The Major Arcana

What makes a card "major"

The Major Arcana are the deck's named cards - The Fool, The Tower, Death - as distinct from the four numbered suits. They carry no suit and no element of their own, and in most reading traditions they outrank the Minors: where a Minor describes what is happening, a Major describes what it is about. A spread with several Majors is usually read as a period the querent is not fully steering.

The Fool's Journey, and why it is younger than it looks

The familiar reading of the sequence as a journey - The Fool setting out at 0 and arriving at The World at 21 - is a twentieth-century framing, popularised by Eden Gray in the 1960s. It is genuinely useful as a memory structure and as a way of hearing the cards in relation to each other. It is not, however, how the Renaissance decks were used, and no early source describes the trumps that way. Worth knowing which part of the tradition you are standing in.

Where the numbering disagrees

Strength and Justice swap places between traditions. In the Marseille pattern Justice is VIII and Strength XI; the Golden Dawn moved Strength to VIII and Justice to XI so the sequence would line up with the zodiac, and Waite followed them. Neither is a mistake. If you read with a Marseille deck and an RWS book, this is the first place they will disagree with each other.

The astrological attributions

Twelve of the Majors carry a zodiac sign and ten carry a planet, under the Golden Dawn system that both RWS and Thoth inherit. These attributions are what let a card be read against a live sky - The Emperor with Aries, The Moon with Pisces, The Tower with Mars. Each sign and planet has its own page here working through why the pairing was made.

The twelve signs and their cards

The ten planets and their cards