«Arcanum» simply means secret, and in the deck it names the cards that belong to no suit. There are twenty-two of them and they form a closed sequence handed down in writing for centuries.
Twenty-two cards, and two decks inside one
A complete deck has seventy-eight cards split into two very different blocks:
- The minor arcana, fifty-six cards in four suits with their court figures. They are the structure the ordinary playing deck inherited.
- The major arcana, twenty-two loose cards, numbered and each with a name of its own.
The minors speak of circumstances; the majors, of processes. That is the functional difference, and it explains why a major «weighs» more in a reading: it does not describe an episode, it describes the current the episode happens in.
Why the Fool carries a zero
It is the system's most famous oddity and it is not a whim. Twenty-one cards are numbered from I to XXI; the Fool falls outside that count and is therefore given the zero, a number that simply did not exist in the old decks.
The consequence is that the Fool has no fixed place. It can be read at the beginning — what has not yet started — or at the end — what returns to the world having travelled through it — and both placements have tradition behind them. A system that leaves one piece without a fixed position is saying something about itself: the sequence is a journey, not a staircase.
The sequence as a journey
Read in order, the twenty-one numbered cards describe a recognisable route: first the figures of authority and learning, then the trials and the reversals, and at the end the large cards of dissolution and recomposition. You do not have to believe anything to see the pattern; it is the same frame that journey stories have had since long before the deck existed.
From there comes the habit of grouping them into three stretches of seven. It is a late reading and not the only one, but it orders the memory well.
What a reversed card means
A card coming out upside down does not invert its meaning like a minus sign. In the tradition it is read as the same content at another intensity or in another direction: blocked, still interior, excessive, or already spent.
There are whole schools that use no reversals and read all seventy-eight upright. Neither position is the correct one: they are reading conventions, and what matters is not mixing them halfway through a spread.
What this is not
It is worth saying plainly. The arcana are a symbolic language in the public domain: a heavily worked vocabulary for naming states and processes. They do not announce future events, they diagnose nothing, and they do not replace a doctor or a licensed psychologist.
Used as a mirror they work; used as a forecast, they do not. Anyone selling you the second is selling you something else.
Where all this comes from
- The sequence of the twenty-two arcana, their numbering and the reading conventions have been handed down in writing for centuries in works in the public domain, and belong to no one.
- The writing, the selection and the order of this article are our own work.
This article does not rest on official sources but on common tradition and the public domain: material handed down in writing for centuries and belonging to no one. The writing, the selection and the order are our own work.
This is a summary. The twenty-two one by one, with their plate, their classical correspondences and the two opposing reversal conventions, do not fit in an article. It is in the Codex of the Arcana, a 62-page PDF in Spanish, English and French.
Published by VILLUMINATIONS. The tarot practised here is a symbolic language, not a predictive science: nothing said in it announces future events or replaces the care of a health professional.