How to read the four suits of the minor arcana
September 30, 2026
Fifty-six of the seventy-eight cards belong to four suits of fourteen. In the usual modern reading the suit names the domain and the number places you somewhere in its arc, with the four court cards standing for people or for the stances people take.
The four suits and their names
| Italian pattern | English decks | French playing cards | Element in the modern system |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bastoni, batons | Wands, rods, staves | Clubs | Fire |
| Coppe, cups | Cups, chalices | Hearts | Water |
| Spade, swords | Swords | Spades | Air |
| Denari, coins | Pentacles, discs, coins | Diamonds | Earth |
The French suits in the third column are the same family of cards with the symbols redrawn, which is why an ordinary 52 card pack and a tarot deck share four suits, ten numbered cards each, and most of a court.
The difference is the court itself. Tarot has four court cards per suit and a playing card pack has three, because the knight was dropped somewhere in the transmission from the Italian pattern to the French.
The elements are a late addition
The fourth column of that table is worth treating differently from the first three.
The suits are as old as the cards, and the elemental attributions are not. They belong to the occult reinterpretation that began in Paris in the 1780s and was systematised by nineteenth century orders, then carried into the decks now in print. The cards were a game for three hundred years before anyone assigned fire to the wands.
Traditions also disagree on two of the four. Some assign air to wands and fire to swords, on the reasoning that a blade cuts as thought does. Anyone reading with a system needs to know which assignment that system uses, since the two produce opposite readings for the same card.
The numbered cards
Ace to ten is generally read as an arc through the suit's domain: the ace as the seed of it, the middle numbers as the working out, the ten as the end state with whatever that costs.
Number meanings that repeat across suits are the reason a reader can make sense of an unfamiliar deck. Threes tend to be read as first results, fives as difficulty, tens as completion. Holding that pattern alongside the suit gives a first reading of any of the forty numbered cards without memorising forty things.
The court
| Card | Commonly read as |
|---|---|
| Page, or knave | A beginner in the suit, a message, or a younger person |
| Knight | The suit in motion, pursued hard and sometimes too hard |
| Queen | The suit held inwardly, mastery expressed through understanding |
| King | The suit held outwardly, mastery expressed through authority |
Court cards are the hardest part of a reading, because they can stand for a person, for a role the querent is taking, or for the quality itself with nobody attached. Deciding which of the three before you read, and saying so, keeps the reading honest.
Why the minors look the way they do
Older decks, including the Tarot of Marseilles, print the numbered cards as arrangements of the suit symbol, the way a playing card shows five hearts, with no scene on them at all.
The 1909 Rider deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith gave every numbered card an illustrated scene, and most decks printed since have followed. That single decision is why modern readers describe the Eight of Pentacles as a figure at a workbench, an image that did not exist before the twentieth century.
Read with a Marseilles deck and the pictorial meanings do not transfer. The reading works from number and suit instead.
Sources
Tarot, Wikipedia, for the deck structure, the suit systems and the history of occult reinterpretation from the 1780s
How to tell the major arcana from the minor, for where the other twenty-two cards came from
The booklet published with your own deck, which states the elemental assignments its designer intended