The Ultimate Free Tarot Course for Beginners Part 2
How a Tarot Deck Is Built: 78 Cards, 2 Halves, 4 Suits
The Free Tarot Course · Lesson 2 of 12
Foundation Track: The Skeleton
Reading time: about 7 minutes, plus ten with your cards.
Somebody told you to memorize 78 card meanings, didn’t they? Maybe it was a book, maybe a video, maybe the little white booklet that came tucked inside the box, and somewhere around card eleven your brain filed tarot next to organic chemistry and quietly closed the drawer.
Here’s what nobody said: you don’t need 78 meanings. You need one skeleton.
A tarot deck isn’t 78 separate things. It’s one system with a spine, two halves, four suits, and a numbering pattern that repeats so reliably you’ll start predicting cards you’ve never studied.
Once that structure clicks, the whole tarot deck stops being a memory test and becomes something you can actually read, the way you read a map instead of memorizing every street in the city.
This lesson hands you the skeleton. Everything else in this course hangs off it.
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One more thing. If you’d rather learn this with your own cards on the table and my eyes on your spreads, you can book a private session here, and we’ll build your foundation together.
By the end of this lesson you’ll be able to:
- Explain why a tarot deck holds 78 cards, not 52
- Tell the Major Arcana from the Minor at a glance
- Name all four suits and the territory each one governs
- Walk the ace-through-ten arc from memory
- Sketch any court card cold using rank and suit
Jump to what you need:
Why does a tarot deck have 78 cards?
Not 52, and the difference is the whole point
Playing cards and tarot cards are cousins, and you can feel it the moment you fan a tarot deck: four suits, numbered cards, royalty at the top. European card games and tarot’s documented history grew up side by side in the fifteenth century, long before anyone used the cards for reflection.
Count them, though, and tarot runs 26 cards heavier than the 52 in a poker deck.
Those extras aren’t padding.
Twenty-two of them form a separate sequence entirely, cards with names instead of suit numbers, The Fool, The Tower, The Star.
Toss in one extra court card per suit, and you’ve arrived at 78.
The number matters less than what it tells you: a tarot deck is two different instruments in one box. Learn to hear which one is playing, and you’re already reading.
What’s the difference between the Major and Minor Arcana?
Life’s big chapters versus daily weather
Arcana just means mysteries, so relax about the Latin. The two halves of your tarot deck split the human experience between them, and they split it cleanly.
The Major Arcana is the 22 named cards, and they carry life’s big chapters. Births, endings, awakenings, the tower moments that rearrange everything.
When majors dominate a spread, something structural is moving through a life.
The Minor Arcana is the other 56, and they’re the daily weather. Arguments and reconciliations, tight budgets and small wins, restless nights, ordinary Tuesdays.
Minor Arcana cards describe the texture of the week you’re actually living.
Here’s the reframe that changes everything: big chapters versus daily weather isn’t a ranking. Weather is where life mostly happens, and the minors do most of the talking in real readings.
You were told to memorize 78 meanings. You only ever needed one skeleton.
What do the four tarot suits mean?
Four elements, four kinds of day
Every minor card belongs to one of four suits, and each suit governs one territory of being human. The old system mapped them to the four classical elements, and the mapping still works because it was never really about elements. It was about you.
Wands carry fire: your energy, passion, ambition, the projects you can’t stop thinking about in the shower.
Cups carry water: your emotions, relationships, intuition, everything that moves through the heart.
Swords carry air: your mind, thoughts, words, conflicts, the truths that cut and the anxieties that circle.
Pentacles carry earth: your material world, money, work, health, home, the parts of life you can physically touch.
Four suits, four kinds of day you’ve already had this week. Notice a spread heavy in one suit and you know the territory before you’ve read a single card.
What do the numbers on tarot cards mean?
Ace through ten is one story, told four ways
Here’s the part that collapses your workload by half, so leaning in is worth it. The numbered cards, ace through ten, follow one repeating arc, and all four suits walk the same arc through their own territory.
Aces are the seed, pure potential handed to you. Twos bring choice and balance. Threes show first growth. Fours stabilize, sometimes into stagnation. Fives disrupt, since every story needs friction.
Sixes restore harmony after the storm. Sevens test and reassess. Eights show mastery and movement. Nines near the summit. Tens complete the cycle, fullness or burden, and hand the story back to a fresh ace.
One arc. Four costumes.
The Five of Cups and the Five of Swords are the same disruption wearing different clothes, one moving through the heart, one through the mind.
Your brain loves this, by the way. Learning science calls it chunking, and memory research is unambiguous that patterns beat brute-force memorization every single time. The skeleton isn’t a shortcut around the work. It is the work, done the way minds actually learn.
A checkpoint before you read on..
