Major vs Minor Arcana: the structure of the deck
Seventy-eight cards, two halves, and a structure that makes the whole thing learnable.
4 min read · Published 17 August 2026
The short answer
A standard tarot deck has 78 cards. The 22 Major Arcana are the numbered trumps from The Fool to The World, and they are traditionally read as large themes, turning points and forces bigger than the everyday. The 56 Minor Arcana are four suits of fourteen — Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles — running Ace through Ten plus four court cards, and they are read as ordinary life: the situations, feelings and people you actually deal with.
The two halves at a glance
| Major Arcana | Minor Arcana | |
|---|---|---|
| Count | 22 | 56 |
| Structure | Numbered 0 to 21, no suits | Four suits of 14 |
| Traditionally read as | Themes, turning points, forces acting on you | Daily situations, feelings, practical matters |
| In a spread | Weight. Several Majors is read as a significant period | Texture. The specifics of how something is playing out |
That last row is the practical difference. A reading full of Minor Arcana is usually read as ordinary life proceeding; a reading dominated by Majors is read as something structural happening. Whether that is meaningful is a separate question — but it is what the tradition says, and it is why the split exists.
The Major Arcana
Twenty-two cards, numbered 0 through 21. The Fool is 0 — outside the sequence, which is the whole point of the card — and The World is 21.
They have no suits and no repetition. Each card appears once and carries a single large idea: The Tower for sudden collapse, The Star for hope after it, Death for endings that are not literal. Read in order they form a narrative, which is covered in the Fool's journey.
Because they are unnumbered by suit, the Majors are also the half that carries most of tarot's symbolic freight — and most of its baggage. The Death card gets its own post for exactly that reason: what the Death card really means.
The Minor Arcana and its four suits
| Suit | Element | Domain | Playing-card equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wands | Fire | Drive, creativity, action, enterprise | Clubs |
| Cups | Water | Emotion, relationship, intuition | Hearts |
| Swords | Air | Thought, conflict, communication, truth | Spades |
| Pentacles | Earth | Money, work, body, material security | Diamonds |
Each suit runs Ace to Ten, then four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, King in the Rider-Waite tradition. That is 14 per suit, 56 in total.
The elemental assignments will look familiar if you have read any astrology: the same four elements, doing roughly the same work. That overlap is not a coincidence — both systems were shaped by the same European esoteric revival in the nineteenth century, which is where a great deal of the correspondence between tarot and astrology was invented rather than inherited.
How the numbers work
A rough numeric spine that holds across all four suits
- Ace — the pure beginning of the suit, potential not yet spent.
- Two to Four — early development: choice, expansion, the first stable form.
- Five — the difficulty of the suit. Fives are the friction cards in every suit.
- Six to Eight — working through it: recovery, assessment, movement.
- Nine — the suit at its most intense, for better or worse.
- Ten — completion, and the burden that comes with it.
This is genuinely useful for learning. Rather than memorise 56 cards, you learn four suits and one numeric spine, then combine. The Five of Cups is emotional difficulty; the Five of Pentacles is material difficulty. The system does most of the work.
Where AsterNym fits
AsterNym does not shuffle. It calculates a tarot birth card from your birth date using the Mary K. Greer method — adding month, day and year and reducing — which produces a Major Arcana card that stays the same for life.
That is a different object from a drawn card, and worth keeping distinct. A drawn card is chance plus interpretation; a birth card is arithmetic plus interpretation. Neither predicts anything, but only one of them is reproducible, and we would rather be clear about which we are offering. Yours is on your tarot page.
Common questions
- How many cards are in a tarot deck?
- Seventy-eight: 22 Major Arcana numbered 0 to 21, and 56 Minor Arcana made up of four suits of fourteen cards each — Ace through Ten plus four court cards.
- What is the difference between Major and Minor Arcana?
- The Major Arcana are 22 unsuited trump cards read as large themes and turning points. The Minor Arcana are 56 suited cards read as everyday situations, feelings and practical matters. A spread heavy in Majors is traditionally read as a more significant period.
- What do the four tarot suits mean?
- Wands are Fire — drive, creativity and action. Cups are Water — emotion and relationship. Swords are Air — thought, conflict and communication. Pentacles are Earth — money, work and material security.
- Do I need to memorise all 78 cards?
- Not separately. The Minor Arcana follows a numeric spine that holds across all four suits — Aces are beginnings, Fives are difficulty, Tens are completion — so learning four suits and one number sequence covers 40 of the 56 cards.