Chapter V

The Symbolic Structure of the Major Arcana (or, Throw Away Your Little White Book)

Buying a tarot card deck is not a complex procedure, even if you don’t really know that much about tarot. Go to the bookstore. Look through the decks you like (there will be samples). Consider buying the Tarot of the Cat Lovers or the Tarot of the Autobots or something. Commune with your inner cat or inner robot. Look at the Dalí deck and imagine how impressed your friends will be. Find a deck that resonates with your inner being, then put it back and buy the Rider-Waite deck.

I’m only half-kidding. There’s a bookshelf in my office stacked with various decks, all of which I’ve used and enjoyed. But when it comes to actually doing divination and magical work, I come back again and again to two decks: the Rider-Waite and the Crowley Thoth deck. And I would hate to pooh-pooh the artistic work of fellow occultists, but at least some (by which I mean, many) decks you find on display for sale are really rather awful. Many decks are gorgeous pieces of art and could work for divination—after all, you can find the language of the Anima Mundi nearly everywhere. But there’s something to be said for the tried and true.

Buy the deck you like. You will anyway, but let me make my case. Most decks are just knockoffs of the Rider-Waite deck anyway. To test, pick up a copy of both the Rider-Waite and some other deck (the Tarot of the Frat People, let’s say). Now flip past the changes they make to the major arcana (replacing the Hierophant, perhaps, with the Pledgemaster). After all, Waite made a few such changes himself. Get to the minor arcana, the cards that represent the suits of tarot—wands, cups, swords, and disks (or pentacles). Odds are good that the Tarot of the Frat People will rename one or more of these suits, for no clear reason—paddles instead of wands, kegs instead of cups. Is there a clear symbolic reason why such a change seemed necessary? The tarot is supposed to describe every situation possible; why would changing one of the suits, or all of them, make it clearer symbolically what is going on in a life? Is there a reason that kegs represent the element of water better than cups? Also notice if the cards simply represent a number of the relevant objects: is the three of kegs just three kegs? The odds are against it: probably you’ll see three people celebrating with three kegs, or something of that nature. It will probably look strikingly familiar to the Waite deck, because Waite (or Smith) invented these images in order to make the minor arcana easier to learn. Everyone else copied them, because they were such a good idea. And some of the copies might be better, in some senses, than the original. Many people, for example, prefer the redrawn Universal Tarot images depicted in this book.

The problem with making willy-nilly changes, though, is that the Rider-Waite deck is carefully designed to reflect the symbolism of both elemental and planetary interactions. The claim that Waite added blinds to the cards is probably true—after all, there’s really no clear symbolic reason why the Six of Swords should have a boat, other than some traditional meanings of the cards. But how much worse is the unthinking copying of those blinds coupled with an unawareness of the actual symbolic parts?

I don’t mean to imply that the Rider-Waite deck is the best of all available decks (I actually prefer the Crowley Thoth deck for having more careful symbolism), nor do I mean to imply that you should only like certain kinds of things. If you’re into fraternities and you want to buy the Tarot of the Frat People, go ahead—but keep in mind that the tarot is both art and a tool. Maybe a glass hammer is really pretty, but it’s not terribly practical.

Once you buy a deck, you’ll find it comes with a little white book (LWB). This booklet supposedly tells you how to read the cards. It does little in the way of that, actually, but it might be useful in giving you a short bio of the artist, which is always interesting. When people buy their first tarot deck—and I remember doing this as a kid—they flip through the booklet frantically while doing readings, trying to piece together the somewhat vague “meanings” of the cards to their question. I must have had some success, since I didn’t give up—but I do remember putting my tarot cards on a shelf for a couple years after buying them, because I couldn’t figure out how the odd statements in the little book had anything to do with either the pictures on the cards or my question.

It’s a daunting prospect as it’s presented by that LWB. Seventy-eight cards, each with two meanings—most LWBs use reversed meanings even if the authors of the deck didn’t. That seems like a lot of memorization before you can ever lay out a card, so most people don’t bother and apologetically “use the book,” flipping through the LWB as they read the cards. Even professional readers, when they read for themselves, often “use the book,” although they rarely admit it.

As an aside, this holds true for astrology, too. You buy a book on astrology, cast your chart, and then look up what Mercury in Gemini means. You read a short paragraph, try to make sense of it, and then move on to the next planet-house combination. These instruction books, whether LWBs or cookbook astrology texts, rarely teach the synthesis of the information. In other words, the symbols are saying something—not a lot of little paragraphs of something.

