The 78 Tarot Cards Explained — A Complete Guide to the Major and Minor Arcana

Where Tarot Came From — A Card Game Turned Divination Tool

Tarot is often said to descend from ancient Egypt or secret mystical orders, but its documented origin is fifteenth-century Italy. The deck began as tarocchi, a trick-taking card game popular among the nobility; the lavishly hand-painted Visconti-Sforza cards commissioned in Milan are among the oldest surviving tarot decks. In other words, tarot started life as entertainment, not prophecy.

The link between tarot and divination emerged some three hundred years later, in eighteenth-century France. Antoine Court de Gebelin popularized the claim that the cards concealed ancient Egyptian wisdom, and a fortune-teller writing under the name Etteilla published the first decks and manuals designed specifically for card reading. The Egyptian-origin theory was later shown to be baseless, but the tradition of reading tarot as a symbolic system dates from this era.

The most widely used deck today is the Rider-Waite deck, published in England in 1909. Conceived by the mystic scholar Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, it was the first popular deck to give every numbered card a full pictorial scene, letting even beginners intuit a meaning at a glance. Countless later decks follow its imagery, which is why most tarot books teach from it as the de facto standard.

How the 78 Cards Are Organized

A tarot deck contains 78 cards in two groups. The first is the Major Arcana — 22 cards, each with a unique name and number from 0 (the Fool) to 21 (the World). "Arcana" comes from the Latin word for secrets or mysteries, and the Major cards are traditionally read as symbols of life's great turning points and universal themes.

The second group is the Minor Arcana, 56 cards divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. Each suit runs from Ace through Ten, plus four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, and King — for fourteen cards per suit. If that structure sounds like an ordinary playing-card deck with its spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs, that is no coincidence: both descend from the same family of European card games.

By convention, the Major Arcana speaks to the broad arcs of life and inner growth, while the Minor Arcana handles the concrete situations and emotions of everyday experience. Many readers treat a spread heavy with Major cards as a sign that the question touches something significant. It is worth remembering that this is a long-standing interpretive custom rather than a verified law.

The Major Arcana — One Story Called the Fool's Journey

The 22 Major Arcana cards are often read as a single narrative known as the Fool's Journey. Card 0, the Fool, is a traveler stepping off a cliff edge with no idea what lies ahead. Along the way this innocent learns skill from the Magician, intuition from the High Priestess, and abundance and order from the Empress and Emperor, gathering experience card by card.

Midway through the journey the Fool meets forces beyond anyone's control — the turning Wheel of Fortune — endures the perspective-flipping trial of the Hanged Man, and passes through the farewell to old things symbolized by the Death card. After the bondage and collapse shown by the Devil and the Tower, the traveler moves through the Star's hope and the Moon's uncertainty, arrives at the joy of the Sun, and completes the cycle with card 21, the World.

This narrative is what makes the Major Arcana learnable without rote memorization. If you remember each card as a stage of the journey, a card in a reading becomes a metaphor for where things stand — beginning, trial, transformation, or completion. The table below lists all 22 cards with their core keywords.

The Minor Arcana — Four Suits, Four Elements

The four Minor Arcana suits are paired with the four classical elements of Western esoteric tradition. Wands correspond to fire — passion, motivation, work, and challenges. Cups correspond to water — emotions, love, and relationships. Swords correspond to air — thought, judgment, conflict, and communication. Pentacles correspond to earth — money, health, and material foundations. The suit alone tells you roughly which area of life a card is speaking to.

The numbered cards in each suit are commonly read as an arc: the element's energy sprouts at the Ace, develops through the middle numbers, peaks, and resolves by the Ten. An Ace represents pure potential in that domain, a Five often marks mid-journey conflict or hardship, and a Ten shows the culmination — or sometimes the excess — of the theme. Because the Rider-Waite deck illustrates every numbered card with a full scene, this progression is easy to follow visually.

The sixteen court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, and King of each suit — are traditionally read as personality types, levels of maturity, or attitudes the questioner might adopt. The Page carries a learner's curiosity, the Knight charges forward with action, the Queen embodies deep inner command of the element, and the King wields it outwardly with mastery. Whether a court card points to an actual person or an attitude depends on the context of the question.

Upright and Reversed — Is a Flipped Card a Bad Card?

When a card lands with its image right side up it is called upright; upside down, reversed. It is tempting to assume a reversal means bad news, but the traditional convention is subtler. A reversed card is generally read as the upright meaning weakened, delayed, turned inward, or tipped into excess or deficiency.

For example, if the upright Chariot means confident forward drive, the reversed Chariot can suggest momentum that has lost its direction — a cue to pause and check the route. Conversely, a heavy card appearing reversed is sometimes read as that burden beginning to lift. A reversal is less an omen than a lens that views the same theme from a different angle.

Plenty of readers skip reversals entirely and read every card upright, since the 78 upright meanings already offer ample range. Most beginner guides suggest getting comfortable with upright meanings first and adding reversals later if desired. Either approach is a stylistic choice, not a rule.

Learning to Read the Symbols

The real pleasure of tarot lies less in memorizing keywords than in observing the pictures. Rider-Waite cards are dense with deliberate symbolism — the figures' postures and expressions, the weather in the background, the colors, the recurring props. Conventional grammar has grown up around these details: white lilies for purity, red roses for passion, mountains for challenges to overcome, flowing water for the movement of emotion.

The heart of tarot reading is that different symbols catch your eye depending on your question. Ask about your career and one part of a card stands out; ask about a relationship and another part does. Readers often describe this as the card "speaking." From a psychological standpoint, it can be described as projecting your situation onto an ambiguous image — a structured way of thinking out loud.

A rewarding way to enjoy tarot, then, is to notice your own first impression of a card before checking the book meaning, and then layer the two together with your question. The image's immediate impression, the traditional keywords, and your actual situation combine into the richest story — and the process itself is a genuinely useful tool for putting vague thoughts into words.

Enjoying Tarot in a Healthy Way

There is no scientific evidence that tarot cards predict the future or influence events. The value of tarot lies elsewhere: its 78 symbolic images work as mirrors that help you look at your circumstances and feelings from a fresh angle. Picture cards are even used as conversation openers in some counseling settings — evidence of the genuine power of symbolic imagery to unlock thought, quite apart from any claim of prophecy.

The healthy stance toward a tarot result is therefore "here is another perspective," never "this is what will happen." Important decisions should always rest on real information and your own judgment; tarot serves well as a light catalyst for organizing your thinking along the way. Unse Hanjan's tarot services are built in exactly this spirit — for entertainment and self-reflection, to be enjoyed as a fun point of reference.

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