The Rider-Waite Minor Arcana in Depth

A Minor Arcana card comes up and you are left with one word: apathy, conflict, abundance. The word is not false, but it is so short that it fits almost any situation and helps with none. This book teaches you to read the 56 Minor Arcana of the Rider-Waite tarot by looking at the scene Pamela Colman Smith drew on each card.

Each card has its own profile with six fixed sections, including the detail that gets overlooked, what the card gets confused with and what would change if its neighbor came up. You compare the same number across the four suits, work through eight pairs of look-alike cards and learn to read Pages, Knights, Queens and Kings as roles, never as portraits. Every chapter ends with exercises with an answer criterion and an invented case worked out in full.

You will also find a glossary, a table of all 56 cards and a short bibliography. The cards are those of the 1909 deck, whose original edition is in the public domain. Here they are a tool for reflection and entertainment: they do not predict the future or replace the advice of a professional.