Each card is an interaction of symbols with a particular meaning—not a bunch of unrelated meanings. And even though you could write a paragraph on any given card, given some intuition and thought, most readings don’t work that way. If you learn the definitions of the cards from the LWB, you will learn them in a state of mind you do not use while you’re doing a reading. Studies on state-dependent learning have shown conclusively that we recall best in the state of mind we learned the information. Mostly, scholars use this information to make jokes about taking tests while drunk, but it is relevant in divination. If we do not learn the meanings of the cards in the state of mind we intend to recall them—the divinatory state of consciousness—we will find it harder to read. Memorizing a book or, more likely, flipping through the thing while you read will not be conducive to this state of mind.

So here’s the good news: you don’t have to memorize seventy-eight paragraphs about the cards. You need only understand how their symbols interact. Similarly, in astrology, once you know how symbols interact, you don’t really need thick interpretive tomes unless you want them. Even the LWB can be useful, and once you understand the symbols, you can gain hours of pleasant meditation thinking about how or why Waite thought the card meant “that.” In fact, when I read for myself, I often “use the book” because I want to see what things I might know about the card but not be thinking about when I read for myself.

The first thing you need to do is learn the major arcana. The advantage of doing this is that you’ve got a divination deck you can use even before you’ve got the entire minor arcana learned, as the major arcana can stand alone.

You’ve got twenty-two cards to learn, and we’re going to learn them in groups. If, as is likely, you’ve already memorized the twenty-two major trumps (or, for that matter, the seventy-eight cards of the deck), I hope that you’ll bear with this exercise and perhaps even complete it, as a way to increase your understanding. Such a contemplation of the tarot seems like a beginner’s exercise, but it’s like a musician playing scales—there’s no point at which musicians stop playing scales, and there’s no point at which you graduate away from thinking about the tarot in new ways.

It’s important to have the symbols in front of you, so take out your deck and separate the major arcana. In most decks, these are the cards marked with a roman numeral at the top and a name at the bottom. The court cards—King of Wands, and so on—are not major arcana, so set them aside. Essentially, anything that does not contain the words “of wands,” “of cups,” “of disks,” or “of swords” (or whatever your deck’s equivalent suits are) is a major arcana card.

If you have a replica of an old deck, it may not have numbers at the top of the major arcana. And even if it does, those numbers may not correspond to what I have below. I will, therefore, refer to the cards by their names and numbers rather than their numbers alone. Also keep in mind that some decks change certain cards; you may need to consult the LWB to figure out which card is which. Also, the astrological and elemental attributions I’ll list below are the most popular and derive from the Golden Dawn. Perhaps you use different ones. That’s okay, as long as you understand how those other correspondences affect and change the meanings of the cards for you.

Memory works by association and grouping, so we will group these cards under their symbolic families. There are many ways to do this—for example, you could lay them out in two rows and make links between cards that fall in the same columns, or you could take out the Fool and break the rest of the deck into three sequential groups of seven. Those are all worthwhile activities for meditation and I recommend them as ways to understand the sequence of the cards and their relationships to each other. But the method I will use applies the keys of three, seven, and twelve (which we have not yet talked about) to the cards. As you can tell, this adds up to twenty-two, the number of major arcana cards in the deck.

Begin by going through the deck and taking out three cards: 0–The Fool, XII–The Hanged Man, and XX–Judgement. Lay the Fool, the Hanged Man, and Judgement out in front of you in that order. Remember that the quality of cardinality involves initiation and beginning, which the Fool also seems to indicate. The Hanged Man represents the quality of being fixed—permanence, stability, and focus. Finally, the quality of mutability involves sudden change, which describes Judgement pretty well, with its dead returning to life. Look again at each card, considering how each symbol on the card reflects something of the nature of the quality. For example, the Fool is chased by a dog and, in some decks, a crocodile, symbolizing that beginnings are often initiated by danger but at the same time, we have a companion (although in some decks, the dog is attacking the fool, which is another thing to consider—the beginnings sometimes separate us from our old companions, who tend to hold on). The Hanged Man is suspended, fixed, to a tree, but notice his facial expression. It is one of focused concentration, not pain. Spin such interpretations on each of the cards, making some notes in a journal. But do not rely on the notes: spend the majority of your intellectual energy focusing on the cards and linking the images on the cards to symbolic meanings in your head.

This process isn’t an intellectual one. You should associate loosely and creatively. The goal is not to memorize the cards in the LWB, but to develop a relationship with the cards. Just as the best way to learn a language is not to memorize a long list of grammatical rules and vocabulary (contrary to the most popular method of teaching language in the United States, which is why most of us are monolingual), the best way to learn a divination system is not through rote memorization but by using the system to create meaning. These reorganizations serve as the first sentences you learn to actually use in a foreign language: “Hello, how are you?” You’re shaking hands with the Anima Mundi, and the state of consciousness you find yourself in as you do this is the divinatory state of consciousness mentioned earlier.

