How many tarot cards are there?

78 — 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, the latter split into four suits of fourteen cards each.

What is the difference between major and minor arcana?

Major arcana describe large themes and turning points. Minor arcana describe the ordinary texture of life, sorted by suit into action, feeling, thought and material matters.

Do reversed cards mean the opposite?

Not usually. A reversed card more often means the same energy blocked, internalised, delayed or overdone. Some readers do not use reversals at all.

Tarot Card Meanings: All 78 Cards, Upright and Reversed

Card of the day

Six of Cups reversed

Recovery delayed, or moving on before the lesson landed. Again, in the domain of feeling, relationship and intuition.

The four suits

Wands Fire · Action, ambition and creative drive Cups Water · Feeling, relationship and intuition Swords Air · Thought, conflict and truth Pentacles Earth · Money, work and the body

Major arcana

0 The Fool 1 The Magician 2 The High Priestess 3 The Empress 4 The Emperor 5 The Hierophant 6 The Lovers 7 The Chariot 8 Strength 9 The Hermit 10 Wheel of Fortune 11 Justice 12 The Hanged Man 13 Death 14 Temperance 15 The Devil 16 The Tower 17 The Star 18 The Moon 19 The Sun 20 Judgement 21 The World

All 78 cards →

Spreads

Three Card The workhorse spread. Fast, readable, and hard to over-interpret. Celtic Cross Ten cards, the most detailed traditional spread. Rewards a specific question and punishes a vague one. Yes or No A single card read for direction rather than detail. Relationship Five cards separating your side, their side and the thing between you. Career Five cards on work, aimed at a decision rather than a fantasy.

The minor arcana are not 56 things to memorise

Every minor card is the intersection of two axes. The suit sets the domain — Wands for action, Cups for feeling, Swords for thought, Pentacles for material life. The number sets the stage of a process: Aces begin, fives disrupt, tens complete.

Once you hold both, most minor cards can be reasoned out rather than recalled. A Five of Cups is disruption in the domain of feeling — loss, grief, focusing on what spilled rather than what remains. A Five of Pentacles is the same disruption in the material world: hardship, exclusion, being outside in the cold.

On reversals

A reversed card rarely means the plain opposite. More often it means the same energy turned inward, blocked, delayed or taken too far. The Sun reversed is not disaster — it is warmth that is not being felt.

Plenty of experienced readers do not use reversals at all, taking the position that 78 cards already contain their own shadows. Both approaches are defensible; what matters is deciding before you shuffle rather than after.

What tarot is doing

The deck is a set of 78 images broad enough that any of them can be connected to any situation. That is not an accusation — it is the mechanism. A random card interrupts the story you were already telling yourself and forces a different framing, which is genuinely useful and requires nothing supernatural to work.