The twenty-two trump cards of the tarot, numbered from the Fool to the World, which stand outside the four suits and are read as a sequence of archetypal stages rather than as a graded rank. They carry the deck's best-known images (the Magician, the Lovers, Death, the Tower), and it is these cards that occultists from the eighteenth century onward attached to the Hebrew alphabet, the planets and the paths of the Tree of Life. The Atlas keeps them in trump order, because the order is part of what the sequence means.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingThe trump cards of the tarot pack: cards belonging to no suit, which in the original trick-taking game outranked every suit card. 2 Size of the Traditional Set22 trumps: twenty-one numbered cards and the unnumbered Fool 2 Origins
Origin of the Name"Major Arcana" is a coinage of the nineteenth-century French occult tarot; the fifteenth-century Italian decks called these cards trionfi. 3 Learn More
The Major Arcana
This group gathers the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana (the "trumps"), the symbolic heart of the tarot. From the Fool and the Magician through figures such as the High Priestess, the Lovers, the Wheel of Fortune, Death, the Tower and the World, the Major Arcana are read as a sequence of archetypal images, sometimes called the Fool's journey.
The browser will find the twenty-two Major Arcana. The entries describe each card's imagery and interpretive meanings. The atlas notes that the tarot began as a fifteenth-century Italian card game and that its esoteric and divinatory meanings were attached only from the late eighteenth century onward.
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Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City
3. A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot
Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, St Martin's Press, 1996on the invention of the occult tarot vocabularyView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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