Minor Arcanum: definition

The minor arcana complement the majors by specifying situations, registers of experience and the practical tones of daily life. They belong to another reading logic, more detailed, more contextual and more circumstantial.

They are spread across four suits —wands, cups, swords and coins—, each corresponding to a symbolic register: impulse and action for wands, affect and relationship for cups, the mental and decision for swords, the concrete and matter for coins.

Each suit comprises ten numeral cards (from ace to ten) and four court cards (page, knight, queen, king), that is 56 cards in total. With the 22 major arcana, the complete tarot thus counts 78 cards.

Although Tarot Nova pedagogically favours the 22 majors, the notion of minor arcanum remains essential from an encyclopaedic perspective, to situate the Marseille Tarot within its overall architecture.

The relationship between minors and majors is one of the keys of reading: when a spread mixes both, the majors mark the great underlying themes and the minors specify how they take shape in daily life.

A predominance of one suit in a minors spread also offers valuable overall information: many cups speak of affections; many swords, of conflicts or decisions; many coins, of the material; many wands, of action and projects.

Read together, then, majors and minors offer two complementary scales: the broad existential themes and the concrete, everyday detail in which those themes actually play out.