Major Arcana

What is the Major Arcana?

The Major Arcana is the group of 22 trump cards in the tarot, numbered from 0 to XXI, each one naming a major life theme, lesson or turning point. The other 56 cards form the Minor Arcana. Where the Minors speak in suits and numbers, the Majors speak in figures and forces: a ruler, a hermit, a lover, a wheel, a falling tower, the sun. “Arcana” is the Latin plural of arcanum, a secret, and the name fits: these are the cards that point to what lies under a situation rather than its surface.

The 22 cards in their Rider–Waite–Smith order, with the theme each one opens and its astrological link in the Golden Dawn system:

No.	Card	Core theme	Astrology
0	The Fool	a new beginning, trust, the open road	Air
I	The Magician	skill, focus, willpower	Mercury
II	The High Priestess	intuition, hidden knowledge	Moon
III	The Empress	abundance, care, creativity	Venus
IV	The Emperor	structure, authority, protection	Aries
V	The Hierophant	tradition, teaching, shared values	Taurus
VI	The Lovers	union and the choice of the heart	Gemini
VII	The Chariot	direction, drive, self-control	Cancer
VIII	Strength	gentle courage, patience	Leo
IX	The Hermit	solitude, inner guidance	Virgo
X	Wheel of Fortune	cycles, a turn of events	Jupiter
XI	Justice	truth, fairness, consequences	Libra
XII	The Hanged Man	pause, surrender, a new angle	Water
XIII	Death	an ending and transformation	Scorpio
XIV	Temperance	balance, blending, patience, moderation	Sagittarius
XV	The Devil	dependency, compulsion, control, the shadow	Capricorn
XVI	The Tower	rupture, upheaval, collapse, revelation	Mars
XVII	The Star	hope, renewal, faith	Aquarius
XVIII	The Moon	fear, illusion, the unconscious	Pisces
XIX	The Sun	joy, clarity, vitality	Sun
XX	Judgement	awakening, a calling, reckoning	Fire
XXI	The World	completion, wholeness, arrival	Saturn

Where the Major Arcana comes from

The trumps began as a game. In the courts of northern Italy, from the 1440s, a fifth series of picture cards called trionfi was added to the ordinary four-suit pack for a trick-taking game later known as tarocchi. Some of the oldest surviving cards are the hand-painted Visconti–Sforza decks of about 1450, made for the rulers of Milan. Their trumps already show many familiar figures: the Emperor, Love, the Wheel, Death, the Sun and the World.

Fortune-telling with the full deck took shape in eighteenth-century France. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the trumps preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt; no evidence supports that, but the idea launched the esoteric tarot. In the nineteenth century Éliphas Lévi tied the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the terms major and minor arcana took hold among French occultists.

In late nineteenth-century London the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn gave each trump a Hebrew letter and an astrological attribution, the column in the table above. Two of its members, Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith, published the Rider–Waite–Smith deck in 1909. It followed the Order in placing Strength at VIII and Justice at XI, and its images became the visual language that most modern decks still speak.

How to read Major Arcana cards in a spread

A Major Arcana card names the theme; the Minor cards around it show how that theme is being lived. When the Emperor sits next to the Five of Wands, the question is about authority, and the Five shows that it is being contested. Start a reading from its Majors and let them set the frame.

Count them. Use the proportion of Majors as a reading emphasis. In a ten-card spread, four or more draws attention to broad themes such as identity, authority, loss or change; fewer Majors leaves more of the reading to the suits and ranks. With none, examine the practical situations in the Minors. The count does not settle how serious the situation is or how much control you have over it.

Read their position. A Major in a position about the past describes a theme to examine in earlier circumstances; in an outcome position, read its theme as a direction if current conditions continue. A Major as advice directs attention to a stance: the Hermit to reflection and withdrawal, Strength to patience and self-command.

Read them as a story. A common way to study the sequence is to lay out the cards I to XXI in three rows of seven. The first row (Magician to Chariot) is about building a self in the world, the second (Strength to Temperance) about inner work and loss, the third (Devil to World) about the deeper forces that break and remake a life. The Fool walks through all three, a picture known as the Fool’s Journey. When two Majors fall in a reading, ask which row each comes from: a card from the first row beside one from the third often shows an everyday matter touching something much older.

Read the hard themes directly. Death names an ending, loss and transformation; the Tower names rupture, upheaval and the collapse of a structure; the Devil names dependency, compulsion and control. Their positions and neighbouring cards show which part of the question is under examination. Reversed Majors keep the same themes in play through resistance, delay, inward pressure or an unresolved conflict.

Examples: Major Arcana combinations in a tarot spread

One Major among Minors. You ask about a job and draw the Eight of Pentacles, the Tower and the Three of Wands. The Tower brings rupture, upheaval and collapse beside the Eight’s skilled work and the Three’s plans. Examine what the work depends on, which assumptions those plans contain and where disruption enters the question. Read the practical cards through that conflict between established effort and an unstable structure.

Two Majors in conversation. The Lovers and the Devil in a relationship question set choice, values and mutual commitment beside dependency, compulsion and control. Read the pair through the question and its positions. Ask where a choice is freely made and where pressure, fear or habit shapes it.

A spread with no Majors. Five cards, all from the suits: the Two of Cups, the Six of Pentacles, the Page of Swords and two more. Read the exchanges, conversations and decisions through the suits and ranks rather than treating the absence of Majors as a verdict. Ask what practical action each position makes relevant to the question.

The Major that keeps returning. When the Hermit recurs across different readings, compare its position and neighbours each time. Solitude, withdrawal and examination remain its themes, but a position about earlier experience and a position asking for advice give them different roles. Note how each question changes the emphasis.