Minor Arcana

The Minor Arcana descend directly from the Mamluk playing cards brought to Europe via Venetian and Catalan trade routes at the end of the 14th century, as the historian Michael Dummett showed in 1980. The word arcanum, from the Latin arcanum, was only applied to these 56 cards in the 19th century, in the writings of Eliphas Levi and Papus. Before then, they were simply called the ordinary tarot cards, as opposed to the trionfi. The four Latin suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles) are attested in 15th-century Italian decks such as the Visconti-Sforza and have survived in Spain and Italy under the name palos.

Until the 19th century, the Minor Arcana of Italian and Marseille tarots bore a repetitive design: three crossed wands on the Three of Wands, and so on. The break came in 1909 with the Rider-Waite deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite: each Minor Arcanum received a figurative scene. This innovation transformed divinatory practice by offering immediate readability. The Golden Dawn tradition then linked each card to an astrological decan. Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck pushed this further with a title assigned to each card (Dominion, Failure, Ruin).

In a spread, the Minor Arcana describe the concrete details of a situation: actions, feelings, material contexts. The four suits classically correspond to the four elements: Wands / fire for drive, Cups / water for emotions, Swords / air for thought, Pentacles / earth for material matters. On Tarotoui, all 56 Minor Arcana can be consulted individually, with their upright and reversed meanings. Many readings combine majors and minors to articulate broad themes and everyday facts. Court cards are often interpreted as people or facets of the querent.

The word minor can be misleading: it indicates only a structural distinction, not lesser importance. Many tarot readers, including Rachel Pollack, insist on the narrative weight of the minors in a detailed reading. Note also that some contemporary decks change the names of the suits (Pentacles instead of Coins in the Anglo-Saxon tradition) without altering the structure.