AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I understand it, those diviners who use only the 22 trump cards in their readings frequently assign all of the cards equal weight in the same way that Lenormand cards are interpreted. I’ve also been told by some in Europe that they accord the trumps no more significance than they would any other card in the deck. This essay is not for them unless they choose to ascribe greater or lesser importance to a card based on other factors like position in a spread or interaction with its peers.

If we were to use all 78 cards in a layout, we would wind up with approximately 28% trump cards, 51% pip cards and 21% court cards, although the randomness of distribution could obviously group or scatter them throughout the pattern. Therefore, in any pull of fewer cards, there is a reasonable likelihood that we will receive input from all three categories. The challenge becomes whether (and how) to allocate more authority in the matter to one set of cards over the rest.

Conventional wisdom is that the 22 Major Arcana represent high-level archetypes and therefore command the most respect, typically auguring prominent events and circumstances, while the 40 “small” cards are more indicative of mundane, day-to-day affairs of little singular import, and the 16 court cards describe other people involved in the situation or personal qualities attributed to the querent. But I find that, at least in my own practice, this seldom works out in a nice, neat way. Trump cards rarely presage major events; court cards most often show other people who are (or will be) connected with my client at some level, or aspects of my own character in self-readings; and pip cards might convey an encouraging or cautionary mood that pervades the narrative, but they don’t always signal upcoming activity and may just be “background noise.”

I typically begin every reading with a broad overview of all the cards, during which I mentally bin each of them into “ranks of relevance” to the question or topic. The trump cards I will allot the role of overarching theme or prevailing atmosphere for the period in question, playing the rest of the cards off them in terms of environmental influence; the court cards I will generally treat as people unless my sitter says otherwise or I’m reading for myself; and the pip cards I will examine for low-level “tone” or “feel” that might be leveraged into purposeful action or treated as a warning not to act. I don’t normally say “This will or won’t happen” in a deterministic way, but rather “There is an opportunity to do (or not do) this or that” in a more discretionary sense.

Beyond the hierarchical considerations described above, I also look for an abundance (aka “preponderance”) or absence of any type of card by suit, element, number, polarity or rank. A surplus or deficit of any of them can leave a deficiency or excess of one or more of its peers, and both conditions can be pertinent to the reading. This amounts to a “fine-tuning” of the testimony that is secondary to the inherent meaning of the cards and their interaction, but it is no less critical to a comprehensive understanding of the spread.

A gathering of court cards always reminds me of a “crowded house, while a lack of such cards implies a solitary interval; an overload of trumps can make sniffing out the dominant theme difficult, and when this occurs a decision must be made about the situational advantage of one or two trumps over the rest; and no trump or court cards leaves the field wide-open to an unbroken and potentially eventful run of pip cards (obviously, zero pips will give the nod to one of the other categories and the reader will never get to them as a prominent factor).