Minor Arcana Tarot Cards

Learn about the Minor Arcana tarot cards from expert Ellen Goldberg, M.A. in this Howcast video.


Hello. I'm Ellen Goldberg and I welcome you to this taro moment from the school or oracles. This segment is on an introduction tot he minor arcana. As I've mentioned, the taro is divided into two basic groups. The 22 groups of the major arcana which portray the major archetypes of the laws of the universe and personalities and spiritual forces and the minor arcana. And that's a greater group, 56 cards. 56 cards subdivided into 4 suits, the wands, the cups, the swords, and the pentacles and we'll be doing a segment particularly on the 4 suits. So, take a look for that one. But the minor arcana, sometimes people think that it is lesser than the major arcana just because it has the prefix or the title "minor." To me, that's like saying the subconscious is lesser than the conscious mind just because it has the beginning of "sub." It's not true. The minor arcana are also archetypes.

They're archetypal situations and people. Each of the 4 suits of the minor arcana has 14 cards in it. 10 of it you know from regular playing cards, they're the ace through 10's. We've seen them and played with them through all of our lives. We even know the other group, but maybe not all of them. Each suit not only has an ace through 10, often called the pip cards, but there are 4 court cards, people. There's pages, there are queens, there are kings, and there are knights on horseback. I even think I found a, oh, here's a knight, knight of cups. These people are the people that you will meet in your life and they will have personalities that you will recognize. The minor arcana, we might say, is a great panorama of life because they represent events. There will be pictures on cards, which is one of the reason why I love the "Ride Awake" cards so much because every card has a picture and a title that is descriptive of the card. The work that we're going to do with the minor comes really from the order of the Golden Dawn.

As we make this video I'm approaching my 70th year and I started to study the cards when I was 29. And somewhere in my 30's I spent 4 years at a Kabbalistic Mystery School based on taro and it was also based on the work of the order of the Golden Dawn which is how I've come to have the association that I do with the cards. every card in the minor arcana not only has a title which we call a lord name, it's called a lord name and not just a name to show that it is a big constellation of energy. But it also has an astrological attribution. A planet, working within a sign. We don't have time for the more complex segment it would take to show how they got their attributions but there is rhyme and reason to it, it's not arbitrary at all. The minor arcana, in my estimation, are the major arcana brought down to earth. They are a panorama of life and all the people and situations that you're going to encounter in your life's journey. Thank you for being with me. Bye for now.

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