Lesson One – Memorizing the Classic Card Meanings

The Minor Arcana symbolizes the mundane events and situations that occur in our daily lives.  Scholars who do not understand the totality of the tarot claim that the Minor is the stepchild of the Major and that occultists really don’t know what to do with it.  Only those who haven’t explored the Minor in any depth could begin to say such a thing. The Minor Arcana is the expression of the archetypes through human activities, the physical manifestation of essence through events, the playing out of the Major archetypes through to the physical plane.
Jana Riley 1992

The Minors are the cards in your deck that are classed into four suits.  Each suit begins with an Ace and ends with a Ten (otherwise referred to as the “pip” cards).

Early Tarot decks depicted the pip cards in strictly symbolic form. In 1909, the Rider publishing company of England published a Tarot deck that was interpreted by Arthur Edward Waite and painted by Pamela Coleman Smith.  This was the first deck whereby detailed and colourful scenes depicting characters appeared on all pip cards (ace to ten). This was a revolutionary change to earlier decks where the symbols were simply drawn in the number matching the number of the card itself.  For example the Six of Wands would simply depict 6 Wands.

Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris in the design of their deck in the 1940’s stayed with the tradition of depicting the pips without characters.  If the deck has characters depicted as performing some function or activity, it’s taken from the Waite tradition, and if the pips depict only the symbols of the suit, it has followed the Crowley tradition.  You will notice that this is one of the differences between you two text decks.  The WOC follows in the Crowley tradition.

Traditional interpretation will say the Major Arcana is about soul, and the Minor about personality.   Each of the Four Suits tells a story in sequence from Ace – 10.

Number Symbolism in the Pip/Minor Arcana

MEMORY KEY The general meanings of the numbers in the Minor Arcana,

• Aces Roots, gifts, beginnings, initiation, birth, positive force, primary impulse.
• Twos Creativity, pairs, unity, adjustment, balance, romance, harmony, privacy, polarity, magnetism.
• Threes Synthesis, spirituality, ancestry (grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, son, daughter), trinity, initial testing game, unsettled feeling.
• Fours Stability, completion, the four elements, wholeness, a square, a cross, order, need for structure and personal safety, rigidity, a space where something special can happen.
• Fives Our five senses, struggle, conflict, a break, fear, awareness of unity in duality, gain skills in communication and negotiation.
• Sixes  Developing self-confidence, enjoyment of successes.
• Sevens  Plodding evaluation, inner work, self reflection, naturally combines the masculine 4 and the feminine 3, representing keeping your eye on the big picture on staying the course on your commitments.
• Eights  Movement, change, inspiration, new direction, definite, expansion.
• Nines  Intensity of energy, completion and finality, summing up of numbers, trinity of trinities, three threes, seeing the results of your actions and making a break from repetitive cycles of despair.
• Tens  Synthesizing and expression, transition, transformation, achievement to the next level where the process begins again, establishing ways of resolving conflicts and dilemmas.

GO TO WORKBOOK 

Exercise 1

Lay out your 1-10 Minor Arcana cards of your deck in four rows of 10 – one row for each suit.  Note your insights regarding the changes in your cards as the numbers increase.

Read the sections in your text related to the “Court” or “People” cards.

Lesson One

• Introduction to Minor Arcana
• Number Symbolism in the Pip/Number Arcana
• Introduction to Major Arcana
• Introduction to People and Court Cards