The Fool's Journey: twenty-two cards, one story

The usual way to learn the Major Arcana is not card by card. It is as a story. The Fool, the card numbered zero, sets out, and each card after it is someone he meets or something that happens to him, until he arrives at the World. Readers call this the Fool's Journey, and almost every modern beginner's book teaches some version of it.

It works very well as a way to learn. Before we use it, though, it is worth being honest about where it comes from.

What the trumps were first

The trumps began, as lesson IV said, as the picture cards of a fifteenth-century Italian card game. They were never just random pictures. They were drawn from the visual culture of their time: the triumphal processions of Renaissance cities, where allegorical figures paraded one after another, each outranking the last. In 1956 the scholar Gertrude Moakley argued that their order echoes Petrarch's poem I Trionfi, in which Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time and Time by Eternity.

So there was a kind of ladder in the trumps from the beginning: lower things beaten by higher ones, ending with the Last Judgement and the World. The historian Robert Place goes further and argues that the sequence was built as a deliberate spiritual allegory, with the twenty-one numbered trumps falling into three groups of seven. Not everyone agrees with him, and early decks were not all numbered, but the idea of an ordered, meaningful series is old.

What is modern is the particular story most books now tell, of one traveller, the Fool, who walks through every card and is changed by each. In the card game the Fool was not really a trump. He was a special card, later called the Excuse, that let you off following suit, standing outside the order rather than at the start of it. Place describes him as an outsider, not part of the allegory, who can be thought of as an Everyman who meets what comes next. That is a lovely reading. It belongs to the twentieth century, when tarot books began to borrow from psychology and from writers on myth.

The hero's journey

The biggest borrowing is from Joseph Campbell. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, Campbell argued that hero stories around the world share one shape: someone leaves ordinary life, meets helpers and tests, goes down into a dark place, and comes back changed. You know the shape from films even if you have never heard his name.

Tarot writers saw the same shape in the Majors, and the tarot teacher Kim Huggens opens her lessons on the Majors with it. Laid against Campbell's journey, the cards fall into place:

• Setting out. The Fool steps off a cliff edge with a small bag and a dog at his heels. He doesn't yet know where he is going.
• Being given the tools. The Magician and the High Priestess show what he has to work with: the will to act, and the inner knowing that tells him what is worth doing.
• Meeting the world. The Empress and the Emperor, the Hierophant, the Lovers: nature, order, tradition and the first real choice.
• Testing. Strength, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice. Patience, solitude, luck and consequences.
• Going under. The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, then the Devil and the Tower: surrender, endings, and the things that have a hold on him breaking open.
• Coming home. The Star, the Moon and the Sun, then Judgement and the World: hope, confusion, clarity, a calling, and arrival.

You don't need to remember the stages. The point is that once you see the cards as moments in one life, each card makes more sense because of the ones beside it.

Three rows of seven

A common way to see the shape is to put the Fool to one side and lay the other twenty-one Majors out in three rows of seven. Pollack does this in her classic book, and this course follows her division.

The Fool stands apart, because he is the one making the journey. Then:

• The first row, I to VII, the Magician to the Chariot, is about the outside world: what you're born with, the people who raise and teach you, love, and finally standing on your own feet. Pollack calls it the worldly sequence.
• The second row, VIII to XIV, Strength to Temperance, turns inward. It's about who you are when the world's answers stop being enough.
• The third row, XV to XXI, the Devil to the World, is the hardest and the most hopeful: facing what really holds you, and the release that comes after.

The next three lessons take one row each.

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The twenty-one numbered Majors in three rows

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From top left, the first row: I The Magician, II The High Priestess, III The Empress, IV The Emperor, V The Hierophant, VI The Lovers, VII The Chariot. The second: VIII Strength, IX The Hermit, X Wheel of Fortune, XI Justice, XII The Hanged Man, XIII Death, XIV Temperance. The third: XV The Devil, XVI The Tower, XVII The Star, XVIII The Moon, XIX The Sun, XX Judgement, XXI The World.

How the story helps when you read

In a real reading the cards don't come out in order, and a single Major isn't a chapter of your life story. So why does the journey matter?

Because it tells you what kind of moment a card describes. The Chariot comes at the end of the first row: it's a card of drive and early success, but success in the world, which the next row will put to the test. The Star comes straight after the Tower: it is hope, but the hope of someone who has just been through something. Knowing where a card sits in the story gives you its tone, and that is often more useful than any list of keywords.

It also means you're never starting from nothing. If you forget what a Major means, ask where it falls on the journey, and what the traveller is learning there.

What to take from this

• The trumps were an ordered series from the start, built from Renaissance processions and allegory. The single traveller's story is a modern reading.
• The Fool's Journey borrows the hero's journey: setting out, being tested, going under, coming home.
• Three rows of seven split the Majors into the world, the inner life, and the hard road to wholeness.

Next, the first row, from the Fool to the Chariot.