Codex of the Arcana

The seventy-eight cards as an instrument of reading: the twenty-two major arcana, the four suits and the thirty-six decans. Nineteen chapters, five plates and a year of practice.

What it contains

• The real history of the tarot, without the Egyptian legend: where each piece came from and who added it.
• The twenty-two major arcana with their letter, their correspondence and their image described, laid out in four stretches of a journey.
• The four suits, the aces and the ten stages of number.
• The thirty-six minor cards with their decan and their ruler — the part that turns a deck into a system.
• How it is really read: the spreads, the reversed card and the reader's errors.
• What is not asked, and why: the chapter that sets the limits of the craft.
• The spread notebook and a year of practice with review.

Format

A5 PDF, 67 pages. Includes all three editions —English (67 pp.), Spanish (62 pp.) and French (64 pp.)— with navigation bookmarks and a closing vocabulary. The card names follow each language's own deck.

How to read it

The arcana are a symbolic language: an old and very finely tuned way of naming situations and temperaments. It is not a predictive science. Nothing in it announces future events, diagnoses illnesses or replaces the care of a registered doctor or psychologist.

The material it starts from belongs to the common tradition: the sequence of the arcana, their iconography and the classical correspondences have been transmitted in writing for centuries in works in the public domain and are nobody's property. The writing, the structure, the readings, the card entries and the illustrations are original work.

Digital download. An original work by VILLUMINATIONS · First edition, 2026.