Tarot 101: Understanding the Major and Minor Arcana
My Introduction to Tarot Class started this week. First thing I tell every student: tarot is a 78-card symbolic system, not exactly a fortune-telling machine. It's not handing you an exact future. It's a mirror, a tool to tap into your own intuition and find personal meaning in the symbols in front of you. That's it. That's the whole point.
The Two Arcana
The deck is split into two parts. One of the two is split into an additional 4 parts but lets just introduce the main two.
Major Arcana is the first 22 cards, your major life themes, archetypes, turning points, the deep spiritual lessons on your journey. Big picture stuff. You'll see them labeled 0 through 21, name right at the bottom.
Minor Arcana is the last 56, your day-to-day experiences, emotions, challenges, the practical stuff. If Major Arcana is the big lesson, Minor Arcana is all the in betweens.
Inside the Minor Arcana
This is one of the two that is split into four suits (like four suits of a card deck): Wands, Swords, Cups, Pentacles.
Wands, Swords, Cups and Pentacles are like fire, air, water and earth. They each have theme representations of your life like passions (fire), thinking/communicating (air), emotions (emotions) and foundations (pentacles).
There are 10 versions plus 4 Court Cards of each of these theme representations of your life.
This is why tarot can get so overwhelming. There are SO MANY CARDS with SO MANY MEANINGS.
If you take one card a day to pick apart and learn, that’s 78 days, (a little over a month of learning) which isn’t a lot compared to some other subjects.
The Deck I Use
I teach with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (RWS), the 1909 deck that set the modern visual standard, most decks you'll run into are based on it in some way. Can you use a different deck? Sure, but the symbolism shifts. If you're a flexible person, branch out once you've got the foundation.
Terms Worth Knowing
Querent: the person asking the question.
Intuition: knowledge you acquire without thinking or analyzing it out, your psychic hit.
Spread: how the cards are arranged in a reading. Positions may or may not carry meaning.
Significator: a card chosen to represent the situation or the querent.
Reversal: a card drawn upside down, blocked, resisting, internalizing, or delayed energy.
Summary
At the end of the day, Major and Minor Arcana aren't two separate decks, they're two halves of the same story. Major Arcana hands you the big chapters, the turning points and lessons that shape who you're becoming. Minor Arcana fills in everything in between, the small, everyday moments that make up the life you're actually living. Once you can spot the difference at a glance, reading starts to click in a whole new way, and honestly, that's most of the battle. Grab your deck, start with the Major Arcana in order, then work your way through each suit. One card a day and you'll know the whole thing before you know it.
