As the ancestor of modern playing cards, the Minor Arcana is somewhat familiar and, therefore, easy to recognize and organize, but the same cannot be said of the Major Arcana.
The cards numbered from zero to twenty-one bear cryptic names such as the Magician, Hierophant, Hermit and the Fool, and their images tend to strike modern audiences as mysterious and exotic. The allegorical figures represented in cards like the Devil and Death, for example, have a startling impact and the emotional responses these cards evoke work to heighten the aura of mystery and magic that surrounds the Major Arcana.
Conjuring a sense of awe and mystery was no doubt Waite’s intent when he executed his designs because he believed that the true meaning of the Major Arcana rests in its “Secret Doctrine,” as promulgated by the “Secret Tradition.” For this reason, many tarot card readers today are inclined to think of the Major Arcana as signposts representing the sequential stages of spiritual development.
The visual impact of the religious images that characterize the Major Arcana does indeed suggest higher meanings, but at another level, they also reveal a constellation of cultural values particular to the social institutions of Renaissance Italy, where the Major Arcana is said to have originated in the fifteenth century. For example, the Empress and the Emperor are traditional personage representatives of imperial earthly power, and the card that immediately follows in sequence, the Hierophant, is another name for the Pope, head of the instituted Roman Catholic Church, which ordained the temporal and territorial domain of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Major Arcana depicts earthly matters just as surely as it conveys religious ideas, such as the Biblical prophecy of the Final Judgment, as portrayed in the Judgement card. The imagery of the Major Arcana presents a curious blend of secular and religious ideas; ideas that were no doubt important and necessary in helping the people who created them make sense of the world they lived in.
Simply put, the Major Arcana cards help to reveal deep meaning scenarios.
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