The Minor Arcana

Cups are water: love, family, friendship, grief, intuition and the inner weather that colours everything else. Pentacles are earth: money, work, health, home and slow, tangible progress. Swords are air: decisions, truth, conflict, anxiety and the clarity that arrives once something is finally said. Wands are fire: desire, ambition, creativity, competition and the willingness to start.

When one suit dominates a spread, that is the reading's real subject — even if you asked about something else. Three Pentacles in a love question usually means the relationship's pressure point is money, time or living arrangements.

Each suit runs the same arc. Aces are a beginning offered rather than earned. Twos are choice or partnership; threes, first results; fours, stability that can become stagnation; fives, loss or conflict; sixes, recovery and generosity; sevens, testing and strategy; eights, effort and movement; nines, the near-complete state with its own private cost; tens, completion, for better or worse.

Once the arc is familiar you can read an unfamiliar card reasonably well from its number and suit alone: the Eight of Wands is fast movement, the Eight of Cups is walking away from something that no longer feeds you.

Pages, Knights, Queens and Kings can describe a person, a stage of mastery or an approach you are being asked to take. A Page is learning, a Knight is pursuing, a Queen holds the suit inwardly, a King holds it outwardly.

Before deciding a court card is a specific person, test the other reading: what would it mean to handle this situation the way that figure would? That interpretation is right more often than a description of someone's hair colour.