On another occasion, or later if you still have time, take out the following four cards and place them under the Fool: IV–The Emperor, VII–The Chariot, XI–Justice, XV–The Devil. These four cards are symbolically associated with the four cardinal astrological signs of Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn. They do not themselves represent those signs, because their symbolism is in many ways much more complex—but there is a symbolic association. Each of the twelve signs is an interaction between quality and element, so we have the four elements represented here too: Aries is fire, Cancer is water, Libra is air, and Capricorn is earth. If the cardinal elements are those elements concerned with beginnings, creativity, and originality, we can derive a lot of meaning just by mixing the ideas of element and quality.

For example, the Emperor is the creative power of fire: authority. But at the same time, it’s new or young: the Emperor can use that authority childishly. Similarly, the Chariot represents the creative power of water—it moves forward and transports us like a river. Justice is the creative power of air—reason and logic and fair judgment—all with the innocence of youth. The Devil is the creative power of earth—it can represent material success, but at the same time it gives us an immature view of the Earth in its image of chained humans who feel they cannot escape matter. Maybe you feel some of these interpretations are stretched, and that’s fair. The only interpretations that will work for you are the ones you construct yourself, but they must be constructed on the foundation of sound symbolic thinking and a divinatory state of mind.

Now imagine that each of these cards is, in some way, linked with the Fool above it. For example, how can authority be a kind of Fool? How can the Devil? How can the driver of the Chariot? Such links do not need to be firm and completely convincing, but this exercise gives you practice in the key of complex cartomancy readings: the combination of symbols into a complex web.

Repeat this process, then, with the Hanged Man and the major arcana cards associated with the fixed quality, viz., Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius, respectively: V–The Hierophant, VIII–Strength, XIII–Death, and XVII–The Star. See how each of the elements of earth, fire, water, and air interact with the fixed quality of focused stability. You’ll see how the Hierophant represents a focused power of earth: the stability of tradition. Strength is the kind that arises from energetic focus. Link these ideas with the images on the cards, and you’ll find them easier to remember. Then, link them to the concept of the Hanged Man.

Finally, repeat this process again under Judgement, using the cards associated with the mutable signs of Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces: VI–The Lovers, IX–The Hermit, XIV–Temperance, and XVIII–The Moon. These represent the unstable qualities of air, earth, fire, and water respectively. This instability isn’t negative, merely undetermined and uncertain. So the Lovers represents an intellectual process of choice that hangs in the air, undetermined as of yet. The Hermit is the uncertainty of earth: the wanderer with no place, who spreads his wisdom to everyone. Temperance is the instability of fire, harnessed for change. For this reason, Aleister Crowley called it Art and reworked it to represent an alchemical transformation. The quantity of water represented in this image might strike you as odd for a card associated with fire—so that’s worthy of some consideration. It’s also worth noting that this figure is also unstable, one foot on land and one on the waves, just as the Anima Mundi is depicted in Fludd’s diagram. Finally, the Moon represents the instability of water, the reflections and refractions of complex emotions. It is deception and concealment, but also dreams and fantasies.

The twelve cards of the zodiac, you may notice, fall conveniently into the traditional order of the twelve signs, so that if we lay out just those cards in their numbered order (at least as the Rider-Waite has it), we’ll have the signs in their traditional order from Aries to Pisces.

Sign	Element	Quality	Card
Aries	Fire	Cardinal	Emperor
Taurus	Earth	Fixed	Hierophant
Gemini	Air	Mutable	Lovers
Cancer	Water	Cardinal	Chariot
Leo	Fire	Fixed	Strength
Virgo	Earth	Mutable	Hermit
Libra	Air	Cardinal	Justice
Scorpio	Water	Fixed	Death
Sagittarius	Fire	Mutable	Temperance
Capricorn	Earth	Cardinal	Devil
Aquarius	Air	Fixed	Star
Pisces	Water	Mutable	Moon

Once you get through these fifteen cards, you still may wonder how you can use this information for readings. After all, you see some relationships but don’t really know, yet, what they mean in a way you can articulate as well as the LWB does. Now is a good time to play with some other arrangements of these fifteen cards. For example, rearrange the twelve cards associated with the zodiac into a new grid, one that groups together signs of the same elements. How do these groupings reveal new relationships? The fire cards, for example, are the Emperor, Strength, and Temperance. Does this triplet reveal anything if you read it as a story? “A person in authority must focus his or her strength to transform a situation.” What of water? The Chariot, Death, and the Moon. Perhaps “Persistence in moving forward will end deception.” Then again, you might say, “No, it means ‘we are deceived if we think we can overcome death.’” Yes, it could also mean that, which is why flipping through a LWB for “the” meaning is useless if you wish to gain sophisticated oracles from the cards—or any other divination system. If, however, you are in a divinatory state of consciousness, one meaning will be clearer, truer, and more obvious than others.

