Last time, we slowed down inside the Major Arcana and walked the Fool’s Journey from card 0 to card 21. If you missed it, the short version is this: those twenty-two cards describe the big stuff, the turning points and defining moments that mark a real before and after in someone’s life. Today we’re turning to the other half of the deck, the fifty-six cards that make up the Minor Arcana, the ones I tell my clients to think of as the texture of daily life rather than its headlines.

What Makes the Minor Arcana Different

If the Major Arcana is the chapter titles of your story, the Minor Arcana is everything written on the pages in between. These cards don’t carry the weight of fate or transformation the way The Tower or Death do. Instead, they speak to the week you’re having: a conversation that didn’t go the way you hoped, a financial decision you’re sitting with, the mood that’s been following you around since Tuesday. When a Minor Arcana card turns up in a reading, I don’t ask my clients to sit up straighter the way I do with the Majors. I ask them to think about what’s actually happening in their life right now, because that’s almost always where the answer is hiding.

The fifty-six Minor Arcana cards are organized into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. Each suit is tied to one of the four classical elements, and that elemental association tells you almost everything you need to know about what a suit is “about” before you ever look at a single card from it.

The Four Suits

Here are the four suits and the element each one carries. I won’t list all fifty-six cards individually today; that’s what the suit-by-suit posts coming up will be for, but understanding these four building blocks is really the heart of reading the Minor Arcana well.

Wands: Fire. The suit of passion, ambition, and creative spark. Wands cards show up around action, energy, and the early, electric stage of any new idea or undertaking.

Cups: Water. The suit of feeling. Cups cards live in the emotional and relational parts of life: love, intuition, connection, and the inner world we don’t always say out loud.

Swords: Air. The suit of the mind. Swords cards deal in thought, truth, conflict, and communication, the sharp-edged clarity that comes from facing something head-on.

Pentacles: Earth. The suit of the material world. Pentacles cards govern money, work, health, and the tangible, grounded results of our day-to-day effort.

Each of these four suits is built the same way: every suit runs from the Ace through the King, fourteen cards in total, which is where you get fifty-six cards across all four suits. Once you understand how one suit is built, you understand the architecture of the entire Minor Arcana, which is really what I want to leave you with today.

Inside Each Suit: Ace Through King

Within every suit, the numbered cards run Ace through Ten, and they tell one continuous story, the same way the Major Arcana does, just on a smaller, more personal scale. The Ace is the spark: a new opportunity arriving in whatever form that suit takes, pure potential and nothing built yet. From there, the Two through Ten trace that spark through choices, partnerships, setbacks, and effort, until the Ten arrives as a kind of small completion, the natural endpoint of whatever that suit set out to do.

After the Ten, each suit shifts into four court cards: the Page, the Knight, the Queen, and the King. These aren’t part of that numbered arc; they’re something different entirely, closer to people than to events. The court cards represent personalities, roles, or even actual people who might be relevant to your reading, each one carrying the qualities of their suit but expressed through a particular kind of presence and maturity. A King of Wands and a King of Cups, for instance, are both “Kings,” but they lead in completely different ways, one through fire and the other through feeling. The court cards genuinely deserve a post of their own to do them justice, so I’ll be giving them that dedicated treatment once we’ve made our way through the numbered cards, suit by suit.

So to recap the shape of it: four suits, each one running Ace through King, fourteen cards per suit, fifty-six cards in total. That’s the entire architecture of the Minor Arcana, and from here, every individual card is really just that suit’s element, expressed at a particular point along its own Ace-to-King story.

Reading the Suits as a Whole

The way I read it for my clients: notice which suit is dominant in a spread before you even look at the individual cards. A reading full of Swords is going to feel very different from one full of Cups, even before you know which specific cards showed up. Ask yourself which element is asking for your attention right now. Is this a Wands moment, all fire and forward motion? A Cups moment, asking you to sit with what you feel? A Swords moment, demanding clarity or a hard truth? Or a Pentacles moment, rooted in the practical and the material? That question will orient you long before you get into the specifics of any single card.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll move through each suit individually, Ace through Ten, and then give the court cards the dedicated post they deserve, the same way I’m already working through the Major Arcana one card at a time. For now, consider this your map of the Minor Arcana’s structure. The deeper conversations, as always, are coming.

Kim’s Esoteric Tarot Journals

Whenever I teach someone to read tarot, we always start in the same place. Not with meanings, not with spreads, but with structure. A full tarot deck has 78 cards. Twenty-two of those belong to the Major Arcana, and the remaining fifty-six make up the Minor Arcana, divided into four suits: Cups, Pentacles, Swords, and Wands. Those suits deal with the mundane, day-to-day events of life, and I’ll save them for next time. Today, I want to slow down and really sit inside the Major Arcana, because these twenty-two cards are the heart of the deck and they deserve to be understood properly, not just memorized. For consistency, everything here follows the Rider-Waite tarot, the most widely used deck and the foundation most modern readers learn from first.

