Tarot Glossary
Pip Cards
Pip cards are the numbered Minor Arcana, Ace through Ten in each of the four suits, as distinct from the sixteen court cards. In older decks such as the Tarot de Marseille, pips display only arranged suit symbols with no scene, so they are read by combining the card's number with its suit rather than by interpreting an image.
Pips, courts, and Majors
The 78-card deck divides into 22 Major Arcana, 16 court cards, and 40 pips. The pips are the bulk of the deck and the part beginners find hardest, because they lack both the archetypal weight of the Majors and the human specificity of the courts. Learning to read them well is most of what separates a reader who needs a reference book from one who does not.
How unillustrated pips are read
The Marseille method is a two-part construction, and it is more systematic than the scene-reading most people learn first. The number supplies an abstract quality (one is beginning, three is expression, five is disruption, seven is challenge, ten is completion. The suit supplies the arena) fire for drive, water for feeling, air for thought, earth for the material. The Five of Cups is disruption in the arena of feeling, which lands very close to the standard Rider-Waite-Smith reading of grief and loss without needing the picture at all.
Why Rider-Waite-Smith changed it
In 1909 Pamela Colman Smith illustrated all 40 pips with narrative scenes, which made the Minor Arcana approachable to readers with no training in number symbolism. That is a genuine gain in accessibility and it is why the deck became standard. The cost is less visible: a scene fixes a card to one story. An unillustrated Five of Cups is disruption-in-feeling and can be many things; an illustrated one shows a cloaked figure and three spilled cups, and readers reach for that specific image even where the situation does not match it.
Worth learning even on an illustrated deck
The number-and-suit method is not an alternative to scene reading, it is a second axis on the same card. When an illustrated pip does not seem to fit a spread, dropping back to the underlying construction (what quality, in what arena) will often produce the reading the picture was obscuring. This is also the fastest route to reading the 40 pips from memory, since it replaces 40 separate meanings with ten numbers and four suits.
Pip Cards in practice
- Learn ten number meanings and four suit arenas, and you have a working reading for all 40 pips without memorising 40 cards.
- When an illustrated pip does not fit the spread, read it as number plus suit instead and see whether it lands better.
- Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith pips need different approaches: do not apply illustrated-card meanings to a Marseille deck.
- Aces are pips too, though they are usually read as a distinct group because they carry the pure form of their suit.
The common misreading
Often said: Pip cards are the minor, less important cards in a reading.
More accurately: "Minor" describes the Arcana they belong to, not their weight in a spread. Pips are 40 of the 78 cards and they carry the concrete detail of a reading: what is actually happening, in what part of your life, at what stage. A spread of Majors describes forces without telling you where they touch the ground. In practice a reading tends to be most actionable precisely where the pips are, and dismissing them is how a reading stays abstract.
Pip Cards: frequently asked questions
What are pip cards in tarot?
Pip cards are the numbered Minor Arcana: Ace through Ten in Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, 40 cards in total. The term distinguishes them from the 16 court cards, which are also Minor Arcana but are read as people or approaches rather than as numbered stages.
How do you read pip cards without pictures?
By combining the number with the suit. The number gives an abstract quality (one for beginning, five for disruption, ten for completion) and the suit gives the arena: fire for drive, water for emotion, air for thought, earth for the material. The Five of Pentacles reads as disruption in material life, which is arrived at without any image.
Are pip cards the same as the Minor Arcana?
Not quite. The Minor Arcana has 56 cards: 40 pips and 16 court cards. Pips are the numbered cards only. All pips are Minor Arcana, but not all Minor Arcana are pips.
Which tarot decks have unillustrated pips?
The Tarot de Marseille and its many variants, along with historical Italian decks and modern reproductions of them. The Thoth deck sits between the two conventions, with abstract designs rather than either plain pips or full narrative scenes. Rider-Waite-Smith and the great majority of modern decks illustrate every pip.
Put it to use
The vocabulary is only worth much once you are reading with it.