Four suits, four elements

Fifty-six of the seventy-eight cards belong to a suit, and every suit belongs to an element. Learn the four elements well and you can say something true about any Minor card before you have memorised its meaning. You will also learn to see, at a glance, which part of a person's life a question really lives in, which is often different from the part they asked about.

The Golden Dawn attribution

TarotPandit follows the Golden Dawn system, and so does every card page in this library.

• Wands are Fire. Look at the Ace of Wands: a hand from a cloud holds a living branch, still putting out leaves. Fire is will, drive, ambition, initiative and creative heat. It rises, it spreads, it needs fuel and it can burn out.
• Cups are Water. The Ace of Cups shows a cup overflowing with streams. Water is feeling, love, friendship, intuition and imagination. It takes the shape of whatever holds it, as feeling takes the shape of a relationship.
• Swords are Air. The Ace of Swords is a blade raised through a crown. Air is thought, speech, decision, truth and conflict. It is invisible and quick, and like a sword it can clear the way or wound.
• Pentacles are Earth. The Ace of Pentacles offers a single gold coin above a garden. Earth is money, the body, home, craft, material results and the patience that time requires. It is slow, solid and dependable.

The reasons are worth holding on to, because they let you reason rather than recite. Fire consumes and transforms, as will does. Water fills its vessel, as feeling fills a bond. Air moves unseen, as thought does. Earth stays where it is put and grows what is planted.

What each element governs in a question

TarotPandit card pages read every card across five areas of life: finance, marriage and relationships, career, health and life path. The elements map onto these areas, though not one to one.

• Finance belongs chiefly to Earth. Pentacles speak of income, spending, saving and the small practical steps that change them.
• Marriage and relationships belong chiefly to Water, with Air entering whenever the matter turns on what is said or left unsaid.
• Career draws on two elements: Fire for ambition and vocation, Earth for the work itself and its rewards.
• Health is read through Earth, the body, and only as attention: rest, routine, the habits worth looking at. The cards never diagnose.
• Life path is usually carried by the Major Arcana, with Fire as the suit of purpose and direction.

The suits that appear in a spread tell you which plane the situation is really on. A person asks about a job, and the cards come up mostly Cups. The difficulty is not the work; it is how they feel about it, or about the people in it. A person asks about a marriage, and the spread fills with Swords. The issue lives in thought and speech: arguments, assumptions, a conversation that has not happened.

Reading the balance of a spread

Count the suits in any spread of five or more cards. Two things are worth noting.

A dominant element shows where the energy of the situation is concentrated. Several Wands suggest momentum and impatience; several Pentacles suggest that the matter is practical and will move at the pace of work done.

A missing element can say as much. A career spread with no Fire may be describing a job done well with no heart in it. A relationship spread with no Water asks where the feeling has gone. Avoid announcing the absence as a fault; ask the querent about it instead, and let the answer shape your reading.

The Golden Dawn also taught that the elements act on one another: Fire and Air feed each other, as do Water and Earth, while Fire and Water oppose one another, as do Air and Earth. This practice, known as elemental dignities, is a subject for a later course. For now, notice when opposing suits sit side by side and treat the pairing as a tension to be named.

When traditions disagree

Some traditions swap Wands and Swords, giving Wands to Air and Swords to Fire. Their argument is that a sword is forged in fire, while a wand is a branch that grew in open air. The argument has its logic, and readers in those traditions work well with it.

The rule is consistency. Choose one system and keep it for every reading, or your elemental counts will contradict each other. In this academy Wands are Fire and Swords are Air, as in the Golden Dawn system and on every card page here.

Exercise

Allow twenty minutes.

1. Take the four Aces. Lay them in a row and write, for each, the element and three words of your own for what it governs. Do not copy the list above; look at the cards.
2. Write down a question you are living with now. Before drawing, write which element you think it belongs to.
3. Shuffle and draw seven cards. Record each card and its suit, or "Major" if it is a trump.
4. Count the suits. Write which element dominates and which, if any, is missing.
5. Compare with your guess in step 2. In three or four sentences, describe what the difference, or the agreement, tells you about your question.