The shape of the deck: 78 cards, two arcana, four suits

Open a new tarot deck and it can look like seventy-eight separate things to learn. It isn't. The deck has a plan, and once you can see it you will know roughly what any card is about before you have read a word on it.

Here is the plan in one line: 22 Major Arcana, and 56 Minor Arcana made of four suits. Each suit has ten numbered cards, Ace to Ten, and four court cards. That's 22 + 40 + 16 = 78.

Two decks in one

The split isn't decoration. It's history.

The earliest tarot decks we know of were painted for courtly families in northern Italy in the fifteenth century, and they were made for a card game. The four suits came first: an ordinary pack of the time already had swords, batons, cups and coins, much like the playing cards still used in Italy and Spain. Someone added a fifth set of allegorical pictures, such as Love, Death, the Wheel of Fortune and the World, and made those cards beat everything else in play. They were called trionfi, triumphs, which is where our word "trump" comes from.

So a tarot deck is two packs that were shuffled together about six hundred years ago and have stayed together since. The names "Major" and "Minor Arcana" came much later, from occult writers who wanted the cards to hold secrets. Arcana is the plural of the Latin arcanum, a secret. The cards do not need the grand name to be useful, but it has stuck, and every book uses it.

The Major Arcana: twenty-two big pictures

The Majors run from 0, The Fool, to XXI, The World. Each one is a single figure or scene with a name: The Magician, The Empress, Death, The Star. Older decks leave The Fool without a number at all, which suits a card about stepping outside the usual order. The deck in these pictures, painted by Pamela Colman Smith for A. E. Waite in 1909, gives it zero.

One thing to know now so it doesn't puzzle you later: in this deck Strength is VIII and Justice is XI. Older French decks have them the other way round. Waite swapped them and gave no reason beyond saying it satisfied him. Neither order is a misprint. They come from two different traditions, and a later lesson looks at both.

Read in order, the Majors tell a story, and three lessons in this course follow it from start to finish. For now, notice what kind of thing they show. These are not everyday events. They are large forces and turning points: love, power, endings, faith, luck.

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All twenty-two Major Arcana

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From top left: 0 The Fool, I The Magician, II The High Priestess, III The Empress, IV The Emperor, V The Hierophant, VI The Lovers, VII The Chariot, VIII Strength, IX The Hermit, X Wheel of Fortune, XI Justice, XII The Hanged Man, XIII Death, XIV Temperance, XV The Devil, XVI The Tower, XVII The Star, XVIII The Moon, XIX The Sun, XX Judgement and XXI The World.

The Minor Arcana: four suits

The other fifty-six cards are much closer to ordinary life. They come in four suits, each with its own territory:

• Wands: energy, drive, ambition, what you want to start.
• Cups: feelings, relationships, what you care about.
• Swords: thought, conflict, decisions, what you have to face.
• Pentacles: work, money, the body, what you can touch.

The Aces above show each suit at its simplest: a single hand from a cloud, holding the suit's sign. In order, that's a wand, a cup, a sword and a pentacle.

Each suit runs from Ace to Ten, and the number tells you where a thing is in its life. An Ace is a beginning, a Five is usually trouble in the middle, and a Ten is something carried as far as it will go. You'll meet that idea properly later. It's what turns forty cards to memorise into one pattern to understand.

Then come the court cards: a Page, a Knight, a Queen and a King in every suit. They often stand for a person, or for a way you are behaving, and telling the two apart is a skill in itself.

Why the split matters when you read

Here is the practical point. A Major and a Minor do not carry the same weight.

A Minor tends to describe something you can see and act on: an argument, a new job, a good evening with friends, a worry you keep returning to. A Major tends to point at something bigger than the day: a theme that has been building for a while, a lesson, a part of life that's shifting under you. When The Tower turns up, readers take it more seriously than the Five of Swords, even though both can describe a falling-out.

That's also why it's worth counting them. In a spread that is mostly Minors, the matter is largely in your own hands. When a reading is full of Majors, many readers take it as a sign that the situation is larger than one decision, and that something is moving that you can respond to but not simply choose. That is not a sentence passed on you. It's a suggestion about where to look.

What to take from this

• 78 cards: 22 Majors and 56 Minors. The Minors are four suits of fourteen: Ace to Ten, then Page, Knight, Queen and King.
• The Majors are the big themes. They were added to an ordinary pack as trumps, and they still outrank the rest when you read.
• The suit says what kind of thing it is, and the number says how far along. Learn those two and the Minors start to read themselves.

Next, we look at choosing a deck, because the deck you pick decides how much the pictures help you.