The Major Arcana cards are numbered 0 through 21, beginning with The Fool and ending with The World. Traditionally, this sequence is read as a single continuous story called the Fool’s Journey, in which The Fool moves through a series of archetypal lessons and, by card 21, arrives at a sense of completion and integration, having lived through every stage the story has to teach.

This is really the key difference between the two halves of the deck. The Minor Arcana describes the mundane, day-to-day events of life: a conversation, a decision, a mood that’s moving through you this week. The Major Arcana describes something larger than any single event. These cards point to major life events, defining moments, and turning points, the kind of shifts that mark a real before and after in a person’s life. When a Major Arcana card shows up in a reading, I always tell my clients to sit up a little straighter. It’s a sign that something significant is unfolding, not a passing circumstance but a deeper current running underneath it.

The Fool’s Journey, Card by Card

Here is each of the twenty-two Major Arcana cards in order, along with a brief sense of what each one is asking of you.

0. The Fool — New beginnings. The start of something. Innocence, a leap of faith, the willingness to begin without knowing exactly where the road leads.

I. The Magician — Manifestation. You already have what you need. This card speaks to willpower, resourcefulness, and the ability to turn intention into action.

II. The High Priestess — Knowing. A call inward. Intuition, mystery, and the wisdom that comes from listening rather than chasing answers.

III. The Empress — Abundance. Creativity, fertility in every sense of the word, and a deep connection to the natural world.

IV. The Emperor — Authority. Structure and stability. This card asks you to lead, to build something solid, to take responsibility.

V. The Hierophant — Tradition. Belief and learning. Often points to institutions, mentors, or the value of those who came before you.

VI. The Lovers — Union. Choice and alignment. Not always romantic, this card is fundamentally about the joining of two things into one.

VII. The Chariot — Willpower. Determination and drive, the discipline it takes to move forward through conflicting forces.

VIII. Strength — Courage. Not brute force, but patience, compassion, and the gentle taming of our own inner wildness.

IX. The Hermit — Introspection. Withdrawal for the sake of clarity. Solitude and the search for your own inner light.

X. Wheel of Fortune — Cycles. Change and turning points. A reminder that life moves and that nothing stays fixed forever.

XI. Justice — Truth. Cause and effect. Fairness, and the consequences of our choices finally coming due.

XII. The Hanged Man — Surrender. A pause. A new perspective, the wisdom that sometimes comes only from letting go of control.

XIII. Death — Transformation. An ending that makes room for something else. Release, and the closing of a chapter so a new one can begin.

XIV. Temperance — Balance. Patience and moderation, the slow blending of opposites into something harmonious.

XV. The Devil — Bondage. Attachment and temptation, the parts of ourselves we haven’t yet looked at directly.

XVI. The Tower — Upheaval. The collapse of what was never built on solid ground often follows real clarity.

XVII. The Star — Hope. Renewal and faith, a quiet sense that things are beginning to mend.

XVIII. The Moon — Illusion. The realm of the subconscious. Intuition, and the things that only become clear once we stop demanding logic from them.

XIX. The Sun — Joy. Vitality and confidence, a return to warmth after a long stretch in the dark.

XX. Judgement — Awakening. A reckoning. Reflection on the past, and a calling toward whatever comes next.

XXI. The World — Completion. Wholeness and fulfillment, the satisfaction of a long journey finally coming full circle.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be giving each of these twenty-two cards its own dedicated post, with more of the imagery, symbolism, and personal reading experience there simply isn’t room for here. Consider this list your map. The deeper conversations are coming.

The Major Arcana isn’t twenty-two separate ideas to memorize. It’s one long, spiraling story about becoming, one we move through again and again throughout our lives rather than just once. So when you see a Major Arcana card in your own reading, try asking where in the Fool’s Journey it sits. Are you near the beginning, full of potential like The Fool or The Magician? In the middle of the harder lessons, somewhere around The Devil or The Tower? Or closer to the end, settling into the wisdom of The Star, The Sun, or The World? That question alone will tell you more about your reading than any keyword list ever could.

Next time, we’ll turn to the other half of the deck. I’ll walk you through the Minor Arcana, suit by suit, so you can see how the daily details of Cups, Pentacles, Swords, and Wands fill in the texture beneath these bigger Major Arcana lessons.

Kim’s Esoteric Tarot Journals