How are tarot cards structured?
A standard tarot cards has 78 cards. There are Oracle decks (including one reading system that has gotten very popular called Lenormand) that have anywhere from 35 to 90 cards, but these are not tarot decks. You could say that all tarot decks are oracle decks, but not all oracle decks are tarot decks.
Minor Arcana
The Minor Arcana is like a standard playing card deck. There are four suits: Pentacles, Cups, Wands, and Swords. Each suit has 14 cards, Ace through 10, just like a playing card deck but more court cards: instead of Jack, Queen, King, they have Page, Knight, Queen and King.
I am not going to go into detail on what each card means. There are plenty of books that will explain that, and every tarot deck comes with a Little White Book (LWB) that will explain the meanings of the cards as that artist sees them. As a general framework, the suits stand for different things:
Wands are business and enterprise.
Pentacles are money and power.
Swords are worries and direction.
Cups are love and emotions.
Aces are beginnings and 10’s are endings. (Tarot runs in a cycle from start to finish.) Pages seek, they are outgoing energy and learning new skills. Page of Swords for example, is learning and trying out whatever it is that is being asked about. Knights bring messages, they may be more active: the Knight of Swords is charging forward, for instance. But the Knight of Pentacle, on the other hand, is more stable. I see Queens as peers or friends. So, if you get the Queen of Swords, that is someone who you can rely on to cut through to the truth of what you need to know. Kings are people in a position of authority. King of Swords would be firmer, laying down the law.
Major Arcana
The Major arcana are 22 extra cards that include such famous cards as Death and the Devil. Fiction has made these cards seem very scary but by themselves they are not. Death does NOT mean death, it signifies change. Change the client is doing or change the client needs to do, depending on the reading. Similarly, The Devil does not mean evil. It really discusses anger and grudges being held on to that need to be let go of.
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