The Major Arcana

The Major Arcana are the twenty-two picture cards that stand outside the four suits: the Fool, numbered 0, and the trumps numbered I to XXI, from the Magician to the World. Where the Minor Arcana describe the everyday weather of a life, the majors are usually read as its larger themes: forces, turning points and lessons that shape a period rather than a day. When several majors appear in one reading, many readers take it as a sign that the question touches something more than circumstance.

Their images draw on the shared stock of late medieval European art: virtues such as Justice, Temperance and Strength; figures of authority such as the Emperor and the Hierophant; the heavenly bodies; and the Christian last things of Death and Judgement. Waite and Smith kept the traditional subjects but reshaped many of them, adding the symbolism of the Golden Dawn and of Western esoteric tradition. The High Priestess sits between the pillars of Solomon's Temple, the Lovers become Adam and Eve in the garden, and the Wheel of Fortune is ringed with Hebrew and Latin letters and the four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision.

The majors are often read as a sequence as well as individually. They can be arranged in three rows of seven after the Fool, read as stages of a life, or followed as a story in which each card answers the one before. One of those readings, the Fool's journey, is set out below.