When you first hold a tarot deck, the number seventy-eight may feel a little dizzying. But these cards divide into two great branches: the twenty-two Major Arcana and the fifty-six Minor Arcana. “Arcana” originally means “hidden things, secrets” — carrying the old belief that the cards reflect the grains within us that are hard to see.
The Major Arcana is a journey of twenty-two cards, beginning with the Fool (0) and closing with the World (21). Like the Lovers, Death, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Star, they hold the great themes of life and the growth stages of the heart. When several Major cards appear in a reading, it is often read as a season of passing through a great knot or turning point — a sign that not a passing matter but a deeper current is moving.
The Minor Arcana is fifty-six cards divided into four suits: Wands (fire), Cups (water), Swords (air), and Pentacles (earth). Each suit runs from Ace to Ten in number cards plus the four figures of Page, Knight, Queen, and King, reflecting the grains of daily life in fine detail — passion and work (Wands), feeling and relationship (Cups), thought and conflict (Swords), money and body (Pentacles). If the Major is “the season of life,” the Minor is “the day-to-day weather within that season.”
Reading the two together is humble. It is enough to see the Major as the great current you now pass through, and the Minor as the concrete grain to handle today within it. Simply noticing which appears more often lets you quietly ask, “is this a time to pause and look widely, or to tend the small things of daily life?” Yet the cards are not a fixed future but a mirror of the heart. Big decisions like a job change or a relationship should be made not with the cards but with your own situation, those near you, and, if needed, a professional. As FortuneLeaf always does, what these seventy-eight cards offer is not a fixed fate but a quiet reflection that lets you look once more at yourself — for whether a great card or a small one, in the end it reflects the very you seated before it.