Strength to Temperance: turning inward

By the end of the first seven Majors, the Fool has done well. They have met teachers, chosen a path and driven the Chariot out into the world. On the outside, that looks like success.

The next seven cards ask a different question. Not "what can you do?" but "who is doing it?" This is where the sequence turns inward. One well-known reading of the Majors, Rachel Pollack's, lays the twenty-one numbered cards out as three rows of seven, and calls this middle row the work of turning inwards. The confidence built in the first row has started to harden into habit, and these cards loosen it.

From left to right: VIII Strength, IX The Hermit, X Wheel of Fortune, XI Justice, XII The Hanged Man, XIII Death and XIV Temperance.

VIII Strength: the gentle kind

A woman in white rests her hands on a lion's jaws. She isn't fighting it. She doesn't look worried, and the lion doesn't look beaten. Above her head floats the same sideways figure eight that hangs over The Magician.

Some early decks showed Hercules wrestling a lion, which is strength as force. The picture that won out is the opposite: a strength that works with the wild part of you rather than against it. In a reading, Strength tends to point to patience, steadiness and courage of the quiet sort. It's the strength of someone who can stay kind while frightened or angry, and not the strength of someone who wins.

IX The Hermit: stepping back to see

An old man stands alone on a mountain at night, holding up a lantern with a six-pointed star inside it. He has climbed away from the crowd.

The Hermit is about withdrawal for a purpose: time alone to think, listen and find out what you actually believe. The lantern matters. He isn't hiding. He's looking, and the light he carries can also guide someone coming up behind him, which is why the card can stand for a teacher or a mentor as well as solitude. When the Hermit turns up, a reader will often suggest slowing down and asking yourself the question before asking anyone else.

X Wheel of Fortune: what you don't control

A great wheel turns in the sky. Creatures ride it up and down, and in the four corners sit an angel, an eagle, a lion and a bull, each reading a book.

This is the card of change that comes from outside. Luck, timing, a turn of events you didn't arrange. It falls almost in the middle of the Majors, and that placement is telling. After the Hermit's look inward comes the reminder that life also moves on its own. The Wheel can mean a lucky break, but it's really about cycles: what goes up comes round again. The useful question it raises is how you meet a change, since whether the change comes isn't up to you.

XI Justice: the honest account

A figure sits between two pillars, holding scales in one hand and an upright sword in the other. The face is calm and direct.

Justice is about fairness, truth and consequences: seeing a situation for what it is, including your own part in it. It can describe a legal matter or a decision weighed carefully, but more often it asks for honesty. Where the Wheel says "things happen", Justice says "and what you did also counts". The two make a pair, and they work well read together.

XII The Hanged Man: the world upside down

A young man hangs by one foot from a living tree. His hands are behind his back, his free leg crossed. His face is peaceful, and a halo shines round his head.

This is one of the strangest pictures in the deck, and one of the most loved. He isn't being punished. He's suspended, and from where he hangs everything looks the other way round. The card tends to point to a pause: a time to stop pushing, let go of the plan and see the situation differently. It can describe a sacrifice made willingly, or simply waiting when waiting is wiser than acting. Readers sometimes say this is the card that turns the whole sequence over.

XIII Death: an ending, and only an ending

A skeleton in black armour rides a white horse, carrying a black banner with a white flower on it. A king lies fallen in its path. A bishop stands to meet it, a girl turns away, and a child looks up. Far behind, between two towers, the sun is rising.

This is the card people dread, and it's the one that needs saying most clearly. A tarot reading does not predict anyone's death. Not this card, not any card, and not any reading we give. Writers on the tarot have said for a long time that Death in a reading almost never means a physical death, and the picture shows why. Everyone meets the rider, king and child alike, and behind it all the sun comes up.

What the card describes is an ending: a job, a relationship, a stage of life, a way of seeing yourself. Something has run its course and needs to be let go so something else can begin. That can hurt, and the card doesn't pretend otherwise. But it is rarely a disaster. Often it names a change that is already happening and that resisting only makes harder. That's why many readers call it the least frightening card in the deck once you know it: it's the one that says something old is finished, and leaves the next part to you.

XIV Temperance: mixing it back together

An angel stands with one foot on land and one in water, pouring liquid between two cups. The stream bends in a way that water can't. Behind, a path leads up to the hills.

After the Hanged Man's letting go and Death's ending, Temperance puts things back together, though not the way they were. It's the card of balance, patience and the middle way: mixing opposites until they work as one, at the right pace. In a reading it often suggests moderation, healing, or bringing two sides of a life into step. Pollack notes that it can speak to someone split between two things, like work and feeling, and say that both can be held.

What the seven have in common

Read as a row, these cards all take something away. Strength takes away force, the Hermit takes away company, the Wheel takes away control, Justice takes away excuses, the Hanged Man takes away the plan, and Death takes away what has finished. Temperance shows what remains: someone steadier, less defended and better balanced than the confident Charioteer who started the row.

That's why, in a reading, a run of these cards tends to describe an inward time rather than an outward one. It isn't a bad sign. It's often the sign that something is growing where you can't see it yet.

What to take from this

• This is the inward row. VIII to XIV move the story from doing to understanding who is doing it.
• The Wheel and Justice are a pair. One is what happens to you, the other what you are answerable for.
• Death is an ending, not a death. A reading never predicts one. The card names something finished, and the sun rising behind it is part of the picture.

Next, we follow the last seven Majors, from the Devil to the World: the hardest stretch of the road, and where it leads.