What’s in a Deck?

A Tarot deck is quite a daunting prospect when you’re first exposed to the art of card readings. What do the cards mean? How do you know what they’re trying to tell you? Do the meanings change?

There are a lot of questions that you can ask, but there are certain aspects of a deck that are relatively common across them all.

So let’s make this a little easier by jumping into a quick overview of a standard Tarot deck and what is contained inside.

A standard Tarot deck is made up of 78 cards, and the deck is basically split into two sections – Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. Those are intimidating terms, but it is really not at all complicated when you look at them more closely.

Let’s begin with the Major Arcana. This section is made up of the first 22 cards of the deck and represents our journey through life from the first card, The Fool to the final card, The World. It is called The Fool’s Journey and takes us from the fresh, new, innocent Fool right through the various stages and experiences of life to The World, the final card in the Major Arcana which represents completion, coming full circle.

Each card in the Major Arcana predominantly refers to different archetypes, karmic life lessons, or big shifting energies for our situation. A large number of these cards in a reading usually mean big things are ahead.

Then you have the minor arcana that make up the remaining 56 cards of the deck. This section of the deck is divided into 4 different suits which each have 14 cards. The suits are usually labelled Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles (though some decks have different names for the suits).

Now that we have covered the basic division of the Tarot deck, let’s dip just a little deeper into each suit. Each suit has a general meaning, and this will help you to understand the different card meanings a little more easily:

* Wands (representing the element of fire) is about passion, enthusiasm, energy, ambition and spirituality.

* Cups (water) is the suit of emotions and relationships, interconnectedness.

* Swords (air) focuses on the intellect, thought and mental processes, communication, ideas.

* Pentacles (earth) is your suit of the material things, money, finances, possessions, your career, work-related news.

So generally speaking, when one of these cards is pulled, it is telling us what area of our lives we can look at as a starting point.

Within each suit of 14 cards, the first 10 are labeled like a normal deck of cards: Ace to 10 (with Ace representing the number one). The numbers have significance, but that’s for another post.

The last 4 cards of each suit are called the Court Cards because they represent the members of the royal court: the Page, the Knight, the Queen, and the King. These cards usually speak to personalities or personality traits in yourself or others, depending on the question you’ve asked of them, and again their meanings will be for another post.

Each card in the deck, be it major or minor arcana, has an interpretation, and more importantly an intuitive meaning that often becomes apparent to you as the querent and to me as the reader as we go through the reading.

Keep following me here to find out more about the Tarot deck. And remember, when it comes to your future, you hold all the cards.