I’ve taken this definition of the Major and Minor Arcana in the tarot deck directly from the “Tarot” page of Wikipedia.
- “The Major Arcana (greater secrets), or trump cards, consists of 22 cards without suits:
- The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World, and The Fool. Cards from The Magician to The World are numbered in Roman numerals from I to XXI, while The Fool is the only unnumbered card, sometimes placed at the beginning of the deck as 0, or at the end as XXII” (Wikipedia, “Tarot” October 15, 2019).
- “The Minor Arcana (lesser secrets) consists of 56 cards, divided into four suits of 14 cards eachTen numbered cards and four court cards. The court cards are the King, Queen, Knight and Page/Jack, in each of the four tarot suits. The traditional Italian tarot suits are swords, batons, coins and cups; in modern occult tarot decks, however, the batons suit is often called wands, rods or staves, while the coins suit is often called pentacles or disks” (Wikipedia, “Tarot” October 15, 2019).
These Arcanas make up the Tarot deck and in sequence ” the Tarot trumphs are like a secular Neoplatanic rosary. They tell of a similar heroic journey, through three layers equated to three parts of the soul, but the hero in the Tarot is not Christ. The hero is Everyman or Everywoman” (Place p.129). I think it’s this idea that draws so many to tarot; it’s the power that comes with being the hero in your own story. The focus on self. Still, I don’t believe this desire manifests through narcissism. The desire to seek place and make room for your own journey in an expansive world doesn’t scream self-absorption to me. It just seems human. A human urge that has lasted centuries exists in a deck of cards.
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