What Is Tarot? 78 Cards, Two Systems, One Deck

The structural overview that makes every card meaning click into place.

A tarot deck has 78 cards. That's the whole deck. No more, no less — regardless of which edition you buy, from the Rider-Waite-Smith printed in 1909 to the hundreds of indie decks published last year. The artwork changes. The card count doesn't.

Those 78 cards split into two groups: the Major Arcana (22 cards) and the Minor Arcana (56 cards). "Arcana" comes from the Latin arcanum, meaning a secret or mystery. Major Arcana are the big archetypal forces. Minor Arcana are the day-to-day stuff. Understanding the division between these two groups is the single most important structural fact in tarot.

The Major Arcana: 22 Trump Cards

The Major Arcana consists of 22 cards numbered 0 through 21, starting with The Fool (0) and ending with The World (21). Each one has a name — The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, and so on — and depicts a distinct archetypal scene with its own symbolism.

When a Major Arcana card appears in a reading, it signals something significant. A reading dominated by Major Arcana suggests a period of major life change, spiritual development, or forces beyond everyday control. A reading with mostly Minor Arcana points to day-to-day concerns, practical decisions, and transient situations.

The 22 Major Arcana cards are often read as a sequence called the Fool's Journey. Arthur Edward Waite, who co-designed the Rider-Waite-Smith deck with artist Pamela Colman Smith, arranged them to tell a story of spiritual development from innocent beginning (The Fool) to final integration (The World). You can read them linearly or pull them individually — both approaches work.

The Minor Arcana: 56 Cards in Four Suits

The Minor Arcana contains 56 cards divided into four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. Each suit has 14 cards: an Ace, numbered cards 2 through 10, and four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King).

If you've ever held a standard deck of playing cards, you already know the Minor Arcana's structure. The four suits map to the four suits of modern playing cards, and the court cards map roughly to Jack, Queen, King (tarot adds the Page, giving each suit four court cards instead of three). The numbered cards run Ace through 10, same as playing cards.

This isn't coincidence. Tarot decks and standard playing cards share a common ancestor: the Italian playing card decks of the 15th century. Michael Dummett, one of the most rigorous scholars of tarot history, traced this lineage in The Game of Tarot (1980). The split between tarot and ordinary cards happened gradually over centuries.

The court cards

Each suit contains four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King. These are the cards beginners struggle with most, because they can represent people in the querent's life, aspects of the querent's own personality, or energy dynamics in a situation.

Rachel Pollack, author of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980), suggests reading court cards as approaches or attitudes rather than literal people. A King of Swords represents decisive, analytical authority — whether that shows up as a person or as a mode of behavior the querent needs to adopt.

How the two systems interact in a reading

Here's the practical difference. Say you ask about your career and pull the Ten of Pentacles. That's a Minor Arcana card — it suggests financial stability, long-term investment paying off, possibly family business or inherited wealth. Solid but bounded. Now say you pull The Emperor instead. That's Major Arcana — it suggests structural authority, a need to organize, possibly a powerful figure entering the situation, or a call to step into leadership yourself.

The Major Arcana carries more weight. The Minor Arcana fills in the details. Eden Gray, whose books The Tarot (1960) and Mastering the Tarot (1971) introduced millions of Americans to tarot, described this as the difference between fate and free will. The Majors show you the forces at work. The Minors show you what you're doing about them.

That framework is a simplification — most modern readers don't treat any card as pure fate — but it's a useful starting distinction.

Do all tarot decks use the same structure?

Almost all. The 78-card structure is the global standard because the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909) set the template that nearly all modern decks follow. Some traditions differ: the Tarot de Marseille, the historical French deck, uses the same 78 cards but names and depicts the court cards differently (Valet, Cavalier, Dame, Roi instead of Page, Knight, Queen, King). The Thoth deck, designed by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris and published in 1969, renames some cards (The Magician becomes The Magus, Judgment becomes The Aeon) and reassigns three of the court card titles (Princess, Prince, Queen, Knight instead of Page, Knight, Queen, King).

But the 78-card framework — 22 Major, 56 Minor, four suits of 14 — remains consistent across virtually every deck you'll encounter.

Where to go from here

If you're new, the most efficient path is this: learn the four suits and their elements first. Then learn the 22 Major Arcana in sequence. Then start pulling cards daily and noting what comes up. You don't need to memorize all 78 meanings before you start reading. You need to understand the structure well enough to make educated guesses, and then let practice fill in the gaps.

The rest of this wiki does exactly that. The next two articles cover the Major and Minor Arcana in detail. After that, we go suit by suit, then card by card for the most important trumps, and finally into reading practice.

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