The Major Arcana as symbolism: a card-by-card guide

The twenty-two cards of the tarot’s Major Arcana are, before anything else, a sequence of pictures — a procession of figures and scenes that has accumulated meaning over six centuries. This guide reads them as exactly that: as iconography and cultural history, tracing what each card has traditionally been taken to symbolise and where those images come from. It is not a manual for telling the future, and nothing here should be read as a prediction or as advice. Think of it as looking at a very old set of paintings and asking what they were made to say.

Where the images come from

Tarot began not as a mystical system but as a card game. In the courts of fifteenth-century northern Italy, wealthy families commissioned lavish decks called carte da trionfi to play tarocchi, a trick-taking game. The oldest substantially surviving examples are the Visconti-Sforza decks, hand-painted in Milan in the 1440s–50s for the ruling families. The “trumps” that became the Major Arcana were simply the game’s highest cards, illustrated with a parade of stock allegorical figures — Death, the Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune — that any educated person of the day would have recognised from Renaissance art and religious processions.

Only much later, in eighteenth-century France, was tarot reinterpreted as esoteric wisdom. The scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin argued in 1781 that the cards preserved lost Egyptian knowledge — a claim with no historical basis — and the fortune-teller who wrote as Etteilla built the first systematic divinatory method around them in the 1780s. The imagery most people know today, however, comes from a single early-twentieth-century deck.

The deck that set the standard

In 1909 the London publisher William Rider & Son issued a deck designed by the artist Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) to the specifications of the occultist A. E. Waite (1857–1942). Now usually called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck — restoring Smith’s name after decades of neglect — it is the most influential tarot ever made, with well over a hundred million copies in circulation. Smith’s clear, symbol-laden Art Nouveau images are the ones most modern descriptions of the cards implicitly refer to, and the ones described below. Two other historic patterns are worth knowing: the older Tarot de Marseille, a woodcut tradition standardised in France; and the Thoth deck, designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris in the 1940s.

The twenty-two cards, and what they have symbolised

The Major Arcana is often read as a sequence — sometimes called “the Fool’s journey” — running from 0 to 21. Here is what each card has traditionally represented in that iconographic tradition.

• 0 — The Fool. A figure stepping off, bundle on a stick, dog at heel. Traditionally the innocent beginning, potential and the leap into the unknown.
• I — The Magician. A figure at a table of tools, one hand up, one down. Symbol of skill, will and the channelling of higher into lower — “as above, so below.”
• II — The High Priestess. A seated woman between two pillars with a veil behind her. Associated with mystery, intuition and hidden knowledge.
• III — The Empress. A crowned woman amid grain and greenery. Traditionally abundance, the fruitfulness of nature, and nurture; the archetypal mother figure.
• IV — The Emperor. An enthroned ruler. Symbol of authority, structure and worldly order.
• V — The Hierophant. A religious teacher with two acolytes. Associated with tradition, institutions and received doctrine.
• VI — The Lovers. A pair beneath a winged figure. Traditionally union, but also choice and the weighing of paths.
• VII — The Chariot. A driver and two contrary steeds or sphinxes. Symbol of willpower, direction and mastery over opposing forces.
• VIII — Strength. A woman calmly closing (or opening) a lion’s jaws. Traditionally inner fortitude and gentleness over brute force.
• IX — The Hermit. A robed elder with a lantern. Associated with solitude, reflection and the search for meaning.
• X — Wheel of Fortune. A turning wheel. One of the oldest allegories on the cards, symbolising change, cycles and the turns of chance.
• XI — Justice. A figure with scales and sword. Traditionally fairness, balance and consequence.
• XII — The Hanged Man. A man suspended calmly by one foot. Symbol of suspension, surrender and seeing things from a reversed perspective.
• XIII — Death. A skeletal figure, often on horseback. Rarely read literally; traditionally endings, transformation and the clearing away of the old.
• XIV — Temperance. A winged figure pouring between two vessels. Associated with moderation, blending and patience.
• XV — The Devil. A horned figure over two chained figures whose chains hang loose. Traditionally bondage, materialism and self-imposed limitation.
• XVI — The Tower. A struck tower shedding falling figures. Symbol of sudden upheaval and the collapse of false structures.
• XVII — The Star. A figure pouring water beneath stars. Traditionally hope, renewal and calm after difficulty.
• XVIII — The Moon. A moon over a path between two towers, with a dog, wolf and crayfish. Associated with illusion, dream and the uncertain.
• XIX — The Sun. A radiant sun over a child and sunflowers. Symbol of clarity, vitality and joy.
• XX — Judgement. An angel with a trumpet, figures rising. Traditionally awakening, reckoning and renewal.
• XXI — The World. A dancing figure within a wreath, flanked by four creatures. Symbol of completion, wholeness and the closing of the cycle.

Reading the pictures, not the future

What makes the Major Arcana rewarding to study is how densely it borrows. The four creatures around the World card are the same evangelist symbols found in medieval churches; the Wheel of Fortune is a direct descendant of a medieval moral commonplace; the pillars of the High Priestess echo the temple of Solomon in the imagery Waite drew on. Smith’s genius was to pack each card with legible symbols — colours, animals, gestures, landscapes — so that the deck reads almost like a picture-book of Western allegory.

Approached this way, tarot is a window onto how earlier centuries pictured virtue, fate, authority and change. The cards have been used for a card game, for meditation, for storytelling and for divination, and people continue to use them in all those ways. This guide describes the images and their history; it makes no claim that the cards foretell events, and it is offered for cultural and artistic interest rather than as guidance of any kind.