The Major Arcana: Twenty-Two Allegories
The named picture cards are the part of tarot most people recognise. They began as the trumps of a card game and became a gallery of allegories.
What the Major Arcana are
The Major Arcana are the named cards of a tarot pack. A standard 78-card pack usually has 22 of them, typically numbered from 0 to 21. They correspond to the trump cards used in tarot card games, although card players rarely use the term "Major Arcana", which belongs to divinatory use.
Where the name came from
The terms "Major Arcana" and "Minor Arcana" originate with the nineteenth-century writer Jean-Baptiste Pitois, who wrote as Paul Christian. Arcana is Latin for secrets; the name tells you more about the occult revival than about the cards' origins as a game.
From the Fool to the World
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck the sequence runs from 0, The Fool, to 21, The World. Between them come figures of power, virtue, fortune and the heavens, drawn from the visual language of late medieval and Renaissance Europe: emperors and popes, allegories of virtues, the wheel of fortune, the sun and moon.
Names and order changed over time
- In the Waite–Smith deck, the card called the Papess in older packs became The High Priestess and no longer wears a papal tiara.
- Waite swapped the positions of Strength and Justice so that they fitted the astrological correspondences taught by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
- The Lovers changed from a scene of a clothed couple receiving a blessing to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Reading them as pictures
Looked at as images rather than oracles, the trumps are a compact picture book of ideas Europeans used for centuries: the turning of fortune, the virtues, the passage of time. That is reason enough to study them closely, without asking them to predict anything.
Revised 2026-10-22