The Major Arcana

The 22 Major Arcana cards are often read as one continuous story, the Fool's Journey: a soul sets out knowing nothing, passes through the world, and finally becomes whole.

How the Major and Minor Arcana differ

The Major Arcana speak to deeper spiritual themes and inner drives: the values and inner motives that lead a person to make certain choices. When a Major card turns up in a reading, it usually means the forces behind the question run deep and will not shift easily. Some readers take this "hard to change" quality further and link it to cause and effect or karma, but there is no consensus on that ^uncertain. A more restrained reading is that the Major cards mark issues with more weight and longer-lasting effects, without necessarily implying karmic payback in any mystical sense. The Minor Arcana, by contrast, deal mostly with concrete everyday matters that change easily over time; see The Minor Arcana.

Why read them as a journey

Drawn on its own, a Major card stands for a major theme in life. Laid out in order from 0 to 21, though, the cards show a clear line of growth. This reading is not a system Waite spelled out in his own writing. Later authors (especially popular teaching books in the vein of Eden Gray) drew it out, and it has been widely adopted as a framework for remembering and understanding the cards ^inferred. It is more useful as a thread that helps you remember each card and place it at a "stage" than as the one correct doctrine.

The three-part structure

The Major cards are often divided into three rows of seven, each representing a level in the growth of awareness:

First row: the self in the material world (I–VII)

From The Magician to The Chariot. The Fool (0, where the story begins) meets The Magician, who can shape reality; The High Priestess, who stands for intuition; The Empress, who stands for nurture and abundance; The Emperor, who stands for structure and authority; The Hierophant, who stands for tradition and established systems; and The Lovers, who must make a choice. Finally the Fool uses willpower to bring all of this together and sets off driving The Chariot. In this row the self establishes its place in the outer world.

Second row: the self in the inner world (VIII–XIV)

From Strength to Temperance. It runs from Strength, which tames the inner instincts, to The Hermit, who withdraws inward to reflect; Wheel of Fortune, which faces impermanence; Justice, which asks you to bear the consequences of your choices; The Hanged Man, who sees the world upside down; Death, which goes through complete transformation; and finally Temperance, which learns to reconcile opposites and find balance. In this row the self faces its inner life and its fate, and learns to take responsibility and to integrate.

Third row: the self beyond itself (XV–XXI)

From The Devil to The World. First the self has to recognize and break free of what binds it in The Devil, and go through the shattered illusions of The Tower. Only then can it reach The Star, which stands for hope; The Moon, which faces the unknown and the unconscious; The Sun, which moves toward clarity; and Judgement, which completes a stage, arriving at last at The World, wholeness and completion. In this row the self is taken apart and reborn, and moves toward integration.

A memory aid: mountains are mountains

There is a Zen saying that helps with the three rows: "First mountains are mountains, then mountains are no longer mountains, then mountains are mountains again." The first row (I–VII) is concerned only with the self: what I want is simply what is, so mountains are mountains. In the second row (VIII–XIV) the self starts to weigh social rules and other people's opinions and thinks twice about everything, so mountains are no longer mountains. In the third row (XV–XXI) the self stops caring about outside judgment and returns to a free, unselfconscious state. The ease it has now is completely different from the selfishness of the first row, and mountains are mountains again ^inferred. The framework also lines up roughly with Freud's id, ego and superego, and with the analogy of social classes in Plato's Republic (temperance, strength, and justice or prudence). For the details of these correspondences, see How to Learn Tarot.

Mirrors and the center of the second row (advanced)

The following is drawn from Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, where she analyzes the internal order of the "turning inward" row (VIII–XIV). It is offered as a reference for understanding how these cards relate to one another.

The second row largely mirrors the first: many cards look like the card directly above them turned around. For example, the gender polarity between The Magician and The High Priestess is reversed in Strength and The Hermit (Strength's central figure is a woman and the Hermit is a man), yet the underlying principle of light and dark, outer and inner, stays in the same place.
The Wheel of Fortune is the peak of the "outer lessons", and the Hanged Man is something else entirely: Wheel of Fortune carries on from the natural, non-intellectual world of The Empress and opens onto a vision of inner mystery. It is also the highest point that the preceding series of lessons on "how to mature and succeed in the outer world" can reach: it presents an overall vision of the world and of one's own fate that demands a response. The Hanged Man, on the other hand, presents no further lessons. It is an image of awakening itself: the outer personality turned completely "upside down" by an experience that is intensely real and intensely personal.
Justice sits at the exact center of the deck: Justice, placed between the Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man, is the midpoint of all 22 Major Arcana. It carefully balances the scales between inner and outer, past and future, reason and intuition, knowledge and experience.
The numbering dispute between Strength and Justice changes the logic of the whole row: Waite swapped the numbers of Strength and Justice. In the Marseille deck and the Golden Dawn system, Justice is VIII and Strength is XI; Waite made Strength VIII and Justice XI (see The Three Main Traditions). This is more than a game with numbers. If Justice comes first, the story of the second row begins with "a rational assessment of one's life", followed by the decision whether to look inward for deeper meaning, and the Hermit and the Hanged Man are two responses to that assessment. If Strength comes first, the story begins with "releasing and taming suppressed inner passions" and uses that energy as fuel for the path of introspection, and Justice and the Hanged Man are two responses that this inner work draws out, one from reason and one from a deeper place [inferred; Pollack presents two possible readings and does not settle the question].

Another link between Death and the Fool (advanced reading)

What follows is an alternative reading, offered alongside the usual three-row Fool's Journey above. It does not replace it.

Death is the only card that links straight back to the Fool: one reading starts from the direction the Fool walks (right to left, matching the direction Hebrew is written) and argues that if you follow that order through, Death is the only card in the deck that connects directly back to the Fool and returns its energy to the original driving force. This reading treats Death as the dividing line where "the Fool's material journey" ends and "the journey of spiritual ascent" begins. After Death, the Fool does not simply head toward the usual ending of The Sun, Judgement and The World. It first passes through The Star, The Moon and The Sun, rising all the way, and finally in The World reaches what is described as "becoming a great presence in the night sky". ^inferred

Using the framework in a spread

If the Major cards in a reading cluster in the first row, the question usually has to do with "how to find solid footing in outer reality". If they cluster in the second row, it usually concerns inner work, emotions and a sense of fate. If they cluster in the third row, the querent is often going through some kind of transformation or moving beyond a former self.
If the Major cards in a spread have consecutive or nearby numbers (for example, The Tower and The Star together), you can often read them in narrative order as "first this happened, then it moved toward that" ^inferred. This is only a supporting clue, though. It cannot replace judging what each card means on its own.
The Fool is numbered 0. It wanders outside the whole sequence and also runs through all of it. Traditionally, 0 is understood as the main character of the story rather than the start or end of the sequence.