Clubs

Clubs is one of the four suits of the standard French-suited playing pack, and in the tradition of cartomancy, fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards, it carries a settled range of meaning: action, ambition and growth.

Suit, element and tarot parallel

When cartomancers and occultists set the playing-card suits beside the four suits of the tarot's Minor Arcana, Clubs is paired with the tarot suit of Wands and with the classical element of Fire. This scheme of suit, element and tarot equivalence was systematised in the Western esoteric revival, notably by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, though the practice of reading fortunes from a common deck is older and more widespread.

The correspondence is one convention among several, other writers have exchanged the elemental attributions of two suits, and it is described here as part of the documented cartomantic tradition rather than as a fixed rule.

The sign on the card and the English name for it come from two different suit systems, and the mismatch is visible every time the deck is dealt.

The sign is a clover

In French the suit is trefle, a clover leaf, and the shape on the card is a three-lobed leaf on a short stem. Nothing about the drawing suggests a weapon.

The name is Italian

English calls the suit clubs, from bastoni, the batons or cudgels of the Italian and Spanish Latin-suited packs. When French-suited cards displaced Latin-suited ones in England, the older suit name stayed attached to the slot the new sign occupied. The same thing happened with spades, from Italian spade, meaning swords. Two of the four English suit names therefore describe objects that are not on the cards.

Why the French signs won

The French pattern of the later fifteenth century replaced pictorial suits with four flat silhouettes in two colours that could be printed with stencils rather than engraved. Cheapness, not symbolism, is why this pattern became the international standard while the German and Latin patterns remained regional.

In cartomancy

Readers map this sign onto the baton suit of the Latin packs, which is where its association with work, enterprise and action comes from. That is a convention of reading rather than a derivation, and the atlas records it as one.