The Deck
Tarot Card Meanings
All seventy-eight cards, each with its upright and reversed voice, plus what it says about love, work and the next right action.
0–XXI
Major Arcana
Twenty-two cards of fate: the large turns of a life, from the Fool's first step to the World's completion.
🜂
Wands · Fire
Will, work and creative heat. Ambition, momentum, and the cost of burning too fast.
🜄
Cups · Water
Feeling, bonds and the inner tide. Love, grief, intuition and everything unsaid.
🜁
Swords · Air
Thought, conflict and clarity. The mind cutting cleanly — or cutting itself.
🜃
Pentacles · Earth
Body, money and the built world. Craft, patience and material consequence.
78 CARDS
Rider–Waite–Smith deck (1909), illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In short
Browse every card of the tarot: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana with upright and reversed meanings, love and career readings, advice and affirmations.
- Study one card a day rather than memorising a book. Seventy-eight days covers the deck.
- Compare the same number across suits — the four fives together teach more than any single card.
- Note which cards you dislike. Those are almost always the ones with the most to say to you.
- Look at where figures are facing and what colours repeat. Smith encoded meaning in both.
The Major Arcana runs from the Fool at zero to the World at twenty-one and is usually read as a single narrative — a journey from unformed potential through every archetypal encounter to completion. The Minor Arcana divides into four suits, each mapped to a classical element and a domain of ordinary life.
Waite deliberately swapped Strength and Justice from the older Marseille ordering to align the trumps with the zodiac, which is why numbering VIII and XI differ between traditions. Both orderings are defensible; the cards mean the same things.
Questions Readers Ask
Which suit corresponds to which element?
Wands to fire, cups to water, swords to air, pentacles to earth — the standard Golden Dawn attribution used by most modern decks.
Why are Strength and Justice numbered differently in some decks?
Waite exchanged them to fit a zodiacal sequence. Marseille decks keep the older order.
Are these images in the public domain?
Yes — the 1909 Rider–Waite–Smith illustrations are public domain in the United States and most of the world.