The Major Arcana cards in order

The 22 Major Arcana run in order from 0 The Fool to 21 The World: The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement and The World. That is the Rider-Waite-Smith order used by most modern decks. The table gives Roman numerals and keywords, and the sections after it cover how decks differ, where the order came from and some quick ways to memorize it.

The Major Arcana in order, with numbers and Roman numerals

Each card links to its own page, where you’ll find the full upright, reversed, love and career meanings. The keywords in this list are only memory hooks.

The attribution column follows a deliberate pattern. The Golden Dawn spread the twelve zodiac signs, the seven classical planets and three elements across the 22 cards, matching the twelve “simple,” seven “double” and three “mother” letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Later astrologers often gave Uranus to The Fool, Neptune to The Hanged Man and Pluto to Judgement. For your own sign’s card, use the zodiac tarot card calculator.

Why is The Fool numbered 0?

The Fool began as an unnumbered card that stood outside the ranking of trumps, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck gave it a 0, while tarot numerology counts it as 22. The Fool: 0 or 22? covers the history and both readings.

Why Strength and Justice swap places

Marseille decks put Justice at VIII and Strength at XI, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck swapped them in 1909 to follow the Golden Dawn’s zodiac order. This site’s card pages use the Rider-Waite-Smith numbering and the Destiny Matrix uses the Marseille one, as Strength 8 or Justice 11? explains.

How card names and numbers differ between decks

The 22 cards are the same in almost every deck, but their names and positions vary.

If you’ve switched decks and a card seems to be missing, check this table first. The Popess and The High Priestess are the same card, and so are Lust and Strength.

Where the order came from

The first trump cards in 1440s Italy had no numbers printed on them. Players learned the ranking by heart, and it varied by city. The tarot historian Michael Dummett grouped the surviving local orders into three families. One of them, linked to Milan, became the ancestor of the Tarot de Marseille, and that is where the modern sequence comes from.

Some cards drifted more than others. The three virtues (Justice, Strength and Temperance) moved around the most, and the order of The Sun, The Moon and The Star also varied from region to region. Once woodblock-printed Marseille decks spread across France and Switzerland in the 1600s and 1700s, the Roman numerals fixed the order we use now, apart from the later Strength and Justice swap.

The three rows of seven

Many tarot teachers set The Fool aside and lay the other 21 cards out in three rows of seven:

• Cards 1 to 7. Learning to act in the outer world: skill, intuition, nurture, structure, tradition, choice and will.
• Cards 8 to 14. Inner work: courage, solitude, cycles, honesty, surrender, endings and balance.
• Cards 15 to 21. Larger forces: temptation, upheaval, hope, fear, joy, renewal and completion.

The Fool then walks through each row in turn. That reading of the sequence as a story is called the Fool’s Journey. Laying the rows out also reveals the columns, such as The Magician, Strength and The Devil (1, 8, 15), which all deal with power.

How to memorize the Major Arcana order

You don’t need the order to read single cards. You do need it for birth cards, year cards and charts, where a number has to become a card. These tricks help:

• Learn the anchors first. Fix 7 Chariot, 14 Temperance and 21 World, which end each row of seven, plus 0 Fool, which sits outside the rows. These four give you landmarks.
• Learn the pairs. Many neighbors are partners or opposites: Magician and High Priestess (1 and 2), Empress and Emperor (3 and 4), Tower and Star (16 and 17), Moon and Sun (18 and 19).
• Use the digit sums. Cards nine places apart share a root number: 3 Empress, 12 Hanged Man and 21 World all reduce to 3. Know one and you can find the others. These groups are called constellations, covered in Tarot Constellations and Hidden Factor Cards.
• Tell it as a story. Say the cards aloud as a sequence of events, from setting out to arriving. A story sticks better than a list.
• Practice with numbers. Pick a random number from 0 to 21 and name the card, then check yourself against the table.

How the order turns your birthday into a card

Every birth-date system on this site relies on this sequence. Your arcana number comes from adding the digits of your birth date and reducing the total until it is 22 or less. For March 15, 1990, the digits 0+3+1+5+1+9+9+0 add up to 28, and 2+8 gives 10, which is Wheel of Fortune. A total of 22 points to The Fool.

The same order sits behind your tarot birth cards, your year card and the Destiny Matrix. To see where your own birthday lands in the sequence, use the arcana calculator.