Tarot: Numbers & Elements
We all have our own personal opinions, biases, beliefs and lenses through which we view the world with. We bring these malleable & hard-set perspectives to anything & everything we engage with. It’s not to say that someone with a specific lens can’t learn how to look through someone else’s lens. That’s where empathy, curiosity, & intuition overlap. But our natural default perspectives are what shape our lived reality the most.
It is these same lenses through which we perceive, experience, understand, & communicate with Energy.
When you envision the energetic undercurrents of life all around us, how does it appear to you? How would you describe the mechanism through which that current operates? By beginning to explore the “what & why” behind your perspective you get a clearer understanding of what lens is your “default.”
When I describe learning tarot as co-creating a language, part of that co-creation comes from the many different lenses we have & our ability to engage with energy. I encourage you to contemplate & answer the questions I asked above. Even if you’re answer isn’t well defined, anything that’s not “I don’t know” is enough. And then engage with your lens in connection to tarot, as that’ll serve as a solid starting point for connecting to foundational energies & pattern recognition that you can build off of as you gain experience & knowledge.
Numerology
Numerology gets significantly watered down & reduced to a handful of key-words due to the influx of focus on angel numbers. Numerology actually has an extensive & rich history that can be connected back to the era of Pythagoreas (the guy who’s responsible for math teachers drilling “A^2 + B^2 = C^2” into our noggins.)
As a beginner, expert, or in-between, do you need spiritualized mathematics to do tarot? Not at all. (Deep breaths everyone lol!) But it could be a fascinating layer to deepen the meanings of the cards at a later point in study.
Basic numerology is a really great place to start, and I really do consider it a main foundational energy within tarot. Every single card has a number on it. Every single number contributes to why a card represents what it does. The numerical order of the Major Arcana is very much intentional. The pip cards, or Minor Arcana, showcase the maturation of an element through incrementing numbers.
But, wait? The court cards of a suit don’t have a number? True. But they also kind of do. Early, early pre-Capital T-Tarot card sets aren’t unlike our modern card decks used for solitaire, poker, etc. in which the jack/queen/king are assigned game play numbers/points.
For tarot, that would loosely equate pages to 11, knights to 12, queens to 13, & kings to 14. As an application example, page energy is often attributed to innocence, naïvety, and being the student of whichever element. And, often, 11 is used as a “wishing” number (i.e. “11:11 make a wish.”) By making a wish like that, we are the student of hope. In that moment, we are utilizing our child-like wonderment to engage optimistically with our reality; an upright page does exactly that while under the influence of its assigned element.
With numerology as a foundational energy of tarot, spend some time thinking of or writing down your pre-set understandings of each number. Whatever pops into your head as you contemplate each number. For example, in our individualistic & capitalistic society, the number one easily reminds us of being in first place, winning, new beginnings, and on the flip-side: isolation.
After contemplating the numbers for yourself, search up basic number meanings. Combine your thoughts & research, contemplate some more, update your understandings, fine tune and adjust definitions as you like. Now go back to tarot. Take your expanded number meanings and connect them to the cards. Allow the cards to speak in contrast or in addition to those meanings.
You may feel that this is a lot of work, but that process is the basis for how you co-create your unique intuitive language with tarot.
The Elements
I have touched on elemental energy in past blogs, breaking down each element within a dedicated post. Those posts would serve as a really good read to become familiar with the elemental energy as a stand-alone.
Elemental energy is another foundational energy of Tarot. They provide depth to each suit, influence to each card’s symbolism, & directionality to each Major Arcana theme. Undergoing the same process detailed with numbers, start with your own experiences and connections to these energies and then expand the elemental meanings from there. After formulating a broad vocabulary for each element, plug it back into the themes of each suit, court, & Major Arcana card.
Your specific energetic lens shapes how you understand the elements more than it shapes your connection to numbers. The numbers feel like broad topic ideas while the elements feel like archetypes. So how you understand the world, energy, philosophy & application will directly impact how you interpret those archetypes.
If we take the elements from a psychological lens, earth becomes routines, boundaries, functionality, structured safety, and labored currency. Water would represent the subconscious, dreams & aspirations, the inner child, & emotional currency. Air: consciousness, mental processing, problem-solving, & expressional currency. Fire: passions, ambitions, socialization, risk & reward, & valued currency.
But if we approach the elements through an esoteric lens, instead of earth being labored currency (i.e. maintenance of the self in relation to the physical world) it would appear more like material currency. Raw goods, physicality, payment, storage, details/planning/slow, meticulous & intentional actions. The mundane & embodied aspects of being human.
Water would shift from emotional currency to Collective Subconscious currency. The Unknown. The veil & void. The relationalism of connective entanglement. Memory imprints of past, present, & future. Air: Consciousness currency; the sword of Truth, perspective, channeling & condensing Will. Fire: Spirit currency; Willpower, transformation, Oneness, sacredness.
How ever you view the elements is perfectly fine! The focus should be on connecting to the energy so you can express it using whatever language feels good & aligned to you. It may take some time, but if you slowly become familiarizes & acquainted to the energy of the elements, that developed relationship will serve you exponentially more than just retaining key-words you looked up. How you describe an element may be the same as how someone else describes it, but the difference I want to emphasize is your own lived connection to them.
Plugging it Back into Tarot
Earlier, I mentioned that I view numbers like topic points & elemental energy like archetypes. That is usually where I begin when merging the themes of numbers & elements together.
Let’s take two different Pages as an example, sticking with that 11:11 wish, wonderment, & the-student-of-X mentality. By blending 11’s & the-student-of-x with earth energy, the Page of Pentacles becomes the student of humanity & presence (material currency), with the optimism & wonderment being focused into a physical doing or non-doing task/project (labored currency).
If we blend 11’s & the-student-of-x with fire energy, the Page of Wands can be described as the student of risk & reward or impulses (valued currency). With the focus being on enlivening or inspiriting lessons (spirit currency), the main question this Page contemplates is what draws their interest & is it worth perusing.
Taking the foundational energies of numerology & the elements & plugging them back into Tarot sometimes is super, super easy to do. Dots connect. Light bulbs flip on. Life is grand!
But sometimes it takes a little tinkering to get things to connect completely, especially as we blend numbers & elements together with symbolism. In the middle of that tinkering is where your intuitive vocabulary & energetic awareness expands. This is the growth we want as readers who are formulating a co-created energetic story with the cards. Because when the energetic insights finally do click into place, it’s like a doorway of possibilities opens for you!
Keep studying, keep practicing, & always be You!
-Alyssa
