The 22 Major Arcana: the main archetypes

The Major Arcana are easiest to remember not individually, but as a story. It's called the Fool's Journey: the zero card leaves home and goes through twenty-one experiences until he returns whole.

You can read this story on any level. As a person's biography from youth to maturity. As a single project from idea to result. As a single conversation from the first phrase to goodbye. The scale changes, the sequence doesn't.

The first third: the world teaches

1. The Fool: a beginning with no guarantees. A readiness to step forward without knowing what comes next.
2. The Magician: you have the tools. The only question is whether you'll pick them up.
3. The High Priestess: what you know but don't admit out loud.
4. The Empress: care, growth, abundance. The ability to create.
5. The Emperor: rules, boundaries, structure. The ability to hold things together.
6. The Hierophant: tradition and teacher. What you were taught before you were you.
7. The Lovers: a choice you'll have to make yourself.
8. The Chariot: movement through effort. Two forces pull in different directions, and you still have to drive.

The second third: the person grows up

1. Strength: not about muscles. About the ability not to snap.
2. The Hermit: a pause and solitude in which you can finally hear yourself.
3. Wheel of Fortune: circumstances you didn't choose.
4. Justice: consequences. Every action turns into something.
5. The Hanged Man: being stuck, in which your angle of vision changes.
6. Death: the end of what has ended. Almost always about liberation.
7. Temperance: mixing the unmixable. Finding your own proportion.

The last third: the return

1. The Devil: addiction and a deal with yourself. Chains you put on voluntarily.
2. The Tower: the collapse of what was built wrong.
3. The Star: quiet hope after the collapse.
4. The Moon: fog, fears, uncertainty. Not everything is visible, and that's temporary.
5. The Sun: clarity and simple joy.
6. Judgement: taking stock and an honest look back.
7. The World: completion. The circle has closed, you can start a new one.

How to remember this

Don't try to memorize all twenty-two as a list. They don't stick that way, because a list isn't a structure.

What works is different: find events in your own life that map onto the arcana. When did you have a Tower? And a Hermit? What became your Death, what ended and freed up space? Once an arcanum is tied to your own story, it stops being a word on a list.

The second thing that helps is neighbors. Many arcana are clearer in pairs. The Emperor and the Empress. The Sun and the Moon. Strength and the Chariot: both about overcoming, but one from within, the other from outside. The Devil and the Lovers: both about connection, but in one there's a choice, and in the other it seems there isn't.

Upright and reversed

Sooner or later a card will land upside down, and the question will come up of what to do about it.

There are three approaches, and all three work. First: don't use reversals at all, turn every card upright. To start with, this is the best option, 78 meanings is plenty as it is.

Second: reversed means the same thing, but inward, not manifested outwardly. Reversed Strength is composure you can manage around people and can't manage at home.

Third: reversed means an excess or a lack of the quality. Reversed Emperor is either tyranny or a complete absence of boundaries.

Pick one approach and stick with it for at least a month. Mixing them is a sure way to read anything as anything.

Why the arcana are called major

Not because they're more important. Because they speak to what doesn't depend entirely on you.

A Minor Arcana card is almost always about your move: do it, say it, pay it, leave. A Major Arcana card is about the circumstance you've landed in. The Tower doesn't ask permission. The Wheel of Fortune turns on its own.

Hence a practical rule: if there are many Major Arcana in a spread, the question "what should I do" is temporarily out of place. "How do I get through this" is more fitting.