card games, with pip cards numbered one (ace) to ten, along with court cards (or face cards) in each of four suits. In contemporary tarot decks the Minor Arcana are often illustrated—a convention popularized by the Rider–Waite Tarot deck in 1910. Used in a tarot card reading in conjunction with the Major Arcana, the cards of the Minor Arcana suggest subtleties and details and signify day-to-day insights.

Tarot variations derived from Italian decks and Spanish decks typically have a Minor Arcana of 56 cards, with 14 cards in each suit: Wands (alternately batons, clubs, staffs, or staves), Cups (chalices, goblets, or vessels), Swords (or blades), and Pentacles (coins, disks, or rings).

The four court cards are commonly page, knight, queen, and king. Some variations have princess and prince cards replacing the page and knight cards; the historic Visconti-Sforza tarot deck expands the court with two additional cards: the damsel and the mounted lady. While the historic Tarot of Marseilles contains 56 cards, later decks based on the French suits of clubs (♣), hearts (♥), spades (♠), and diamonds (♦) have only three face cards per suit, with a jack (or knave) in addition to the queen and king.

Correspondence

In divination, the Minor Arcana are believed to represent relatively mundane features of life. The court cards represent the people whom one meets.

Each suit also has distinctive characteristics and connotations commonly held to be as follows:

Latin suit	French suit	Element	Class	Faculty
Wands	Clubs	Fire	Artisans	Creativity and will
Pentacles	Diamonds	Earth	Merchants	Material body or possessions
Cups	Hearts	Water	Clergy	Emotions and love
Swords	Spades	Air	Nobility and military	Reason

Planetary associations

In the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, number cards are associated with planets, corresponding to their placement in Kabbalah.

• Threes - Saturn
• Fours - Jupiter
• Fives - Mars
• Sixes - Sun
• Sevens - Venus
• Eights - Mercury
• Nines - Moon
• Tens - Earth