A tarot deck holds 78 cards in all. Yet these 78 are split into two streams of different character: the 22 Major Arcana and the 56 Minor Arcana. The word “arcana” originally means “secrets,” so the Major can be rendered as the “great secrets” and the Minor as the “lesser secrets.” Knowing the grain of each makes the cards read far more clearly.
First, the Major Arcana. The 22 cards that begin with The Fool (0) and end with The World (21) are commonly seen to reflect life’s great themes and turning points. Like Love, Death, Justice and the Wheel of Fortune, they hold the universal stages and inner archetypes a person meets in living. So when a Major card appears in a reading, that place is often read as holding a weighty theme that divides the flow.
Next, the Minor Arcana. The 56 cards divide into four suits (wands, cups, swords, pentacles), and each suit is made of ten numbered cards from ace to ten, plus four court cards — page, knight, queen and king — fourteen in all. These are seen to reflect the grain of daily life rather than grand fate: work and feeling, relationship and money, the concrete scenes we meet day by day. The Minor Arcana is, in fact, the distant ancestor of ordinary playing cards.
So how do the two weave together in a reading? By a common analogy, the Major stands for “the big weather of the day” or “the chapter of the story,” and the Minor for the “fine scenes” that unfold within it. If a spread is unusually full of Major cards, it may be read as a sign that a weighty theme runs through your life now; if full of Minor cards, as a more everyday current. This is no absolute rule, though — only one way of savouring how the cards are arranged together.
So the division of Major and Minor is not a ranking of which matters more, but more a map that lets you see the big picture and the small grain together. When the great theme and the daily scene meet in one place, the story finally gains depth. As always in FortuneLeaf, tarot does not announce a fixed fate — the two streams of the 78 cards are only a mirror, helping you see at a glance both the large current and the small grain of your life right now.