← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 103/121
Major Arcana
The Major Arcana are the twenty-two cards of the tarot that stand outside the four suits. Each has its own name and picture — The Fool, The Magician, Death, The Star, The World and the rest — and each is usually read as one of the larger forces or turning points in a life, rather than an everyday event. "Arcana" means secrets; Waite called them the Greater Arcana or Trumps Major.
Where they come from
The oldest tarot packs were made in fifteenth-century Italy for a card game, in which these picture cards were the trumps — the cards that beat all others. Their use as a book of symbols came much later: from the late eighteenth century French writers read them as an ancient wisdom, and in the nineteenth century occultists tied them to the Hebrew alphabet, astrology and the Kabbalah. Most of those historical claims are not supported, but the symbolic reading they began is the one tarot readers use today.
The sequence
The cards run from 0 to XXI. In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck of 1909 the order is: The Fool (0), The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement and The World (XXI).
Older Marseille-pattern decks put Justice at VIII and Strength at XI; the Golden Dawn swapped them so that the cards' astrological signs would follow the zodiac, and Waite's deck kept the swap.
The Fool's journey
Many readers see the Majors as a story: the Fool sets out with nothing, meets teachers and powers, is tested, loses and is renewed, and arrives at the completeness of the World — after which the journey can begin again. The idea is modern, but it gives a helpful sense of where a card sits: the early cards about learning and the self, the middle ones about trial and letting go, the last ones about light, reckoning and wholeness.
Correspondences
The Golden Dawn gave each Major a Hebrew letter and a path on the Tree of Life, and through the letter an element, a planet or a sign — The Emperor Aries, The Tower Mars, The Hanged Man the element of Water. Most English-language decks follow this scheme; the French tradition of Lévi and Papus attributes several cards differently. See the Golden Dawn attributions.
In a reading
A Major in a spread tends to carry more weight than a Minor card in the same position: it can suggest that a situation touches something important, or that forces larger than the querent's own choices are at work. The Golden Dawn read a spread with a majority of Majors as showing "forces of considerable strength beyond the enquirer's control". Even so, readers usually treat them as themes to understand, not fates to submit to.