How many Major Arcana cards are there?

22, numbered 0 (The Fool) through 21 (The World).

What does it mean to draw a Major Arcana card?

Majors usually point at bigger themes and turning points, rather than day-to-day events.

Major Arcana: The 22 Cards of the Soul's Journey

Written by the Toe Bean Tarot team Aug 19, 2026 · 3 min read We built a full tarot curriculum: 98 guided lesson sections, spaced repetition, and two original 78-card decks.

The Major Arcana are the 22 named cards of the tarot deck, The Fool through The World, and they carry the deck's biggest meanings: beginnings, love, upheaval, hope, endings, and renewal. Read in order, they tell one story. Tarot readers call it the Fool's Journey, and it's the fastest honest way to learn all 22.

The Fool, card zero of the Major Arcana, from the Toe Bean Tarot deck. — The Fool: the journey starts at zero.

What makes a card "Major"

The other 56 cards (the Minor Arcana) cover daily life. The majors cover the turning points: the chapters you'd mention if you told your life story. When one shows up in a reading, it usually points at something that matters more than the day-to-day.

Act one: setting out (0 to 7)

The Fool leaves home and meets their first teachers.

0. The Fool: a fresh start, open-hearted and unafraid.
1. The Magician: willpower and skill turning ideas into action.
2. The High Priestess: intuition and inner knowing.
3. The Empress: nurture, abundance, growth.
4. The Emperor: structure and worldly authority.
5. The Hierophant: tradition and shared belief.
6. The Lovers: love and a choice of the heart.
7. The Chariot: victory through willpower.

Act two: the trials (8 to 14)

The lessons turn inward and get harder.

8. Strength: quiet courage, gentle mastery over force.
9. The Hermit: solitude and the search for truth.
10. Wheel of Fortune: cycles, change, a turn of luck.
11. Justice: fairness, truth, consequences.
12. The Hanged Man: pause, surrender, a new point of view.
13. Death: an ending that clears the way for renewal.
14. Temperance: balance and the calm middle path.

Act three: the dark night and the dawn (15 to 21)

The hardest cards in the deck, followed by its brightest.

15. The Devil: the attachments that bind us.
16. The Tower: sudden upheaval, false things falling.
17. The Star: hope and healing after the storm.
18. The Moon: uncertainty and imagination in the dark.
19. The Sun: joy, clarity, vitality.
20. Judgement: awakening and answering a call.
21. The World: completion, the journey fulfilled.

The World, the final card of the Major Arcana, from the Toe Bean Tarot deck. — The World: the journey's last card, wholeness.

How to learn all 22

Don't memorize them as 22 separate facts. Learn the three acts above as a story: setting out, the trials, the dark night and the dawn. Each card is a chapter, and chapters are easy to remember. The Toe Bean Tarot app has a dedicated Fool's Journey walkthrough plus a full Major Arcana module in its guided course, on Google Play (iPhone coming soon).

For the rest of the deck, head back to the full guide to all 78 tarot card meanings, or start with the suit that runs your life lately: Wands, Cups, Swords, or Pentacles.