Anatomy of a Tarot Deck
A standard tarot deck has 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana cards about life-level turning points and 56 Minor Arcana cards about everyday matters. That division is the starting point for understanding any reading.
How a deck is built
A standard tarot deck (taking the Rider-Waite-Smith system as the reference) has 78 cards in two parts:
- The Major Arcana (the "major cards"): 22 cards numbered 0–21, running from The Fool to The World. Each card stands for an archetypal experience or turning point on the scale of a whole life. When one appears in a spread, it usually means the matter carries real weight, has a large effect and reaches beyond everyday business; it touches things like values and inner drive that don't change easily. Some readers tie this weight of the major cards to cause and effect or karma. That is more of a personal interpretive preference than an established rule of the tarot system.
- The Minor Arcana (the "minor cards"): 56 cards, 14 in each of four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. The minor cards speak to the everyday level: specific events, specific feelings, specific choices. The major cards are like the weather; the minor cards are like what actually happens over the course of a day. The minor cards split into two further layers. The 40 number cards (Ace to Ten) correspond to concrete, changeable day-to-day matters; from today to tomorrow, the situation and mood around the same matter can slide from a Three to a Four to a Five. The 16 court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King) correspond to the people involved in the matter, or to a type of personality trait.
This division between major and minor cards is the starting point for understanding any reading. Many major cards in a spread suggest the period itself is a turning point; many minor cards suggest the concrete, detailed, workable level matters more. When the cards drawn stand for a specific person, the three groups work at different levels: the major cards suit an analysis of the person's nature and values, the number cards show their concrete everyday behavior, and the court cards can map directly onto a person or a personality type. The three usually need to be read against each other; relying on just one of them in isolation misses too much.
Seen from another angle, you can also understand the division by "which question each part answers in a reading." The number cards mainly tell you what concretely happened and roughly when. The court cards tell you who is involved and how each of them is handling it. The major cards tell you why it happened and what inner lesson the experience corresponds to. A reading that uses both major and minor cards is usually enough to explain "what happened, why it happened, and who can help right now." This is also the logic behind the learning order found in many courses: learn the minor cards first to build a foundation, then learn the major cards to explain causes.
How a card comes to "mean" something
The meaning of each card isn't written in isolation. It is built up from several systems layered together, which is why it helps to settle on a correspondence table first (see Correspondence Table):
- The image itself: Rider-Waite-Smith was the first mainstream deck to draw the minor cards as full scenes (instead of a simple arrangement of a few cups or swords), and the details of the picture carry meaning in their own right.
- Number: Numbers in Tarot. One through ten each carry a shared layer of meaning in every suit.
- Suit and element: The Minor Arcana. The four elements, Fire, Water, Air and Earth, define the area of life a card is concerned with.
- Astrology and the Kabbalah: Astrological Correspondences and The Kabbalah and the Tree of Life. Behind the major cards lies an older system of correspondences, a framework handed down by the Golden Dawn tradition.
- Upright and reversed: Reading Reversals. When the same card comes up upside down, its meaning changes, though it is not simply "flipped."
When you are just starting out, you don't need to hold all of these systems in your head at once. Starting from the image and the keywords is enough. The systems are there to link scattered memories into a web once you already know the card meanings well.
Should you "open" a new deck?
Many beginners hear that a new deck should first go through an "opening ritual," followed by drawing a "deck spirit" card to stand for the deck's "personality." Before deciding whether to do this, one thing is worth stating clearly: tarot cards have no magical function in themselves. Whether you perform an opening ritual is purely a matter of personal belief, and skipping it has no effect at all on whether the deck can be used.
If you want to do it, a common approach borrows the four elements from The Minor Arcana to symbolically "cleanse" the new deck of the scattered energy left by people who handled it before, and then make the deck "your own." For example, you might pass the cards over a candle flame (for Fire), smoke them with sage (for Air), or bury them in a pile of crystals for a while (for Earth). Avoid rinsing paper cards with water. Drawing the "deck spirit" means shuffling and then drawing one card by intuition, and treating it as a metaphor for how the deck reads. If you draw Temperance, for instance, you might take it to mean the deck reads on the cautious side and avoids absolute answers. There is no fixed standard for which card you draw or how you interpret the metaphor; it is up to each person, and the point is the sense of ritual that helps you form a connection with a new deck.