Cracking the Code of the Minor Arcana Part 1: with Marianne Costa
The Tarot as a Tool for Self-Observation and Survival in the Real World
In our pre-course podcast, Marianne Costa describes Tarot as an art and a way of learning how to see. Costa, who worked for years with Alejandro Jodorowsky, approaches Tarot, not as an occult curiosity or a New Age divination tool, but as a symbolic grammar. This primordial visual language allows us to read the world.
Tarot is also a lineage: of craftsmanship, contemplation, and poetic intelligence that stretches far beyond the clichés that often surround it. The Tarot de Marseille suggests a single deck from a single city; it is, in fact, a broader tradition: a style of tarot imagery that crystallized between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in the workshops of French, Italian, and Swiss artisans. These cards were printed on woodblocks and hand-colored, the product of guilds. They combine medieval Christian iconography, Renaissance allegory, folk symbolism, and numerical philosophy into figures at once simple and infinitely interpretable. Before esoteric movements layered their own correspondences onto the cards, the Marseille decks already functioned as a kind of visual mandala of the European imagination—an alphabet of archetypes.
The Minor Arcana is the foundation of this symbolic grammar and will be the heart of her upcoming course. The 56 cards of the Minor Arcana are comprised of four suits: Bâtons (Wands), Épées (Swords), Coupes (Cups), and Deniers (Coins), each with ten numbered cards and four Court Cards. Unlike the Major Arcana, the numbered cards are “pip cards” that show only geometric arrangements of the suit symbols, similar to standard playing cards. This lack of illustrative scenes forces the reader to rely on the purity of the number, the elemental associations of the suits, and the structural relationships between the cards. Costa explains that the Four Aces of the Minor Arcana function as a concise, elemental map of human life and society: Swords connect to the mind, symbolizing the verb and political power; Cups correspond to the heart, representing the sacred and religious power; Coins represent the material base, the planet, and the economy; and Wands embody nature, growth, and the refining of sexual energy. The work of the Minor Arcana is to ground esoteric wisdom in the most concrete, “profane” details of everyday life—connecting the “cosmic” to the “microcosmic” within the self.
To read these cards is to learn how meaning arises from form. The Tarot de Marseille is built from repeated structures—gestures, postures, tools, colors, gazes, relationships between figures. Everything has weight. A face turned to the left suggests return; a raised hand signals offering or invocation; a foot forward indicates direction or intent. The colors themselves carry narrative tensions: red for action, blue for contemplation, yellow for illumination. When the cards appear together, they form phrases, arguments, and questions. Tarot, in this light, behaves more like grammar than fortune-telling.
Tarot is a practice of attention. Costa describes reading tarot as slow looking: the moment when the eyes adjust, the breath deepens, and one becomes aware of the subtle relations within the picture. The body participates. One’s posture, tone of breath, and quality of presence inflect the reading. In this sense, tarot becomes a physical discipline—akin to meditation, dance, or martial arts—where the body learns to recognize patterns before the intellect names them. By focusing on the structural patterns of the Minor Arcana, the reader avoids the distraction of “titillation”—the negative “imagination “ that Gurdjieff warned against—and instead performs a pure act of seeing akin to “the imaginal” of Henry Corbin.
In a time saturated with disruptive imagery—screens, feeds, endless visual noise—the Tarot de Marseille seems almost radical: images that do not seduce or manipulate. They are austere, functional, strangely impersonal. The characters do not express psychological turmoil or sentimental drama; they stand in archetypal clarity, as if carved from a deeper stratum of meaning. Costa emphasizes that this anonymity is not a limitation but a liberation. These old decks invite the reader into a symbolic space where the personal blends into the universal, where the ego is not the center of interpretation but one participant among many.
Costa points out that tarot is not about predicting the future. It is about perceiving what is already present but unnoticed. The cards become mirrors—not of one’s personality, but of the deep structure of a moment. They reveal how situations are composed, how tendencies move, and how directions open or close. They speak in gestures rather than verdicts. And from this, the reader learns something much more subtle than “what will happen”: they learn how to see.
The Tarot de Marseille cultivates a form of perception that is at once disciplined and imaginative, grounded and open. Tarot is a conversation between the visible and the invisible, the crafted and the spontaneous, the human and the symbolic. It asks for sincerity, patience, and a willingness to be surprised.
Costa’s vision of the tarot is not nostalgic or mystical but an invitation to recover our capacity for seeing, listening, and reading the symbolic world.
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Course link: https://www.parallax-media.com/courses/cracking-the-code-of-the-minor-arcana-part-1
More courses by Marianne Costa: https://www.parallax-media.com/past-courses/tarot-the-real-deal
Parallax Media Library: https://www.parallax-media.com/library