The Major Arcana
In the Rider-Waite tradition, a tarot deck has 78 cards in two parts, and the Major Arcana is the smaller part: 22 picture cards, from The Fool to The World. Waite called them the Trumps Major, “otherwise, Greater Arcana,” and set them apart from the four suits of the Lesser Arcana.
The Major Arcana is made up of 21 numbered cards and one unnumbered card, The Fool. Placing The Fool at the head of the series as zero, as Court de Gebelin did, is a simpler and better arrangement, and in the Rider-Waite deck it carries the number 0.
Modern readers give these cards the larger themes. The Major Arcana represents the life lessons and big archetypal themes in a person’s life, and a Major Arcana card in a spread often sets the scene for the whole reading. The sequence depicts The Fool traveling through each card, meeting new teachers and lessons until he reaches The World, an idea tarot readers know as “the Fool’s Journey.”
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck
In 1909, the artist Pamela Colman Smith’s involvement with the Order of the Golden Dawn led to a commission from Arthur Edward Waite to create a 78-card tarot deck. Waite paid her only a token fee, and under his guidance she produced the drawings that became the design inspiration for most later tarot decks. The result is the best-selling tarot deck of all time.
The cards were drawn and colored by Miss Pamela Colman Smith. The cards were prepared under Waite’s supervision, in respect of the attributions and meanings, by a lady who has high claims as an artist. Rider and Co. published the deck in 1910, and it was the first deck to give the Minor Arcana pips full pictorial scenes. Some tarot scholars now prefer the name Waite-Smith Tarot, to recognize Smith’s part in it.
Waite’s own guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, prints Smith’s 78 designs as plates beside his text, in a London edition from W. Rider dated 1911. Smith’s dates are 1878 to 1951 and Waite’s are 1857 to 1942.
Reading a card
Waite himself held the fortune-telling side of the cards at arm’s length. Waite wrote that the meanings drawn from the Trumps Major by “the divinatory art” seemed to him “artificial and arbitrary,” and that the cards “belong in themselves to another region,” a world of high symbolism.
A Major Arcana card is a call to reflect on the life lessons and themes a person is living through at the time.
Upright and reversed
In Waite’s order, Strength is card VIII and Justice is card XI. Waite gave a reversed meaning for every card in his divinatory lists, and every card has a reversed reading as well.
