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Tarot Card Meanings

Seventy-eight cards sounds like a lot to hold in your head. The structure underneath is much smaller than the number suggests, and once you can see it the memorising mostly stops being necessary.

Twenty-two Major Arcana carry the large movements of a life, and each one has to be met on its own terms. The remaining fifty-six split into four suits of fourteen, and every suit runs the identical shape: ace through ten, then Page, Knight, Queen and King.

That repetition is what makes the deck learnable. Once you know what a five does, which is a wobble, a loss of footing, a test applied partway through, you already know something true about all four of them. The suit only tells you which part of life it landed in. Wands handle drive and momentum, Cups handle feeling, Swords handle thought, Pentacles handle the material world of work and money and health.

Court cards work the same way once you stop reading them as people. A Page is anyone meeting the suit for the first time, a Knight is anyone charging at it, a Queen holds it from the inside and a King holds it from the outside. Four postures, four suits, sixteen cards, and you've learned the postures once.

So the actual learning is fourteen ideas plus four elements, and then twenty-two majors on top. Most people find the minors click into place surprisingly fast once they stop treating fifty-six cards as fifty-six separate things to memorise.

Start wherever you like. The Majors are the usual doorway because they're vivid and because their arc gives you something to hang the rest on. The suits pay off quickly once the number pattern lands, and after that the deck stops being a vocabulary test and starts being a language.

None of it has to be memorised in order. Look up what you drew, read why it sits where it does, and the structure assembles itself over a few weeks of doing that.

Updated July 2026·78 cards·Little Grimoire card reference

• 0—XXIThe Major Arcana22 cards · the named sequence
• The Wands14 cards · fire · driveComing soon
• The Cups14 cards · water · feelingComing soon
• The Swords14 cards · air · thoughtComing soon
• The Pentacles14 cards · earth · matterComing soon