Minor Arcana

The Minor Arcana are the 56 suit cards of a tarot deck: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, each with ten numbered cards and four courts, Page, Knight, Queen and King. They descend directly from the four-suited playing cards that reached Europe in the 1370s; the trumps were added to them in 15th-century Italy. The names Major and Minor Arcana came much later, from 19th-century French occultists. Readers usually take the Minors as the day-to-day side of a reading: events, moods, people and choices, where the Majors stand for larger themes. A common confusion: in game decks and most Marseille-pattern decks the numbered cards show only suit signs, not scenes. See Major and Minor Arcana.