The Major Arcana — 22 Cards of the Soul's Journey

The Major Arcana is the soul of the deck. These twenty-two cards depict not the small weather of a Tuesday afternoon but the great seasons of a life — the falling-in-love, the awakening, the loss, the surrender, the rebirth. They are sometimes called the Trumps because they outweigh, in any reading, the cards of the Minor Arcana around them. Where a Five of Cups speaks of a particular sadness, The Tower speaks of the moment a whole way of being collapses.

The cards are numbered 0 through 21, and many readers see them as a sequence — The Fool's Journey — in which the protagonist (the Fool, card 0) walks through the lessons of every other card and arrives at the wholeness of The World. Whether you read them as a journey, as archetypes from a dream, or as messengers from your own deeper mind, the Major Arcana speak the language of fate, vocation, and meaning.

When a Major Arcana card appears in a reading, slow down. Something is asking to be understood at a deeper level than a yes-or-no question can hold.