The four suits of the tarot's Minor Arcana (wands, cups, swords and pentacles or coins), each carry a block of correspondences and a court of four ranks. The suit names and emblems descend from the Italian and Spanish playing-card packs the tarot was built on. Occult writers from the eighteenth century onward attached the four classical elements to them; the specific assignments vary between systems and are not uniform across decks.
Facts
Overview
- Entries in the Atlas
- 4
- Size of the Traditional Set
- Four suits: batons or wands, cups, swords, and coins or pentacles 1
Origins
- Origin Period
- Later fourteenth century: the Italian suit signs derive from the Mamluk pack that reached Europe in the 1370s. 1
- Place of Origin
- Italy and Spain, from suit signs of Mamluk Egypt 1
- Whose Classification This Is
- The elemental attribution standard in English-language tarot, wands to fire, cups to water, swords to air, pentacles to earth, is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's, from its late nineteenth-century papers. Older and rival schemes assign the elements differently. 2
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The Four Suits of the Minor Arcana
The Minor Arcana of the tarot is divided into four suits, most commonly wands (or batons), cups, swords, and pentacles (or coins), each running ace to ten with a court of four ranks. Each suit carries a block of correspondences: an element, a range of themes, and a set of court personalities.
The suit names and emblems descend from the Italian and Spanish playing-card packs the tarot was built on, which in turn derive from earlier packs that reached Europe from the Islamic world. The four-suit structure is thus shared with ordinary playing cards, to which the tarot's Minors are directly related.
Elements and Meanings
The Western esoteric tradition, following the Golden Dawn, assigns each suit an element: wands to fire, cups to water, swords to air, and pentacles to earth, though older and alternative schemes differ, and some assign wands to air and swords to fire. With the element comes a field of meaning: wands with will, energy and enterprise; cups with emotion and relationship; swords with thought and conflict; pentacles with body, work and money.
The entries give each suit's element, themes, court and correspondences, noting where authorities disagree on the elemental attribution. The parallel with the four playing-card suits is treated under the playing-card category.
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