The Major Arcana of Tarot — The Journey of Life Read Through Symbols
About 6 min read
The 22 cards that hold the strongest symbols among tarot's 78 are called the 'Major Arcana.' These 22 are not randomly scattered pictures but a single story of growth running from card 0, The Fool, to card 21, The World — a miniature of life often called 'the Fool's Journey.'
The difference between Major and Minor
Tarot divides broadly into the 22 Major Arcana and the 56 Minor Arcana. If the Minor deals in fine detail with the concrete events and emotions of daily life, the Major symbolizes life's great turning points and fundamental themes. When many Major cards appear in a reading, it's read as a sign that a fateful, weighty current is at work. That's why, when first learning tarot, it's best to start with the story of these 22.
The Fool's Journey — beginning and learning
Card 0, The Fool, is a pure starting point where nothing is yet decided. It continues into 1 The Magician (will and creation), 2 The High Priestess (intuition and secrets), 3 The Empress (abundance and love), 4 The Emperor (order and authority), and 5 The Hierophant (teaching and tradition), learning the world's rules and one's own power one step at a time. This opening stretch is read as the stage in which the self forms and learns the frameworks of society.
Trials and turning points — the middle of the journey
From 6 The Lovers (choice and relationship), the journey turns toward ordeal and resolve. Passing through 7 The Chariot (breaking through by will), 8 Strength (inner courage), 9 The Hermit (solitary reflection), 10 The Wheel of Fortune (turning), and 11 Justice (balance and responsibility), a person passes the tests. In particular, 12 The Hanged Man (pause and a shift of perspective), 13 Death (ending and new beginning), and 16 The Tower (sudden collapse) are easy to be startled by from their names alone, but they should be read as the language of growth: the old must be emptied for the new to come.
Cards 14 and 15 — Temperance and The Devil
Between Death (13) and The Tower (16) sit two cards that form a pair. Temperance (14) shows an angel pouring water from one cup into another, and speaks of recovery after an ending: mixing and adjusting without hurry. The Devil (15) shows two people in chains, but look closely and the chains around their necks are loose enough to lift off, which is the heart of the card. So The Devil is read not as punishment or a curse but as a card that makes you look at what you cannot let go of, such as attachments, habits and dependence. If Temperance shows how to regain balance, The Devil shows where the cord that pulls you off balance is tied.
The path to completion
The latter half of the journey is the stage of recovery and completion. Passing 17 The Star (hope), 18 The Moon (anxiety and the unconscious), 19 The Sun (achievement and joy), and 20 Judgement (awakening and the call), one cycle finally completes at 21 The World. The World card means the fruit of effort and wholeness, and at the same time is the threshold of a new journey. In this way the 22 cards draw a single circle from beginning (The Fool) to completion (The World).
Cards 8 and 11 — where Strength and Justice sit
In this site's deck, card 8 is Strength and card 11 is Justice. Older decks of the Marseille line did the opposite, putting Justice at 8 and Strength at 11, until Arthur Edward Waite swapped the two numbers in the early twentieth century. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn matched the cards to the zodiac following the order of the Hebrew letters, and in that order Leo fell on the eighth card and Libra on the eleventh. Most decks in wide use today follow Waite's numbering, but to someone who learned on a Marseille deck the numbers can look off, so it is safer to remember the cards by name than by number.
Upright and reversed
A tarot card's orientation changes as it's drawn. A card coming out upright is read as the state in which its energy is expressed smoothly, while one coming out reversed is read as the state in which that energy is blocked, excessive, or turned inward. For example, if an upright Sun is bright achievement, a reversed one may be confidence momentarily clouded. There's no need to see reversed as unconditionally bad; the key is to understand it as another face of the same symbol.
One card your birthday points to — the birth card
There is also a way to choose one of the 22 Major Arcana from your birthday alone, without drawing. This site's birth card follows the method set out by Mary Greer: add the month, day and year of birth, then keep adding the digits together until the total is no more than 22. Someone born on May 15, 1990, gets 5 + 15 + 1990 = 2010 and 2 + 0 + 1 + 0 = 3, which is card 3, The Empress. Someone born on January 5, 1975, gets 1 + 5 + 1975 = 1981 and 1 + 9 + 8 + 1 = 19, which is card 19, The Sun, and because a two-digit card is added once more, 1 + 9 = 10 and 1 + 0 = 1, the soul card is card 1, The Magician. Someone born on January 12, 1980, whose total lands exactly on 22 (1 + 12 + 1980 = 1993, 1 + 9 + 9 + 3 = 22), reads 22 as card 0, The Fool, and their soul card is card 4, The Emperor, since 2 + 2 = 4.
How often do the Major Arcana turn up?
We said that many Major cards in a reading point to a weighty current, and the yardstick for many comes from the make-up of the deck. Since 22 of the 78 cards are Majors, a single card has a 28.2% chance of being a Major. When you draw three cards, the chance that at least one Major appears is 63.6%, which is actually common, and a ten-card Celtic Cross holds 2.8 Majors on average. A spread in which five or more of the ten are Majors comes up only 10.6% of the time, and a spread with no Major at all only 2.8%, so those are the layouts truly worth a second look. This site shuffles and draws cards without repeats and gives each card an even chance of being upright or reversed, so these figures apply exactly.
Common misunderstandings and where the stories come from
The most common misunderstanding is that Death (13) foretells an actual death, whereas modern tarot commentary usually reads it as the end of one period and the change that follows. The story that tarot is a secret book of ancient Egypt is also widespread, but it is a hypothesis Antoine Court de Gébelin put forward in Le Monde primitif in 1781, with no historical basis. The oldest tarot cards that survive are the Visconti-Sforza cards, painted in fifteenth-century Italy for a noble family. This site's numbering and its upright–reversed system follow the deck that Waite designed and Pamela Colman Smith drew in 1909, and the following year Waite set down the meaning of each card in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.
Once you know the story of the 22 Major Arcana, a single card speaks to you far more richly. Bring to mind the question in your heart, draw today's card yourself, and read the message the symbol offers you.