Major Arcana: A Complete Guide to the 22 Tarot Trumps

The major arcana are the twenty-two picture cards of the tarot, numbered from 0 or I to XXI and running from the Fool and the Magician to the Judgement and the World. They began in fifteenth-century Italy as the trumps of a card game, illustrating familiar allegorical themes; from the late eighteenth century occultists reinterpreted them as a book of hidden wisdom, linked to the Hebrew alphabet, astrology and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

The Trumps in Renaissance Italy§

In the earliest tarot decks the picture cards were called trionfi, "triumphs," and functioned as a permanent trump suit in a trick-taking game. Their subjects were drawn from the common stock of late medieval imagery: the cardinal virtues (Justice, Fortitude, Temperance), the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Devil, the celestial lights, the Last Judgement, the Emperor and Pope. The order in which one trump beats another resembled the Petrarchan "triumphs," allegorical processions in which Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame and so on. The cards were unnumbered and untitled in the luxurious Visconti-Sforza decks of Milan, and players learned the order by memory.

Michael Dummett identified three main regional orderings of the trumps in Italy, associated with Milan, Ferrara and Bologna, which differ in the placing of the virtues and of the Angel (Judgement) and the World. Some images are hard to read today. The Hanged Man, a figure suspended upside down by one foot, may reflect the Italian "shame paintings" of traitors displayed hanging in this way. The Popess has been connected with the legend of Pope Joan, or with a heretical Visconti relative, though neither theory is proven. For the general history of the deck see History of Tarot.

The Twenty-Two Cards§

The table gives the standard order with the Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith titles. The Hebrew letter and astrological attribution are those the Golden Dawn gave to the Rider-Waite-Smith card in each position.

In the Marseille numbering Justice is VIII and Strength (La Force) XI; the Golden Dawn exchanged them so that Leo (Strength) and Libra (Justice) would follow the order of the zodiac, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck adopted the change. Death traditionally bears no name on Marseille cards. The trump formerly called the Pope became "the Hierophant" in Golden Dawn and Waite usage.

From Trumps to "Arcana": The French Occult Reading§

The idea that the trumps encode secret knowledge began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed they were the remains of an Egyptian "Book of Thoth," and the Comte de Mellet linked them to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Éliphas Lévi in the 1850s proposed a different correspondence, beginning with the Magician as Aleph, and treated the trumps as hieroglyphs of a universal doctrine; see Éliphas Lévi. The terms "major arcana" and "minor arcana," from Latin arcanum, "secret," are generally credited to Lévi's follower Paul Christian (Jean-Baptiste Pitois) in the 1860s and 1870s. Papus and Oswald Wirth developed this French school, and Wirth's deck of 1889 redrew the trumps with Kabbalistic symbols.

The Golden Dawn System and the Tree of Life§

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn placed the Fool first as Aleph, assigned the trumps to the twenty-two paths connecting the ten sefirot on the Tree of Life, and derived astrological attributions from the classification of Hebrew letters in the Sefer Yetzirah as three "mothers" (elements), seven "doubles" (planets) and twelve "simples" (signs). The trumps thus became a map for meditation and visionary "path-working," as well as divination. Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith redrew them on this basis for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, and Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris reworked them again in the Thoth tarot, renaming several cards and altering two attributions; see Tarot and Qabalah in Thelema.

These attributions belong to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century occult revival. They are not found in the Renaissance decks, and readers who work with the Marseille tradition often ignore them.

Reading the Major Arcana§

In modern divinatory practice the major arcana usually signify significant forces, turning points or psychological themes, while the minor arcana describe everyday circumstances. Many readers treat a spread dominated by trumps as pointing to important matters. Common meanings, which vary between authors, include initiative and skill for the Magician, hidden knowledge and intuition for the High Priestess, sudden upheaval for the Tower, hope and renewal for the Star, and completion for the World. Death is almost always read as transformation or ending rather than literal death.

From the mid-twentieth century, writers such as Eden Gray popularised the "Fool's journey," reading the sequence as the progress of the Fool, the soul or the seeker, through the encounters represented by the other cards, ending in the integration of the World. Jungian authors such as Sallie Nichols related the trumps to archetypes of the collective unconscious. These readings have been influential in contemporary tarot but are modern interpretations rather than the intentions of the cards' Renaissance designers.

Frequently asked questions§

How many major arcana cards are there?§

There are twenty-two: twenty-one numbered trumps from I (the Magician) to XXI (the World), and the Fool, which is unnumbered or numbered 0. In the original game the Fool was not a trump but an "excuse" card.

Why are Strength and Justice numbered differently in different decks?§

In the Marseille tradition Justice is VIII and Strength XI. The Golden Dawn exchanged them to match the order of their zodiac signs, Leo and Libra, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck followed this change; the Thoth deck keeps the older numbering under new names.

What does "arcana" mean?§

Arcana is the plural of Latin arcanum, "secret" or "mystery." The terms major and minor arcana were introduced by French occultists in the nineteenth century to present the tarot as a book of esoteric teaching.

Are the major arcana linked to the Kabbalah?§

Not originally. The linking of the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two Hebrew letters was proposed in 1781 and systematised by Lévi and the Golden Dawn, which also assigned them to the paths of the Tree of Life. Jewish Kabbalah itself has no connection with tarot.

Sources and further reading§

• The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City — Michael Dummett, 1980
• A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot — Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, 1996
• A Cultural History of Tarot — Helen Farley, 2009
• The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
• The Book of Thoth — Aleister Crowley, 1944
• Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey — Sallie Nichols, 1980
• The Tarot of the Bohemians — Papus, 1889