The Minor Arcana Across the Decks

Pull the Five of Cups from a modern deck and you get a scene: a cloaked figure grieving over spilled cups. Pull it from an older deck and you get five cups, arranged. That gap is the single biggest thing to understand about the minor arcana, and it falls along a clear historical line.

In the hand-painted Visconti cards and the printed Tarot de Marseille that followed, the numbered minors are not scenes at all. They are arrangements of the suit emblems, five cups or eight coins laid out in a pattern, much like the pips on an ordinary playing card. You read them by number and suit rather than by picture, which is why the numerology of the minors matters so much in that tradition.

In 1909 Pamela Colman Smith, directed by A. E. Waite, illustrated all fifty-six minor cards with full narrative scenes. She was not quite the first to do it, the fifteenth-century Sola Busca deck had illustrated its pips and clearly influenced her, visible in the Three of Swords, but the Waite-Smith deck made the illustrated pip the standard.

This is why modern tarot feels readable at a glance, and why Rider-Waite-Smith became the lingua franca that nearly every contemporary deck and guidebook, this site included, is built around.

The Thoth deck takes a third path. Lady Frieda Harris draws each pip as a precise geometric arrangement of the suit symbol rather than a scene, and Crowley gives each one an esoteric title from the Golden Dawn: the Eight of Wands becomes Swiftness, the Ten of Swords becomes Ruin. Meaning is carried by number, suit, and astrological attribution rather than by a pictured story.

None of the three is more correct. With a scenic Waite-Smith-style deck you can read straight from the image. With a Marseille deck you lean on the number and the suit, and with Thoth you add the title and its correspondences. Knowing which kind of deck is in your hands tells you how to read its minors. The card pages here follow the Waite-Smith scenes, with each card's number and element noted for the older approach.