How to Use Tarot Card Suits When Creating a Deck
The suits , when creating a deck, are a nice place to start.
In my opinion, the suits are an easier place to start than the major arcana. The Tarot card suits can be depicted quite literally which makes them easy to work with.
How will you represent each of the 4 suits? What is the mood or tone of the deck?
Are you suits hard hitting or soft? Are they fantastic (as in of the fantasy realm) or down to earth?
Will you simply place the appropriate number of each element in the cards or will the cards use scenes containing the elements?
What colors would you like to use and are they associated with a particular element or suit?
When creating a Tarot card deck, the suits must be considered. The four suits are: pentacles, swords, wands, and cups which correspond to earth, air, fire and water.
Wands
The Suit of Wands corresponds with the element of fire.
Fire represents enthusiasm and active energy. In Tarot, the suit of fire is represented by wands or batons. The wands are usually wooden sticks or boughs of some sort, often with green growth emerging. Sometimes the ends of the wands glow like embers are on fire.
When creating your Tarot deck, the fire suit can be a fire background. It can be the proper number of wands. It can be fireplaces, fire rings, bonfires, fireflies, salamanders…
I quickly created this Tarot card in Canva using a photograph of a fireplace, a black background and a wee bit of text.
Cups
The suit of cups corresponds with the element of water.
Water can be flowing and easy or overwhelming and destructive. Water is associated with emotions, feminine creativity and psychic influences.
The suit of cups is usually depicted by chalices, but why not aquariums, bottles, rivers, the ocean, swimming pools, steam, ice or ice cubes?
How about mirrors? Mirrors have the reflective quality of water and can be doorways into the imagination and unconscious.
The 7 of water from the Gain Tarot, uses various water vessels plus the ocean in the background to depict the suit of water.
When creating Tarot card suits, you are only limited by your imagination.
Swords
The suit of swords corresponds with the element of air.
Air represents the mental realm, the act of analyzing, deciding, and deciphering. Swords separate this from that, good from bad, old from new, early from late. Swords are also language and communication, the meeting of one mind to another. Information belongs in the realm of swords.
The suit of swords is usually represented by, you guessed it, swords.
Joanna Powell Colbert, author of the Gaian Tarot, uses alternative representations of the elements without being confusing. In this case birds, butterflies, and people doing air-like activities represent the suit.
Pentacles
The suit of pentacles corresponds with the element of earth.
Earth represents all facets of life on the Earth plane. Living, breathing, working, building, earning, money, manifesting, skills. Within the Earth plane time is called into play. As such the earth element also includes waiting, seeding, mastering, accomplishing, back tracking, and resting.
The suit of pentacles is usually represented by coin-like pentacles but also coins, disks, or rings.
If you have created your own Tarot deck, please comment and/or post links. If you haven’t created a deck what are some of your favorite depictions of the suits?