Study Guide · 78 Cards

The Cartomancer's Almanac

A working reference for learning tarot from structure up — the deck's architecture, all 78 cards with upright and reversed meanings, and the spreads that put them to use.

Overview & Structure

Tarot is a 78-card deck split into two halves that work together: big archetypal chapters, and the granular, everyday texture of life.

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Major Arcana — 22 cards

The "trump" cards, numbered 0–21, running from The Fool to The World. Each one is a major archetype or turning point — not a Tuesday-afternoon event, but a chapter of a life. When several Majors show up in one reading, it usually signals something significant is in motion.

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Minor Arcana — 56 cards

Four suits of 14 cards each (Ace through 10, then Page, Knight, Queen, King). These track daily circumstance — mood, money, conflict, effort — the way a diary tracks a life the Majors are narrating.

Suit	Element	Domain	Astrology (common mapping)
Wands	Fire	Ambition, creativity, action, will	Aries, Leo, Sagittarius
Cups	Water	Emotion, relationships, intuition	Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces
Swords	Air	Intellect, conflict, communication	Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Pentacles	Earth	Money, work, health, the material world	Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn

Deck note: Most modern decks (including the one you'll likely start with, Rider-Waite-Smith) illustrate every Minor Arcana card with a scene, not just a pattern of cups or swords. That's what makes intuitive reading of the "pip" cards possible without memorizing all 56 by rote.