I’m pretty well seated in how I both see and use the tarot, and comfortable in that.   But, just recently I came to a new realization about how I see the tarot and its suits.

Up until just the last few days, I had always thought that I saw the suits as “cups, pentacles, wands, and swords”, regardless of the fact that those names don’t always just “roll off the tongue” for me (so to speak).

Then, I got the Numinous Tarot in the mail and it showed me that this isn’t how I view the suits at all, which is a little odd since I’ve had other decks that rename the suits, but it really stuck out to me with this one.

In the Numinous Tarot, the suits are renamed as vials, tomes, candles, and bells.  And, when trying to sort this out?   My mind never even -went- to the whole “cups, pentacles, wands, and swords” thing, but instead went immediately to the elements.

Yes, all along I’ve known and been intimately aware with the correlations between the suits and the elements.  Cups = Water, Pentacles = Earth, Wands = Fire, Swords = Air…. and yet, never before has it stuck out to me how -much- I see the suits not as their names at all, but the elements themselves and the qualities those elements represent.

I’d guess that I’ve been pairing the suit names to the elements so long that, for the most part, they became synonymous with each other.  And yet, clearly, they are not as when push comes to shove?  It’s not to the suit names I relate, but the elements they (for me) represent.