Elemental Dignities: A Bare Bones Intro

I hope to make this blog an open forum for various Tarot-related topics.  If you have suggestions for a topic, by all means let me know and I will happily cover it to the best of my abilities.  If I don't know something, I'll either find the answer or I'll be completely honest about having no idea!

First, a few words about the Tarot in general.  The most widely held belief is that the Tarot originated as a 15th century card game called Tarocchi; its use as a tool for divination occurred later, around the late 18th-early 19th century.  This is a summation on my part of various schools of thought, for there are Tarot authors who ascribe different origins.

The deck is comprised of 78 cards.  22 of these cards make up the Major Arcana (or Trumps), including The Fool, The Devil, The Moon, The Hanged Man, Death, The Lovers...cards that you have no doubt seen here and there.  These cards all bear names.  The remaining 56 cards are called the Minor Arcana.  The Minors are divided into four suits:  Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles.  The 'pip' cards in each suit are numbered 1-10, followed by four Court cards, commonly:  Page, Knight, Queen and King.

Even the small bit of info above is sort of a big ol' can of worms.  For example, the four suits are sometimes known by different names, Wands sometimes as Batons or Staves, Pentacles sometimes as Coins or even Stones, and so on.  What I would like to highlight today is that each suit corresponds to an elemental dignity:  Wands=fire; Cups=water; Swords=air; Pentacles=earth.  In certain decks, these dignities are translated differently, and the Court cards occasionally have different names (Princess, Prince, Queen, King, for example).  The Rider-Waite-Smith style deck offers fully illustrated Major and Minor cards; Marseilles-style decks have fully illustrated Major and Court cards, with the pips having a suit-and-number style only, much like modern playing cards but with a bit more color and style.

So, back to the elemental dignities.  I will use the most common attributions--the way I outlined them above.  If Wands equate with fire, that gives Wand cards an association with the attributes of fire:  powerful, fast moving, strong, confident, sometimes out of control/over the top...the list goes on.  The suit of Cups is associated with water:  fluidity, creativity, psychic ability, love, relationships, transformations, etc.  If you decide to begin reading Tarot cards, this is a great place to start in terms of looking at the cards intuitively.  For example, when you see a Wand card in a spread, you can start interpreting by considering the suit's association with the properties of fire, then look at the scene on the card and tie it all together.  As you get more advanced, you can pull in so many other systems of reading:  psychology, numerology, astrology, etc.

Elemental dignities are just one aspect of reading the cards and a perfect place to begin discovering the Tarot.  Learning the attributes of each suit is key in understanding the cards and telling their story once they're thrown in a spread.

This is a rich topic that I will certainly continue with in a future post; I plan to highlight each suit as time goes on.  Again, if you have a suggestion for a future topic, let's hear it!