Tarot 101

What Is Tarot?

Tarot is a deck of seventy-eight illustrated cards used for contemplative reading. Each card carries a traditional meaning, a scene drawn with care, and a position in a larger system of symbolic correspondences. To draw a card is to ask the deck for an image; to read a card is to weigh the image against the question that prompted the draw.

The earliest decks were Italian, fifteenth-century, played as a card game. The divinatory use grew in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England, and the deck took its modern shape in 1909 with the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith — the deck ArcanaWyrd uses.

The Major Arcana

Twenty-two numbered cards, from the Fool (0) to the World (XXI). The Major Arcana are the trumps — the cards that name the archetypal forces and the turning points of a life: the Magician, the High Priestess, the Lovers, the Tower, Death, the Star, the Sun, the Moon. When a Major Arcana card appears in a reading, the spread is naming something foundational; these cards weigh more heavily than the Minor.

The traditional reading of the Major Arcana sequence is the Fool's Journey — a single passage from innocence through experience to integration, with each card a station along the way. The Fool steps off the cliff at the beginning; the World dances in completion at the end. Every Major Arcana card lives in that arc.

The Minor Arcana

Fifty-six cards in four suits. Each suit has ten numbered cards (Ace through Ten) and four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King). The suits correspond to the four classical elements and the four domains of human life:

• Wands · Fire — will, ambition, creative drive, action. The current that begins things and pushes them forward.
• Cups · Water — feeling, relationship, intuition, the inner life. The current that connects and receives.
• Swords · Air — thought, language, conflict, decision. The current that cuts, names, and divides.
• Pentacles · Earth — body, work, money, the material world. The current that builds, holds, and endures.

The numbered cards trace a sequence within each suit: the Ace as the pure first form of the element, the Ten as its full and sometimes overripe expression. The court cards are people — or aspects of a person — in each suit's domain. A Page is a learner, a Knight a pursuer, a Queen the inner mastery, a King the outer authority.

Upright and Reversed

A card may land upright or reversed. Reversed is not the same as bad — it is the card's other voice. A reversed card may indicate the energy blocked, delayed, internalized, or turned against itself. The Tower upright is a collapse arriving; the Tower reversed is the collapse postponed, the structure rotting from inside while the facade still stands.

ArcanaWyrd deals each card upright or reversed at random. You cannot flip a card back. The deal is part of the reading.

The Logic of a Spread

A spread is a fixed arrangement of positions, each carrying its own assigned meaning. A three-card draw might be past, present, future. A Celtic Cross has ten positions — heart of the matter, crossing influence, foundation, recent past, crown, near future, self, environment, hopes and fears, outcome. The position tells you what question the card is answering; the card tells you the answer.

Read each card by its position, then read the spread as a whole. The throughline lives in the pattern across positions — which suits dominate, which cards are reversed, where the Major Arcana fall. The reading is one synthesis, not a list.

Ready to put this knowledge to use? Learn how to draw the cards and how to read a spread, read every card in the deck at The Cards, or open the virtual draw.