The Minor Arcana
Fifty-six cards in four suits. If the Majors are the weather, the Minors are what you are doing about it — the texture of an ordinary week rather than the arc of a life.
Four suits, four elements
Each suit carries an element and a department of life: Wands and Fire for drive and enterprise, Cups and Water for feeling and attachment, Swords and Air for thought and judgement, Pentacles and Earth for work, money and the body. Reading which suit dominates a spread is often more informative than reading any single card in it.
Ace to Ten: a shape that repeats
Every suit runs the same numerical arc, which is why the numbers are worth learning once rather than fifty-six times. The Ace is the raw element offered whole. Twos are balance or choice, Threes first growth, Fours stability that may have become stasis. The Five of every suit is the suit's characteristic trouble. Sixes recover, Sevens test, Eights move, Nines arrive at the near-extreme, and the Ten is the element carried to completion - which in Cups is happiness and in Swords is ruin.
The sixteen court cards
Four ranks in each suit: Page, Knight, Queen and King. They can be read as people, as approaches, or as the querent at a particular stage. They are the cards readers most often find hard, largely because the "who is this?" reading is the least useful of the three.
The thirty-six decans
The pips numbered Two through Ten - thirty-six cards - map one-to-one onto the thirty-six decans, the ten-degree divisions of the zodiac. That mapping is where each pip gets its Golden Dawn title, from the Two of Wands as Lord of Dominion to the Ten of Cups as Lord of Perfected Success. It is also what allows a Minor to be timed against a calendar.
🔥 Wands — Fire
Wands are the suit of impulse before it becomes a thing. They cover ambition, creative energy, enterprise and the friction that comes with wanting something badly. When a spread runs heavy in Wands the question is rarely whether there is enough drive - it is whether that drive has anywhere useful to go.
💧 Cups — Water
Cups hold what moves through a person rather than what they do. Love, grief, intuition, memory, the quality of a bond. A Cups-heavy spread is usually asking about the emotional truth of a situation rather than its mechanics - and often about a feeling the querent already has and has not admitted.
🗡 Swords — Air
Swords are the mind at work: analysis, argument, decision, and the damage each can do. This is the bluntest suit in the deck, and the one most often misread as simply unlucky. A Swords card usually describes something being understood, said or decided - not something happening to you.
🪙 Pentacles — Earth
Pentacles are where everything else lands: health, work, money, home, craft, the slow accumulation of skill. This is the most patient suit in the deck, and the one that most often answers "will this actually work" rather than "how do I feel about it".
