Major and Minor Arcana

A tarot deck holds 78 cards, and they fall into two unequal groups: 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana. Arcana is simply the Latin word for secrets, so the two names translate as the greater secrets and the lesser secrets, and the difference between them is one of scale rather than rank.

How the 78 cards divide up

The 22 major arcana are numbered 0 to 21 and carry names instead of suits: The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress and so on through to The World. None of them belongs to a suit, and none of them repeats. Each appears exactly once in the deck.

The 56 minor arcana are built like an ordinary pack of playing cards: four suits of fourteen. Every suit runs ace to ten, then adds four court cards, which in most decks are the page, knight, queen and king. Four times fourteen gives 56, and 56 added to 22 gives 78.

The resemblance to a playing deck is not a coincidence. A modern pack of 52 is the same skeleton with the knight removed from each suit, which is why the two feel oddly familiar when laid side by side.

What the major arcana are taken to mean

The majors are read as the large movements: the chapters a life passes through, rather than the errands inside a week. Laid out in order from The Fool at 0 to The World at 21, the sequence is often described as a single journey, with the Fool as the figure setting off and the numbered cards as the people, pressures and lessons met along the road.

Two of them alarm beginners more than the rest. Death is conventionally read as an ending and the transition that follows it, not as a literal forecast, and The Tower as the sudden collapse of something that was built badly in the first place. Those are the traditional readings the cards have carried for a long time. They are conventions the deck hands you, not predictions the deck can make.

The numbering is not fixed across every deck. Strength and Justice occupy positions 8 and 11, and the two are swapped between the older Marseille pattern and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck that most modern packs follow. Nothing about the meanings changes. Only the order does, which matters if you count cards by number rather than by name.

The four suits of the minor arcana

The minors are read as daily life: the conversations, the work, the money and the moods that fill the space between turning points. Each suit is tied to one of the four classical elements, and the element sets the subject matter.

• Wands, also called batons or staves, tied to fire: drive, projects under way, enthusiasm, rivalry, the push needed to start something.
• Cups, also called chalices, tied to water: feeling, attachment, family and friendship, the emotional weather around a situation.
• Swords, also called blades, tied to air: thought, speech, argument, decisions, and the damage clear thinking can do when it arrives without kindness.
• Pentacles, also called coins or disks, tied to earth: money, work, the body, property, anything that has to be paid for or maintained.

Suit names vary from deck to deck and no version is more correct than another. If your pack calls the earth suit coins and the fire suit batons, every meaning travels across unchanged.

Numbers and courts inside a suit

Within a suit the numbers are usually read as a progression. The ace is the element in raw form, the beginning of the matter before anything has been done with it. The middle numbers carry it forward through effort, obstacle and negotiation. The ten sits at the far end, which reads as completion in some suits and as saturation in others: ten coins is a family fortune, ten swords is far more thinking than the problem required.

The four court cards are read either as actual people in the situation or as ways of handling it. The page tends to mean a learner or a message arriving. The knight is the suit in motion, often to excess. The queen holds the suit inwardly and knows it thoroughly. The king exercises it outwardly, with the authority and the bluntness that go with the job.

Why the split matters when you lay out cards

The practical value of the division is proportion. A spread that comes out almost entirely minor arcana is traditionally taken to describe a situation running at everyday scale, workable and within reach. A spread thick with majors suggests something structural is moving, the kind of thing that is not settled by a good conversation on Tuesday.

That is a reading convention rather than a measurement of anything, and it is worth being clear about the difference. What the two-tier structure genuinely gives a reader is a way of talking about scale, and scale is one of the few things a spread communicates quickly.

Where the two halves came from

The structure is a great deal older than the fortune telling. The earliest surviving tarot packs were painted in northern Italy in the fifteenth century for a trick-taking card game, and the 22 named cards worked there as permanent trumps, able to beat any card of any suit. The words trump and triumph share a root, and beating everything else on the table is precisely what those cards were built to do.

Reading the cards for divination came later, spreading in France towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the labels major and minor arcana are later still, the work of nineteenth-century French occult writers. The picture-heavy pack most people now learn from was published in London in 1909, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite. Its real innovation was to give the minor arcana full illustrated scenes instead of plain arrangements of cups and swords, which made the lesser secrets far easier for a newcomer to interpret. Nearly every modern deck has copied that decision since.