The ‘language’ of Tarot
The Minor Arcana deals with the day-to-day aspects of our lives. While a Major Arcana card may speak to a long-term theme or pivotal point in your life, a Minor Arcana card is more likely to speak to you about what you are going through in the short term.
The Minor Arcana is split into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. Each suit contains ten chronologically numbered cards and four court cards. Each suit has a specific thematic journey, and the numbers of the cards are associated with specific meanings. Even if you don’t know what a card is intended to mean, you can figure it out by combining the themes of the suit, the number or court position, and what is happening in the illustration.
Suit of Wands
The suit of Wands (drawn here as sticks, pencils, arrows, paint brushes, etc.) is associated with fire and deals with passion, desire, activism, and ideas. If this suit were personified, it would be the muse: full of potential, inspiring ideas, and moments of creative epiphany. This is the suit of the spirit, primal energy, and the essential self. The Wands tell us about our personalities, our driving forces, and what is best for us.
Suit of Cups
The suit of Cups is associated with water, relationships, and connection. Cups are romantic and vibrant. They deal with the full range of emotion—the good and the bad, the intentional and the chaotic. Cups focus on intuition over logic: they suggest that you are, or that you should be, making decisions with your heart over your head.
Suit of Swords
The suit of Swords is associated with air and the mind. This suit is driven by thought, and deals with decision-making, intellectual pursuits, planning, and analyzing. The individual swords on these cards can be seen as glyphs for thoughts: powerful tools when wielded properly, but too many thoughts can overwhelm or drive you to conflict. So, pay attention to the position of the swords on the card—this reveals how thoughts are interacting and affecting the character.
Suit of Pentacles
The suit of Pentacles (drawn here as coins) is associated with earth, and covers the material aspects of life: career, money, and possessions. This suit talks about our bodies, and all the joy and hard work that comes with physicality. I think of Pentacles as depicting the results of the other suits. In other words, emotion (Cups), thought (Swords), and spirit (Wands) bring about the physical manifestations of reality that we see in the Pentacles. Of course, this suit isn’t just about consequences, as everything is part of a connected cycle; the material aspects of life affect our mental, creative, and emotional lives, too.
Numbered Cards
Numbered cards are cards one through ten in the four suits of the Minor Arcana. Each number has a numerological meaning. So, the meaning of the card as a whole results from the intersection of the suit’s themes and the numerological significance of the individual card.
1 – (Aces) Beginnings, potential, opportunity. The core energy of the suit.
2 – Duality and dichotomy. Twos show how things come together, urging us to find balance.
3 – Threes are about interaction, communication with others, and community.
4 – Fours indicate (or suggest) a period of rest, structure, and stability.
5 – Fives are about adversity, change, and conflict. These cards are obstacles.
6 – Sixes are about growth: sometimes painful and sometimes joyful.
7 – Sevens are about reflecting on your situation. They often involve conflict.
8 – Eights are about getting where you need to go, and taking a realistic look at your trajectory.
9 – Nines are about fruition. You are maturing, though the result may or may not be what you want.
10 – Tens are the completion of a cycle: the outcome, rewards, and consequences.
Court Cards
Court cards depict individuals, each embodying the energy of their suit from a slightly different aspect or at a different stage of development. Many readers see court cards as signifiers either for the subject or for other people in the subject’s life, like characters in the story of the reading.
Pages: Pages represent youth, students, and the beginnings of things. Pages are at the start of their journey through the suit, and they are very enthusiastic about it. Though they are not masters of what their suit has to teach them, they are committed to figuring it out.
Knights: Knights are about action! More worldly than Pages, Knights still don’t have a lifetime of experience, and tend to be a bit extreme or impulsive.
Queens: Queens represent the internal ideals of their suit. In the highly gendered language of tarot, the feminine is introspective, gentle, and caring. Queens have all the life experience of the suit, and use it to better themselves.
Kings: Kings represent the external ideals of their suit. Kings are stable, solid people who draw upon the various aspects of their suit to build things, lead, and improve upon the world around them. Kings and Queens are equally mature and self-actualized; Kings simply choose to manifest this energy outwardly, rather than inwardly.
On Gender and Tarot
Tarot tradition is saturated in gender. It’s inescapable. As someone who strives to create art that people of all genders can connect with, I found the prominence of binary gender within tarot difficult to reckon with.
Traditional tarot decks have a definitive idea of which traits are feminine and which traits are masculine. For example, the Empress represents the softer side of the feminine archetype. She is gentle, motherly, and tied to nature. She has a sensual sexuality. She is pure emotion. The High Priestess represents the darker aspects of the divine feminine archetype. She is hidden and patient. She is intuitive and otherworldly. She is a mystery. Together, the traits of the Empress and the High Priestess represent tarot’s idea of the feminine: a collection of women’s qualities as assigned by men.
Meanwhile, the Emperor, the father archetype, is ruled by logic. He is not afraid of conflict or taking a leadership role. He is hard, unemotional, and rational. He represents society in contrast to nature. The Magician, also a male archetype, channels what is abstract into the material world. He is a card of action, cultivating ‘magic’ in a direct path, in contrast to the High Priestess’s quiet magic of wisdom.
Over and over in tarot, this laundry list of feminine and masculine traits can be found in many different cards. Queens are feminine and therefore represent the internal aspects of the suit. Kings are masculine and therefore external, pushing the ideals of the suit outward onto others. The feminine ideal is patient wisdom; the masculine ideal is implementation and action.
What do we, especially those of us who are queer, do with this? Well, it turns out the answer has been in tarot the whole damn time; I was just interpreting things too literally to see it. The goal of most tarot practitioners and designers is balance: the balance of work, of spirituality, of emotions, of material things. Tarot wants us all to be in balance, and gender is one of the symbolic elements it uses to talk about that. So, when reading this book and using this deck, please keep the following in mind: when I say ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, I mean a set of traits that have been assigned as masculine or feminine in the tradition of tarot. When I say ‘man’ or ‘woman’, I am referring to the gender of the character in the card: I am not referring to their biological sex as determined by genitalia. Do not assume, because a character has a clearly defined gender, that they are cis. In this deck, gender is fluid. If gender matters symbolically to the meaning of the card, I have retained the gender expressed in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. If gender doesn’t matter to the symbolic meaning of the card, I may have changed it, or removed any gender cues.
Your tarot readings want you to find balance. You are right to identify with gendered traits in tarot that are not in alignment with your personal gender identity. You are right to seek harmony in these traits, and/or in gender itself, if that feels right to you. Tarot is genderfluid, so let’s read it that way.