Major Arcana


The Major Arcana are the named cards in a cartomantic tarot pack. There are usually 22 such cards in a standard 78-card pack, typically numbered from 0 to 21. Although the cards correspond to the trump cards of a pack used for playing tarot card games, the term 'Major Arcana' is rarely used by players and is typically associated exclusively with use for divination by witches and warlocks.
The Major Arcana are complemented by the Minor Arcana—the 56 unnamed cards of the tarot deck, which more directly correspond to the contemporary standard 52-card deck.

History

Prior to the 17th century, tarot cards were solely used for playing games and the Fool and 21 trumps had simple allegorical or esoteric meaning, mostly originating in elite ideology in the Italian courts of the 15th century when it was invented. The occult significance began to emerge in the 18th century, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss clergyman and Freemason, published two essays on Tarot in his Le Monde Primitif, a never-completed encyclopedia. In the first essay, "Du Jeu des Tarots", Court de Gébelin assigned Egyptian, kabbalistic, and divine significance to the tarot trumps.
Etteilla created a method of divination using tarot; Éliphas Lévi worked to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory tarot, bringing it back to the Tarot de Marseille, creating a "tortuous" kabbalistic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life. Marquis Stanislas de Guaita established the Major Arcana as an initiatory sequence to be used to establish a path of spiritual ascension and evolution. In 1980 Sallie Nichols, a Jungian psychologist, wrote of the tarot as having deep psychological and archetypal significance, even encoding the entire process of Jungian individuation into the tarot trumps.
These various interpretations of the Major Arcana developed in stages, all of which continue to exert significant influence on practitioners' explanations of the Major Arcana.

List of the Major Arcana

Like the early Italian-suited packs on which they were originally based, in a cartomantic pack each Major Arcanum depicts a scene, mostly featuring a person or several people, with many symbolic elements. In many decks, each has a number and a name, though not all decks have both, and some have only a picture.
Every tarot deck is different and carries a different connotation with the art, however most symbolism remains the same. The earliest, pre-cartomantic, decks bore unnamed and unnumbered pictures on their trionfi or trumps, and the order of cards was not standardized.
Strength is traditionally the eleventh card and Justice the eighth, but the influential Rider–Waite Tarot switched the position of these two cards in order to make them a better fit with the astrological correspondences worked out by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, under which the eighth card is associated with Leo and the eleventh with Libra. Today many decks use this numbering, particularly in the English-speaking world.
No.Tarot de MarseilleCourt de GébelinRider–WaiteEtteillaPaul ChristianOswald WirthGolden DawnBook of Thoth
0The FoolThe FoolThe FoolFollyThe CrocodileThe FoolThe FoolThe Fool
IThe JugglerThe Magician The MagicianIllness, IllnessThe MagusThe MagicianThe MagicianThe Magus
IIThe PopessThe High PriestessThe High PriestessEtteilla, Female QuerentThe Gate of the Sanctuary The PriestessThe High PriestessThe Priestess
IIIThe EmpressThe Empress The EmpressNight, DayIsis-UraniaThe EmpressThe EmpressThe Empress
IVThe EmperorThe Emperor The EmperorSupport, ProtectionThe Cubic StoneThe EmperorThe EmperorThe Emperor
VThe PopeThe Hierophant The HierophantMarriage, UnionThe Master of the Mysteries The PopeThe HierophantThe Hierophant
VIThe LoversMarriageThe LoversThe Two RoadsThe LoversThe LoversThe Lovers
VIIThe ChariotOsiris TriumphantThe ChariotDissensionThe Chariot of OsirisThe ChariotThe ChariotThe Chariot
VIIIJusticeJusticeStrengthJustice, JuristThemis JusticeStrengthAdjustment
IXThe HermitThe Wise Man The HermitTraitorThe Veiled LampThe HermitThe HermitThe Hermit
XWheel of FortuneWheel of FortuneWheel of FortuneFortune, IncreaseThe SphinxThe Wheel of FortuneThe Wheel of FortuneThe Wheel of Fortune
XIStrengthFortitude JusticeStrength, SovereignThe Muzzled Lion The StrengthJusticeLust
XIIThe Hanged ManPrudenceThe Hanged ManPrudence, The PeopleThe SacrificeThe Hanged ManThe Hanged ManThe Hanged Man
XIIIDeathDeathMortality, NothingnessThe Skeleton Reaper DeathDeathDeath
XIVTemperanceTemperanceTemperanceTemperance, PriestThe Two Urns TemperanceTemperanceArt
XVThe DevilTyphonThe DevilGreat ForceTyphonThe DevilThe DevilThe Devil
XVIThe House of GodThe Castle of Plutus The TowerMisery, PrisonThe Beheaded Tower The TowerThe Blasted TowerThe Tower
XVIIThe StarOsiris, The Dog Star The StarDesolation, AirThe Star of the MagiThe StarThe StarThe Star
XVIIIThe MoonThe MoonThe MoonComments, WaterThe TwilightThe MoonThe MoonThe Moon
XIXThe SunThe SunThe SunEnlightenment, FireThe Blazing LightThe SunThe SunThe Sun
XXJudgementCreation JudgementJudgementThe Awakening of the Dead JudgementJudgementThe Aeon
XXIThe WorldThe World The WorldVoyage, EarthThe Crown of the MagiThe WorldThe UniverseThe Universe

