Minor Arcana
The Minor Arcana are the 56 tarot cards across four suits — Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles — each running Ace through Ten plus four court cards. They stand for the everyday themes and situations.
The Minor Arcana resemble the classic playing-card deck that our modern card games grew out of: four suits of 14 cards each. Each suit is tied to an element and a domain of experience — Wands to fire (will, drive), Cups to water (feeling, relationship), Swords to air (thought, conflict), Pentacles (or coins) to earth (body, work, material matters). Each suit also has four court cards: Page (Jack), Knight, Queen and King.
A distinctive feature of the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck is that every numbered card of the Minor Arcana is also fully illustrated as a scene — earlier decks usually showed only the matching number of symbols. That's part of what made the deck so influential: the images tell a story and can be read intuitively. The Golden Dawn tradition further assigns each numbered card an astrological correspondence of planet and zodiac decan.
"Minor" doesn't mean unimportant: in most spreads, the Minor Arcana make up the majority of the cards and sketch the concrete events, while the Major Arcana mark the overarching themes.
How we use this term
Leitstern uses all 56 Minor Arcana as part of the full 78-card deck (Rider-Waite-Smith, with the Golden Dawn correspondences) in the Seer's spreads; the daily card, by contrast, is drawn from the Major Arcana.
Read next
Terms that connect directly to this one.