Tarot Symbols: General

“The tarot is a kind of machine for generating interpretations. The images don’t carry fixed messages; they carry possibilities, and the reading is what happens when a life is laid against them.” — Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

The symbolic grammar shared across the major tarot traditions: the twenty-two Major Arcana and their archetypal meanings, the four suits and their elemental correspondences, the numerology of the pip cards, and the four court ranks. It is the interpretive layer every deck-specific and reading-level entry assumes.

A newcomer who picks up a deck for the first time meets seventy-eight pictures and a Little White Book that assigns each one a meaning, and the instinct is to memorize the list. Experienced readers will tell you that’s the least of it. What makes a card legible is not its line in the booklet but its place in a system: the Three of Cups means what it means partly because it is a three, partly because it is a cup, and partly because of the twenty-one other cards it is not. Learning to read tarot is learning this grammar: the handful of organizing principles that let a reader generate a meaning for any card, in any position, rather than reciting a fixed gloss. The grammar is what the rest of the tarot cluster assumes. A deck renders it into images; a reading puts it to work.

What the system is

The seventy-eight cards split into two unequal halves that work differently. The Major Arcana are twenty-two numbered trumps, each a single named image (The Fool, The Magician, Death, The Tower), read as the great archetypal forces and turning points of a life. The Minor Arcana are fifty-six cards across four suits, closer in structure to an ordinary playing deck, read as the textures of daily life: the work, feelings, conflicts, and resources a person moves through. A reading that turns up many Majors is held to describe a moment of large, fated significance; a reading of mostly Minors describes the ordinary weather of a life. The interpretive premise underneath both is that the cards, drawn at random, fall into a meaningful pattern that mirrors the querent’s situation. It is the same “as above, so below” correspondence logic that runs through astrology and the rest of the field’s symbolic systems.

The Major Arcana

The twenty-two trumps are usually read as a sequence, the Fool’s Journey: a single figure, the Fool (numbered zero), passing through twenty-one stages from innocence to completion. The journey is a teaching device rather than doctrine, and not every reader uses it, but it captures why the Majors are treated as more weighty than the Minors. Each is a stage everyone passes through.

Readers will note that the numbering of Strength and Justice (8 and 11) is swapped between the older Tarot de Marseille order and the Rider-Waite-Smith order that most modern decks follow. It’s a small but live point of difference between traditions, and a reminder that the grammar isn’t perfectly uniform across the field.

The four suits

The fifty-six Minor Arcana divide into four suits, each tied to one of the four classical elements and one broad domain of human life. This four-fold correspondence is the most stable structure in the whole system: the suit names change between decks, but the elemental scheme rarely does.

A reading that comes up heavy in one suit is read as a life weighted toward that domain: a spread full of Swords speaks to a mind in conflict or a decision to be thought through, a spread of Cups to matters of the heart. The same four elements run through astrology, and a reader fluent in both will hear Cups and a water sign as saying compatible things, which is one of the bridges the occult revival built deliberately between the two systems.

The numbered cards

Each suit runs from ace through ten, and the number is the second axis of meaning. Where the suit says which domain, the number says where in that domain’s arc, following the same one-through-ten progression that numerology reads in the digits themselves. Read across all four suits, the numbers form a rough narrative of any undertaking:

• Ace — the pure seed of the element; potential, the gift, the beginning.
• Two — pairing, balance, the first choice or partnership.
• Three — first growth, the initial result, collaboration.
• Four — stability, structure, a pause or consolidation.
• Five — conflict, loss, the disruption of the four’s stability.
• Six — recovery, harmony, the resolution after the five.
• Seven — challenge, assessment, the test of resolve.
• Eight — movement, mastery, accumulated effort.
• Nine — near-fulfillment, the intense penultimate state.
• Ten — completion and overload, the cycle’s full expression and its tipping into the next.

The Ten of Cups as emotional fulfillment, the Ten of Swords as the mind’s worst-case bottoming-out: same number, opposite tone, because the suit colors it. This is the combinatorial move at the heart of the grammar. Suit and number multiply, so the fifty-six pip cards are generated from a handful of suit meanings and ten number meanings rather than learned one by one.

The court cards

Each suit closes with four court cards, and these are the part of the deck readers most often find hardest, because a court can stand for a person, a part of the querent, or an approach to a situation. The four ranks form a rough progression of maturity and engagement with the suit’s element:

• Page (or Princess) — the student, the message, the new and curious version of the suit.
• Knight (or Prince) — action and pursuit, the suit’s energy in motion, sometimes to excess.
• Queen — the inward mastery of the suit, holding its power and nurturing it.
• King — the outward mastery of the suit, its authority and command in the world.

A Queen of Swords might be a particular sharp-minded woman in the querent’s life, or the querent’s own clear and unsentimental judgment, or simply the counsel to think with the head rather than the heart. Which reading applies is decided by the spread position and the surrounding cards: the grammar supplies the range of meaning, and the reading narrows it.

Method of interpretation

A card’s meaning is assembled, not retrieved. You don’t look it up so much as build it. The reader holds several layers at once: the card’s own image and keyword, its number or rank, its suit and element (for a Minor) or its place in the Fool’s Journey (for a Major), whether it landed upright or reversed, and the position in the spread that frames it as past, obstacle, outcome, or advice. The art is in combining these into a single statement, and in reading cards against one another: three Cups together as overflowing emotion, a Tower beside a Sun as collapse giving way to clarity. The same card means different things in different company, which is why two competent readers can read one spread differently and both be working the grammar correctly. That same breadth is what a cold reader can exploit, since an archetype wide enough to fit any life can be made to seem to fit one in particular.

Historical development and major variants

The symbolic grammar was not designed all at once. The cards began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, the Major Arcana as trumps in a trick-taking deck with no divinatory meaning attached. The systematic assignment of esoteric meaning came later, through the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French occultists: Antoine Court de Gébelin, then Éliphas Lévi, who linked the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn systematized the astrological and Kabbalistic correspondences in the late nineteenth century, and from that workshop came the two decks that fixed the modern grammar: the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, whose fully illustrated Minors made the meanings legible to anyone, and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth deck, which layered the Golden Dawn correspondences on more densely and renamed several cards. The two diverge on particulars (the Thoth deck’s renamed trumps and court ranks, its explicit astrological attributions), but they share the same four-suit, ten-number, twenty-two-trump skeleton described here. The card-by-card meanings vary somewhat between traditions, which is why a serious reader treats the standard set as a starting grammar to be inflected by the deck in hand rather than as a closed dictionary.

Related practices and tools

This grammar is the abstract layer that the rest of the tarot cluster assumes. It is rendered into pictures by tarot decks, where the artwork on each card is a particular interpretation of the meanings catalogued here; it is the detailed dictionary behind the system tarot describes in outline; and it is put to work in Tarot Reading, the practice that combines these card meanings with their spread positions. Its number axis is shared with numerology, and its elemental and planetary correspondences are shared with astrology, the two systems tarot drew into itself during the occult revival.

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Sources

• Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot (Aquarian Press, 1980) — the standard modern study of the card meanings, the suits, and the Fool’s Journey, and the source of the epigraph.
• A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (William Rider & Son, 1910) — the foundational card-by-card meanings for the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, by the deck’s designer.
• Benebell Wen, Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth (North Atlantic Books, 2015) — a comprehensive contemporary treatment of the suits, numbers, and court cards, used for the structural reading of the Minor Arcana.
• Robert M. Place, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (Tarcher/Penguin, 2005) — the scholarly account of the cards’ origin as a game and the later esoteric layering, used for the historical development.