Major Arcana
The twenty-two trumps in four decks. Choose a deck, then follow each card through its image, divinatory reading and place in the Hermetic correspondences.
The deck Waite designed and Pamela Colman Smith drew for Rider in 1909, and the first widely published pack to give every one of the fifty-six suit cards a scene rather than an arrangement of pips.
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
Pamela Colman Smith died in 1951 and the plates appeared in 1909, placing the artwork in the public domain. Each card links to its file on Wikimedia Commons. The plates on Wikimedia Commons ↗
Major Arcana · Trumps
The great images of the pack, later joined to the twenty-two Hebrew-letter paths of the Hermetic Tree.
- 0 The Fool A traveller steps lightly at the world's edge, carrying little and looking upward. The Fool brings openness, nerve and the freedom to begin, with the old warning that trust can slip into heedlessness.
- 1 The Magician The Magician raises one hand and points the other toward the earth. With the four suit emblems laid out before him, he turns intention into action and gives an imagined thing a worldly form.
- 2 The High Priestess The High Priestess sits before the veil, quiet and watchful. Her wisdom comes by patience, intuition and reflection; what she guards is approached slowly and is never wholly displayed at once.
- 3 The Empress The Empress belongs to fertile ground, ripening grain and the life of the body. She is creativity tended until it bears fruit: abundance, nurture and the slow work of bringing something into being.
- 4 The Emperor The Emperor gives will a throne, a law and a lasting structure. He can be the power that protects and orders a realm, or the same power hardened into control.
- 5 The Hierophant The Hierophant keeps and transmits a received teaching. He speaks of initiation, shared doctrine and guidance within a tradition, along with the authority—and the limits—of those who guard its forms.
- 6 The Lovers The Lovers bring attraction into the presence of choice. In the Rider–Waite–Smith card, the pair's union is blessed but consequential: desire becomes a bond, and the bond asks something of both people.
- 7 The Chariot The Chariot moves because contrary powers have been brought under one direction. Its victory comes through discipline and coordination; without them, momentum scatters into conflict.
- 8 Strength Strength meets the lion without violence. Courage here is patient, intimate mastery: instinct and passion are guided into accord, not crushed into silence.
- 9 The Hermit The Hermit withdraws long enough for experience to ripen into wisdom. His solitude is not empty; the lantern he carries can light both his own next step and the road for those below.
- 10 Wheel of Fortune The Wheel turns through ascent, decline and return, carrying lives with it. Circumstances change beyond any one person's command, though the unmoving centre hints at an order within the turning.
- 11 Justice Justice holds the sword and scales: judgment joined to proportion. The card asks what is due, what follows from an action, and whether the matter is being weighed without favour or distortion.
- 12 The Hanged Man The Hanged Man is held between one movement and the next. Turned upside down, apparent defeat becomes another sightline; patience and sacrifice open an understanding ordinary progress could not reach.
- 13 Death Death closes a form whose time has passed. It speaks first of endings, release and the hard passage by which one stage gives way to another—not of a literal death foretold.
- 14 Temperance Temperance pours one current into another until both can share a vessel. Its balance is living and deliberate: adjustment, reconciliation and the patient making of a workable whole.
- 15 The Devil The Devil shows appetite and fixation hardened into bondage. In the Rider–Waite–Smith image the chains hang loose, suggesting a captivity sustained partly by the belief that no other choice remains.
- 16 The Tower Lightning opens the Tower in an instant. The fall is frightening, but it reveals the weakness already built into the structure and ends what could no longer stand.
- 17 The Star The Star follows the ruin of the Tower with clear water and open sky. It brings hope, renewal and the quiet restoration that begins when inspiration is allowed to flow into life.
- 18 The Moon The Moon lights a road that cannot yet be seen clearly. Instinct, fear and imagination move through its half-light, where the traveller must notice projections without claiming to know everything hidden ahead.
- 19 The Sun The Sun brings the world back into direct light. Warmth, vitality and plain sight return after the Moon's uncertainty, making confidence and renewed life possible.
- 20 Judgement At the trumpet of Judgement, the whole person is called to rise and answer. Reckoning and renewal arrive together; what has been learned now asks for a decision.
- 21 The World The World gathers the long journey into a whole. Completion here is full and living: the pattern can be seen at last, even as its closing circle becomes the threshold of another beginning.
