Major Arcana
Tarot glossary · also majors, greater arcana
The Major Arcana are the 22 trump cards that set tarot apart from ordinary playing cards. In the card game they were trumps, trionfi in Italian, and outranked the suits. The Fool is unnumbered in early decks and numbered 0 in most modern ones; the rest run from The Magician (I) to The World (XXI). The word arcana, Latin for secrets, came from 19th-century French occultists; the term is often credited to Paul Christian. Readers usually take Major Arcana cards as the big themes of a reading, against the everyday detail of the Minor Arcana. See major and minor arcana.
