The Major Arcana
The 22 trumps of the 1909 deck, numbered from 0 to XXI. They follow the Golden Dawn's order, which puts Strength at VIII and Justice at XI.
Trumps I to VII
Trumps VIII to XIV
Trumps XV to XXI
Laid out as Sallie Nichols laid them in Jung and Tarot (1980): the Fool apart, then three rows of seven.
The Major Arcana: one long road
The Major Arcana are 22 picture cards, numbered from 0 to XXI. The Fool carries a zero, the Magician is I, and the World is XXI. In the last hundred years, many readers have taken these cards in order, as one long journey. The Fool is the traveller. Each card after him is someone he meets or somewhere he stops: a maker, a priestess, a mother, a king, a lion, a wheel, a star. The shelf below lists all 22, each with its own echo. You can read them in order, like a road. You can also open any one and stay there for a while.
The image
Lay the 22 cards out side by side, and the pictures start to answer each other. The Magician raises one white wand. The dancer on the World, the last card, holds two. The four creatures from the corners of the Wheel of Fortune come back in the corners of the World.
The same eight on its side floats over the Magician and over Strength. The High Priestess and the Hierophant both sit between pillars.
Pamela Colman Smith drew these rhymes in 1909, following notes from Arthur Waite, who planned the deck. Waite didn't give a method for reading the trumps in a row. He thought "more may be gained by individual reflection on each of the Trumps Major". So you could start with one card and then look for its echoes along the line.
Across traditions
The trumps began as part of a card game. They first turn up in Florence in 1440. In Italian they were trionfi, triumphs, like the victory parade of a Roman general. The oldest painted ones that survive were made for the rulers of Milan in the mid-1400s.
On this early Chariot, a crowned lady rides a gilded car drawn by two white horses. It is a small triumph in gold leaf, made for a game.
Reading the trumps as a journey of the soul came much later. In 1781 two French writers, Antoine Court de Gébelin and the comte de Mellet, first paired the 22 trumps with the 22 Hebrew letters. In the 1850s the French writer Éliphas Lévi made a new one. The Golden Dawn, a magical order in London, made its own, and this deck follows the Golden Dawn's order. That is why Strength is VIII here and Justice is XI. Waite wrote that some of his fellow writers already read the trumps in sequence. One made them "a connected sentence". Another saw the soul coming down into the body and "returning to the height".
Book T, the Golden Dawn's guide to the tarot, has a note on readings where many trumps fall together. It calls them "forces of considerable strength, but beyond the Enquirer's control".
The inner journey
The psychologist Carl Jung had a name for the long work of becoming whole: individuation. In 1980 two writers laid the trumps over that idea. Sallie Nichols read the Major Arcana as one journey of individuation. Rachel Pollack set the Fool apart and laid the other 21 out in three rows of seven. In this reading, each card is a stage of the road, and the Fool meets them one by one.
There is a second way to walk it. The idea of soul-making, borrowed from the poet John Keats, asks you to stay with an image and let it deepen. Seen this way, each card is also a place to live in for a while. The Empress's field doesn't need to lead anywhere. The Hermit's peak is worth sitting on. You could try both readings, and see which one a card invites today.
The name of this app comes from a phrase of the French scholar Henry Corbin: the mundus imaginalis, the world of images. Corbin used it for a place between the world of the senses and the world of pure thought. Its images are real in their own way. The 22 trumps could be a doorway into it.
Try this
When several trumps turn up in one spread, try treating them as guests who have all arrived at once. Lay them in a row in their number order. Which one came first on the road? Which one is furthest along? Then imagine the Fool walking from one to the next. What does he carry from the first to the last?
Questions to sit with
- Which figures have come to the table today?
- Where on the road is the card that feels most like you right now?
- Which card would you like to stay in for a week?
- What would the Fool say to the World, if he could see her from the cliff?
- Which card do you keep skipping?