You don’t have the whole major arcana yet, but it might be fun to do a few test readings, just to stretch out your muscles a little before you have too much stuff to keep in mind. Take only these fifteen cards, shuffle them, and lay out a pair of cards. Now, try to interpret them as if they had arisen in a spread. Try to do this by intuition and by understanding the inevitable relationships between their symbols. For example, if you get the Hanged Man next to Temperance, is there a way that you can imagine the transformational powers of Temperance being focused by the Hanged Man’s fixed sacrifice? If the Chariot and the Hierophant come together, how do they influence each other? The Chariot is enthusiastic and energetic, creative and forward-pushing, while the Hierophant is fixed. Is this pair indicative of a conflict between an urge to rush forward and try new things, against the weight of authority? Or is it a partnership? In truth, it depends on the situation and the intuitions of a reader in the appropriate state of mind.

We’ve got seven more cards to go, and if you predict that these are associated, traditionally (not a particularly old tradition, but tradition at least) with the seven planets, you’d be right on. Fish these cards out of the deck now, and lay them down in order. They are:

I–The Magician	Mercury
II–The High Priestess	Moon
III–The Empress	Venus
X–The Wheel of Fortune	Jupiter
XVI–The Tower	Mars
XIX–The Sun	Sun
XXI–The World	Saturn

It’d be just fabulous if these, like the cards associated with the signs, had the good grace to fall into the traditional order—but they don’t. No worries: imprecision is the nature of language, and everything is a bit messy at the edges of any real language. And the neat and tidy order of the zodiacal arcana is somewhat artificial anyway, since that order was not fixed when Waite started making correspondences. He had some wiggle room, so he took it (swapping, for example, Justice and Strength to make the correspondence more obvious between Libra and Leo).

These correspondences do not really reflect a reality. The makers of the tarot probably did not—occult tradition and mystery notwithstanding—set out to encode all this astrological symbolism in the cards. Moreover, they didn’t need to: the Anima Mundi did it nicely herself. If we search long enough, we can impose (or find, depending on your perspective) such symbolic associations in nearly any set of symbols. Here, we have people who did it with a card game, but we could do it with anything and therefore any set of symbols has the power to become an oracle, if we just learn to listen to it the right way.

That means that there’s no objective message in the cards themselves. The message is in your relationship with the cards: again, meaning is the interaction of symbols in a mind. In order to finish building up the framework for that edifice of meaning, lay out the seven cards in order as shown above.

Consider how the quality of each of the planets is (or isn’t) reflected in the cards. Obviously, the cards mean more than just their planets, or we could simply call the Tower “Mars” and be done with it. And you may notice symbols that strike you as odd or incongruous. These should not be ignored. Instead, they should lead to questions you can contemplate in a focused but relaxed way. For example, why is there a child on a horse in the Sun? How is the World related to constriction (Saturn)? It may help you to seek out some symbol of each of the planets in the trumps. If you’re using a well-constructed deck, that shouldn’t be hard. For example, the heart with the Venus symbol on it should remind you of Venus, and the other cards should fall into place, although some may be challenging (where is Mercury in the Magician? Well, Waite might say, who do you think is standing there?).

Now dig out the three quality cards, the Fool, the Hanged Man, and Judgement. Lay them out and place next to them each of the planetary cards in turn. What happens to the Magician when he is with the Fool? Is this the student, first learning his or her craft? What happens when you place him next to the Hanged Man? The fixed concentration of initiation. Next to Judgement: graduation and completion of a course of study. Now you can see how combinations can create more meanings than are available in the symbols alone.

The LWB isn’t useless to you, but you could just throw it away if you want. You probably won’t, though, and that’s great. You’ll find that you want to look up each of the cards again and see if you can figure out where the meanings come from. Now, when you read the LWB, the meanings that matter, that fit into your symbol system, will sit in your mind on the thrones of the symbolic associations you’ve already built. The ones that don’t work for you won’t. Memorizing the whole book will teach you what the author has in his or her brain. Letting the book roll through you and stick where it speaks to you will teach you what you have in yours.

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