If you don’t have my free tarot guidebook yet, it’s the companion for this whole course, structure, spreads, and the meanings laid out the way I actually teach them. Grab your copy here and keep it beside your tarot deck as we go.
What are the court cards in tarot?
Sixteen people you already know
Above the tens sit the courts: Page, Knight, Queen, and King in each suit, sixteen cards that trip up more beginners than the entire Major Arcana. The fix is knowing what they actually are.
Courts are personalities. Sometimes they’re people in your life, sometimes they’re energies you’re being asked to embody, and traditions taught for over a century at places like the College of Psychic Studies read them both ways depending on the spread.
The rank tells you maturity. Pages are students of their element, curious and green. Knights are on a mission, all momentum, sometimes too much of it.
Queens have internalized their element and radiate it inward, through presence. Kings direct it outward, through decisions.
Cross rank with suit and you can sketch any court card cold. A Page of Cups is a student of emotion, tender and new to feeling this much. A King of Swords directs the mind, clear speech, firm judgment.
You just read two cards you may never have studied, and that’s the skeleton doing its job.
How do you learn the tarot deck structure?
Ten minutes, hands on, as promised
Here’s your exercise, and please actually do it rather than nodding at it. Ten minutes with your hands teaches what an hour of reading can’t, since your body learns structure faster than your eyes do.
Sort the tarot deck, counting down to the payoff
- Empty the full tarot deck onto a table and separate the Major Arcana from the Minor. Twenty-two named cards in one pile, everything else in another. Feel how the two halves differ in your hands, the majors carry a different visual weight, and you’ll spot it immediately.
- Take the minor pile and sort it into its four suits. Notice the mood shift as each suit gathers: fire, water, air, earth becoming four distinct stacks in front of you.
- Pick one suit and lay it out ace through ten, courts at the end. Walk the arc out loud: seed, choice, growth, stability, disruption, harmony, testing, mastery, nearing, completion. Now you’ve held the entire skeleton in your own hands, and no booklet did it for you.
Do the full sort once and you’ll never again look at a spread as random cards.
You’ll see halves, suits, and numbers first, meaning second, which is precisely the order working readers see in.
Keep the sorted stacks out for a day if you can spare the table. Walking past the structure teaches too.
Quick check: did the skeleton stick?
Answer out loud before you tap. Honest answers only, nobody’s grading you but the cards.
1. A tarot deck has 78 cards. A poker deck has 52. Where do the extra 26 come from?
The 22 named cards of the Major Arcana, plus one extra court card in each of the four suits.
2. Your spread comes up heavy with Major Arcana cards. What does that tell you before you read a single meaning?
Something structural is moving through this life. Big chapters, not daily weather.
3. Match the territory: energy and ambition, emotions and relationships, mind and conflict, money and the material world.
Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles, in that order. Fire, water, air, earth.
4. Every suit hits friction at the same number. Which one?
The fives. Every story needs disruption, and all four suits deliver it right at the middle.
5. You’ve never studied the Knight of Pentacles. Sketch it cold using rank and suit.
A knight is on a mission, all momentum. Pentacles is the material world. Someone steadily, doggedly pursuing practical results, the slowest and most reliable of the four knights.
Before you go, one thing directly from me. Twenty years ago I thought structure would kill the magic, and I couldn’t have had it more backwards.
Structure is what lets the magic through, since intuition needs somewhere solid to land.
You’re not behind for needing the skeleton first.
Every reader you admire started exactly here, sorting cards on a kitchen table, and the tarot deck has patiently trained every single one of us the same way.
What you learned today:
One tarot deck, two halves. Majors carry the big chapters, minors carry the daily weather. Four suits govern four territories, ace through ten walks one repeating arc, and courts are rank crossed with suit. That’s the whole skeleton, and everything in this course hangs off it.
Next lesson, the journey begins..
The Fool steps off the cliff edge with a knapsack and no idea what’s coming, and the first eleven cards of the Major Arcana tell one continuous story most books chop into fragments.
One journey, told properly, from the leap to the wheel. That’s where we’re headed next, and it’s my favorite lesson in this whole course.
← Previous lesson · Course home · Next lesson drops Thursday →
Where can I keep learning tarot?
If this resonated, here are a few more pieces worth your time:
- Start here: Course home
- Quiet knowing: Trust yourself
- Real change: True change
- Reading with me: What to expect
- Feeling behind: Your pace
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Chris Bennett is the founder of The Tarot Medium and one of the world’s most highly rated and trusted psychic mediums and tarot readers. He first picked up the cards more than twenty years ago and now reads full-time for clients around the world. Known for accurate, honest readings free of fear and theatrics, his work spans authentic evidential mediumship, intuitive tarot, psychic life path readings, and grief support rooted in real psychological depth. He offers secure online psychic readings, tarot consultations, and mediumship sessions to clients across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond. To book, visit thetarotmedium.com.
