The four elements as a reading key for your tarot deck
The four elements as a reading key for your tarot deck
Working with the four elements in tarot may well be the handiest reading key there is.
We show you a new way to use fire, water, earth and air as your guide. Not as a system to memorise, but as a feeling that helps you grasp more quickly what a card is trying to say. The nice thing: you do not need all 78 meanings. Once you know which element belongs to a card, you already have half the story.
The four elements in tarot: every suit has one
The Minor Arcana of your deck is divided into four suits, and each suit carries an element. That gives you a tone of feeling before you have even looked at the image:
- Wands are fire: Drive, action, passion. Wand cards are about what sets you in motion: plans, ambition, sparks that catch.
- Cups are water: Feeling, love, intuition, relationships. With cups it is about what you feel and how you connect with others.
- Swords are air: Thoughts, words, decisions, sometimes conflict. Swords are about your mind: clear thinking, but also worrying or clashing.
- Pentacles are earth: The tangible: money, work, health, your body, your home. Pentacles bring you back to the ground under your feet.
“Fire is doing, water is feeling, air is thinking, earth is building. Four words, and you already have a direction for every card.”
How to use the elements in a spread
It gets really interesting when you do not look at a single card, but at the balance between the elements across your whole spread. That balance often tells you more than any card on its own:
- A lot of one element?: That is where the emphasis lies. Three cups in a five-card spread? Then the emphasis is clearly on feeling and connection, however practical the question may have seemed. Sometimes that is exactly the answer: your head is on sales, but the cards are pointing at something emotional.
- An element that is missing?: That is just as telling. Not a single pentacle while you are asking about work could mean the problem is not practical but emotional or mental.
- Clashing elements?: Fire and water side by side can show tension: your heart wants something other than your drive. Air and earth together can be about a plan that wants to become concrete.
An exercise to make it stick
Take your deck and draw four cards. Do not interpret them, just name the element of each card out loud: fire, water, air, earth. Can you already feel a difference in tone between the four? That difference is exactly the reading key this article is about.
Do this a few times and you will notice you start to recognise the elements on your own. Not from memory, but from feeling. And then your cards read a good deal more smoothly. By the way: even with an oracle deck that has no suits, you can ask yourself whether a card feels like fire, water, air or earth.
Keep learning?
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Get the guideWant to dig deeper?
- Read our explanation of the Minor Arcana and its four suits
- Find the right deck with our beginner’s guide to choosing a tarot deck
- Reading tarot as a story: cards as a story thread
Look through our collection and find a deck that shows the four elements clearly.