Symbols

The Major Arcana is a sequence of twenty-two figures whose individual symbolism is the central study of esoteric tarot. The standard order, in the post-Marseille convention used by most occult systems, runs: The Fool (0, often unnumbered), The Magician (I), The High Priestess (II), The Empress (III), The Emperor (IV), The Hierophant (V), The Lovers (VI), The Chariot (VII), Strength (VIII or XI depending on tradition), The Hermit (IX), The Wheel of Fortune (X), Justice (XI or VIII), The Hanged Man (XII), Death (XIII), Temperance (XIV), The Devil (XV), The Tower (XVI), The Star (XVII), The Moon (XVIII), The Sun (XIX), Judgement (XX), and The World (XXI). The numbering of Strength and Justice was swapped by the Golden Dawn for reasons of zodiacal correspondence; the Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith orderings differ on this point.

The Minor Arcana’s four suits are conventionally attributed to the four classical elements: Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, and Pentacles (also called Coins or Disks) to Earth. (Some twentieth-century systems reverse Wands and Swords; the matter remains contested and is settled differently in different lineages.) Each suit runs Ace through Ten plus four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King in the Rider-Waite-Smith convention; Princess, Prince, Queen, and Knight in the Thoth deck; Valet, Cavalier, Reine, and Roi in the Marseille pattern.

The composite system — twenty-two trumps mapped to the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, four suits mapped to the four elements and the four worlds of Kabbalah, the forty pip cards mapped to the ten sephiroth across the four suits, the sixteen court cards mapped to the elemental sub-quadrants — is the principal structural inheritance of Golden Dawn tarot, and is preserved in some form in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century esoteric decks.