What the 22 Major Arcana Are About: The Fool's Journey on One Page

In my first year of studying tarot I could not memorise the 22 Major Arcana.

The reason was not a poor memory: I was treating them as 22 isolated meanings and reciting them one by one — reciting that way, I began to jumble them by the twelfth card.

Then someone told me: do not memorise them; treat them as one person walking one road.

What the Major Arcana Are

The 22 cards in a tarot deck that carry no suit are called the Major Arcana, numbered from 0 to 21 (Source 1). The remaining 56 cards, which do carry suits, are the Minor Arcana.

The Major cards are often seen as "the causes behind how everything in the universe runs" (Source 2); in reading terms that means they lean towards states, stages and large turning points rather than one concrete small matter.

Why the Fool Is 0

Card 0 is the Fool. It is numbered 0 and placed outside the other 21 — some diviners hold that the Fool itself performs the function of a blank card, and some therefore think that adding a separate blank card is redundant (Source 1).

The Fool is often read as "setting out" and "a state in which there is no answer yet". That also explains why it is 0: in the whole journey it is the starting point, the one who has no equipment on him at all and is already on the road.

One-page Flow: From Setting Out to Completion

Strung together, the 22 cards give roughly this common narrative: the Fool sets out (0), and meets the skills and rules that have to be learned (1 the Magician, 2 the High Priestess, 3 the Empress, 4 the Emperor, 5 the Hierophant), then goes through choices and tests (6 the Lovers, 7 the Chariot, 8 Strength, 9 the Hermit, 10 the Wheel of Fortune, 11 Justice, 12 the Hanged Man), then faces the gates that have to be passed (13 Death, 14 Temperance, 15 the Devil, 16 the Tower, 17 the Star, 18 the Moon, 19 the Sun), and finally arrives at rebuilding and completion (20 Judgement, 21 the World).

This narrative is called the "Fool's Journey" in divination circles; it is a framework to help memory, one way of reading rather than the standard answer. Its advantage is this: see any Major card and you can place it at once on the whole road.

A Real Difference Between Editions

Different decks do not handle numbering in the same way. The Tarot of Marseille gives VIII to Justice and XI to Strength; the Waite deck adjusted this (Source 1).

Which means: if you see someone call Strength VIII and Justice XI, it is not that they have remembered the edition wrongly, but that they are using a different deck.

Later I drew the 22 cards in order on one sheet of A4 paper and stuck it up for two months. What actually helped me was not memorising the numbers but remembering where each card sits on the whole road — they stopped being individual words and became different crossings on one and the same road.

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This article was last checked on 19 September 2026. Traditional divination has many schools and a long history, and their formulas and versions do not fully agree; the text relies on publicly verifiable sources, and for dates and calendars please refer to the latest official publication.

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Sources

• "Major Arcana" (《大阿尔克那》) — Wikipedia: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/大阿尔克那 (accessed 19 September 2026)
• "Tarot Cards" (《塔罗牌》) — Wikipedia: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/塔罗牌 (accessed 19 September 2026)
• Method page on this site: Tarot: https://zhanbumizhi.top/en/methods/tarot (accessed 19 September 2026)