Esotericism

By the 19th century, the Tarot was being claimed as a "Bible of Bibles", an esoteric repository of all the significant truths of creation. The trend was started by prominent Freemason and Protestant cleric Antoine Court de Gébelin who suggested that the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin, and mystic divine and kabbalistic significance. A contemporary of his, Louis-Raphaël-Lucrèce de Fayolle, comte de Mellet, added to Court de Gébelin's claims by suggesting that the tarot was associated with Romani people and was in fact the imprinted book of Hermes Trismegistus.
These claims were continued by Etteilla. Etteilla is primarily recognized as the founder and propagator of the divinatory tarot, but he also participated in the propagation of the occult tarot by claiming the tarot had an ancient Egyptian origin and was an account of the creation of the world and a book of eternal medicine. Éliphas Lévi revitalized the occult tarot by associating it with the mystical Kabbalah and making it a "prime ingredient in magical lore". As Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett note, "it is to him that we owe its widespread acceptance as a means of discovering hidden truths and as a document of the occult... Lévi's writings formed the channel through which the Western tradition of magic flowed down to modern times."
As the following quote by P. D. Ouspensky shows, the association of the tarot with Hermetic, kabbalastic, magical mysteries continued at least to the early 20th century.
Claims such as those initiated by early Freemasons today found their way into academic discourse. Semetsky, for example, explained that tarot makes it possible to mediate between humanity and the godhead, or between god/spirit/consciousness and profane human existence. Christina Nicholson used the tarot to illustrate the deep wisdom of feminist theology. Santarcangeli wrote of the wisdom of the fool, and Sallie Nichols spoke about the archetypal power of individuation boiling beneath the powerful surface of the tarot archetypes.

Fortune telling

Now popularly associated in English-speaking countries with divination, fortune telling, or cartomancy, Tarot was not invented as a mystical or magical tool of divination, but as an instrument for playing card games with a permanent trump suit. The people who published esoteric commentary of the tarot also published commentary on divinatory tarot. There is a line of development of the cartomantic tarot that occurred in parallel with the imposition of hermetic mysteries on the formerly mundane pack of cards that can usefully be distinguished. It was the Comte de Mellet who initiated this development by suggesting, entirely incorrectly, that ancient Egyptians had used the tarot for fortune telling and provided a method purportedly used in ancient Egypt.
Following the Comte de Mellet, Etteilla invented a method of cartomancy, assigning a divinatory meaning to each of the cards, publishing La Cartonomancie française, and creating the first tarot decks exclusively intended for cartomantic practice. Etteilla's original method was designed to work with a common pack of cards known as the Piquet pack because Piquet was the most popular game played with 32 cards. In 1783, two years after Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde Primitif, he turned to the development of a cartomantic method using the standard tarot deck. His work was published in the book Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots and the creation of a society for tarot cartomancy, the Société littéraire des associés libres des interprètes du livre de Thot. The society subsequently published Dictionnaire synonimique du livre de Thot, a book that "systematically tabulated all the possible meanings which each card could bear, when upright and reversed."
Following Etteilla, tarot cartomancy was moved forward by Marie-Anne Adelaid Lenormand and others. Lenormand was the first well known cartomancer and claimed to be the confidante of Empress Josephine and other local luminaries. She was so popular, and cartomancy with tarot became so well established in France following her work, that a special deck entitled the Grand Jeu de Mlle Lenormand was released in her name two years after her death. This was followed by many other specially designed cartomantic tarot decks, mostly based on Etteilla's Egyptian symbolism, but some providing other flavours as well. Tarot as a cartomantic and divinatory tool is well established and new books expounding the mystical utility of the cartomantic tarot are published frequently.