The Major Arcana Explained
Updated: Oct 24
The Major Arcana Explained
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Whether you're brand new to tarot and wondering what those famous cards actually mean, trying to make sense of a deck someone handed you, or simply curious why images like the Tower and the Death card keep echoing through movies and music, this guide walks through what the Major Arcana actually is, in plain terms. Read it straight through or jump to the section you need. There's no right or wrong way to take it in.
1. The Major Arcana in a Nutshell
A standard tarot deck holds seventy-eight cards, and twenty-two of them form the Major Arcana, the deck's famous trump cards, numbered 0 through 21, running from the Fool to the World. The name comes from the Latin arcanum, meaning secret or mystery, so Major Arcana literally means "the greater mysteries." The other fifty-six cards, the Minor Arcana, deal with the everyday textures of life; the Majors carry its great themes: beginnings, love, collapse, death and rebirth, awakening, completion.
That division is the heart of the system. Each Major card is an archetype, a figure or moment so universal that people recognize it across centuries and cultures, and together the twenty-two form a map of human transformation. In a reading, a Major Arcana card is traditionally understood to signal that something chapter-sized is moving, which is why these cards fascinate psychologists and artists as much as fortune-tellers.
2. Where the Major Arcana Came From
The honest history is stranger than the legend. Tarot was born as a card game. Playing cards reached Europe in the late 1300s, and sometime in the 1430s or 1440s, in the courts of northern Italy, someone added a fifth suit of picture cards to the deck: the carte da trionfi, or triumph cards, which could beat any ordinary card in play. This is where the word trump comes from. The oldest surviving examples, the hand-painted Visconti-Sforza cards made for Milanese nobility, are among the most beautiful objects of the Italian Renaissance, and for roughly three hundred and fifty years the trumps were used for trick-taking games, not divination.
The occult chapter began in 1781, when the French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin declared that the trumps secretly preserved the ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth. He offered no evidence, and Egyptology later dismantled the claim entirely, but the idea caught fire. A Parisian known as Etteilla became the first professional tarot card reader and published the first deck designed for divination. In the nineteenth century the magician Éliphas Lévi linked the twenty-two trumps to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, tying tarot to Kabbalah, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England wove all of it into one grand symbolic system.
Then came the deck most people picture when they hear the word tarot. In 1909, the scholar and mystic A. E. Waite commissioned the artist Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate a new deck, now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith. Her images, rich, strange, and instantly readable, became the template for the modern tarot, and the thousands of decks published since largely descend from her vision. So the tradition carries two true stories at once: a Renaissance parlor game, and two centuries of genuine symbolic depth built on a historical mistake.
3. The Fool's Journey
Before meeting the cards one by one, it helps to know the frame that holds them together. The Major Arcana is traditionally read as a single story called the Fool's Journey, a teaching popularized in the twentieth century by the tarot writer Eden Gray. The Fool is numbered 0 because he is not one station among the others; he is the traveler, the innocent soul who walks through all twenty-one of them, and the sequence traces his education.
Many readers divide the journey into three rows of seven. The first row, Magician through Chariot, teaches the worldly lessons: skill, nurture, authority, tradition, love, and will. The second row, Strength through Temperance, turns inward through trial, solitude, surrender, and loss. The third, Devil through World, faces the great forces of shadow, collapse, hope, and awakening, and ends in wholeness.
4. The 22 Cards of the Major Arcana
The portraits below follow the imagery and numbering of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which swapped the older positions of Strength and Justice; in the French Marseille tradition, Justice sits at 8 and Strength at 11. One principle applies across all of them and will not be repeated card by card: no card is simply good or bad. Each carries a gift and a shadow, and context decides which face shows.
0. The Fool. A young traveler steps toward a cliff's edge, satchel light, a white rose in hand, a little dog at his heels. He stands for pure potential, the leap taken before the outcome is known, beginnings embraced with open hands. His shadow is recklessness, the step that looks before nothing.
1. The Magician. At a table bearing a wand, cup, sword, and coin, one hand raised to heaven and one pointed to earth, he turns ideas into reality. This is the card of will, skill, and focused intention: everything needed is already on the table.
2. The High Priestess. Seated between a black pillar and a white one, before a veil, with the moon at her feet, she guards knowledge that cannot be spoken. Her domain is intuition, stillness, and the wisdom that arrives when nothing is forced.
3. The Empress. Enthroned in a ripening field, crowned with stars, she is abundance itself: creativity, nurture, the body, the garden, everything that grows when it is tended. Her warning side is smothering care or comfort that lulls.
4. The Emperor. Armored on a stone throne, he builds the structures the Empress's garden needs to survive: order, boundaries, law, responsibility. At his best he is protection and stability; at his worst, rigidity and control.
