Minor Arcana

What it is

The minor arcana are the 56 cards of a tarot deck that are not part of the 22 major arcana — four suits of fourteen cards each (ace through ten, plus page, knight, queen, king). Each suit covers a different area of life: wands for action, ambition, and creative energy; cups for emotion, relationships, and intuition; swords for thought, conflict, and communication; pentacles for money, work, and the physical world. Where the major arcana mark significant turning points, the minor arcana describe the ordinary texture of daily life — a much larger share of most spreads, since they make up 56 of the deck's 78 cards.

Worked example

The Three of Swords is a minor-arcana card traditionally read as heartbreak or painful truth — a real but everyday-scale emotional event, not a life-altering turning point the way a major arcana card like Death (which means transformation, not literal death) would be read.

How Mystica computes it

Every Tarot spread draws from the complete 78-card deck, minor and major arcana together, with the suit and rank data (and localized upright/reversed meanings in all ten site languages) normalized from the public-domain Rider-Waite-Smith card set. A card's suit is preserved through the draw so the reading can reference it directly — "the Ace of Cups," not just "a card" — in every language the site supports.