5. The Hierophant. A religious teacher seated between pillars, hand raised in blessing, keeper of tradition and transmitted wisdom. He represents institutions, mentors, and the value of learning what others have already mapped, along with the question of when conformity stops serving.
6. The Lovers. Beneath an angel's blessing, two figures face one another. The card speaks of love and union, but just as deeply of choice: the moment of aligning your life with what you truly value, with everything that must be given up to choose it.
7. The Chariot. A crowned driver steers two sphinxes, one black and one white, that would happily pull in opposite directions. Victory here comes through will and discipline, holding contradictory forces on a single road long enough to arrive.
8. Strength. A woman gently closes, or gently opens, the jaws of a lion, with no weapon and no strain. The power pictured is courage as softness: patience, compassion, and inner mastery over raw instinct rather than force against it.
9. The Hermit. An old figure stands alone on a mountain peak, holding up a lantern with a six-pointed star inside. He withdraws from the noise to find what can only be found in solitude, and the light he discovers is carried back for others to see by.
10. Wheel of Fortune. A great wheel turns in the sky, creatures rising on one side and falling on the other. Luck, cycles, fate, the turn of seasons: the card's blunt teaching is that whatever is turning will keep turning, in both directions.
11. Justice. A clear-eyed figure holds scales in one hand and an upright sword in the other. Cause meets effect here; truth is weighed, accounts come due, and decisions ask to be made with honesty rather than comfort.
12. The Hanged Man. A man dangles upside down from a living tree by one foot, his face serene, a halo around his head. Nothing about him struggles. The card teaches surrender, sacred pause, and the entirely new view of things that only becomes visible once striving stops.
13. Death. A skeleton in armor rides a white horse while, far behind, the sun rises between two towers. Despite its reputation, the card almost never points to physical dying; it marks necessary endings, the clearing away of what is finished so that something can follow.
14. Temperance. An angel pours water between two cups, one foot on land and one in the stream. This is the alchemist's card: blending opposites, finding the middle path, healing through patience and proportion rather than extremes.
15. The Devil. A horned figure looms over two chained humans, and the detail that defines the card is that their chains hang loose enough to lift off. Addiction, obsession, materialism, bondage of every kind, entered willingly and escapable the moment it is honestly seen.
16. The Tower. Lightning strikes a crowned tower and figures fall from its windows. Structures built on false ground collapse suddenly, and the shock, however brutal, is also a liberation: what crumbles here needed to crumble.
17. The Star. Under a vast night sky, a woman kneels at a pool, pouring water onto land and stream alike. After the Tower's ruin comes this quiet renewal: hope, healing, and faith restored, not loudly, but surely.
18. The Moon. A path runs between two towers under moonlight while a dog and a wolf howl and a crayfish climbs from the pool. This is the territory of dreams, illusion, fear, and the unconscious, where things are real but nothing is quite what it appears, and the only way through is to keep walking by uncertain light.
19. The Sun. A radiant child rides a white horse beneath an enormous sun and a wall of sunflowers. Clarity, vitality, joy, and success in full daylight; what was confusing under the Moon is now simply visible.
20. Judgement. An angel sounds a trumpet and figures rise from their coffins with open arms. The card announces awakening and reckoning at once: an honest accounting of the past, forgiveness, and the call to rise into a new life.
21. The World. A dancer moves inside a laurel wreath while the four fixed creatures of the zodiac watch from the corners. Completion, integration, wholeness: the journey's end that gathers everything learned, and the threshold where some new Fool steps off the next cliff.
5. Reading the Major Arcana as a Language
Experienced readers treat the twenty-two cards less like twenty-two separate meanings and more like a vocabulary. The cards define one another: Death and the Tower are both endings, but one is a season closing and the other a wall coming down; the High Priestess and the Hermit both know things, but one receives in stillness and one searches alone. Meaning sharpens in the contrasts, and in a spread the Majors converse, modifying and answering each other the way words do in a sentence.
That is also how the deck earns its second life beyond divination. Many people who never ask it about the future use the Major Arcana as a mirror for reflection, drawing a card and asking what the image illuminates about a situation, a pattern, or a choice. Carl Jung considered tarot's images expressions of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, and whether or not a person follows him that far, the practical experience is the same: the cards give shape and language to things that are otherwise hard to say, and over time the deck becomes a way of thinking.
Want to Learn More About the Major Arcana?
Everything IFS Academy offers a Free Major Arcana Course, written specifically for everyday people, that teaches everything on this page in full depth, one lesson at a time.
Disclaimer: Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute or any tarot school, deck publisher, or esoteric tradition. This guide is offered for educational and self-reflection purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, or professional advice. Only a qualified professional who knows your situation can diagnose, treat, or advise you.
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