Major Arcana

"The practice of Zen mind is beginner's mind. The innocence of the first inquiry – what am I? – is needed throughout Zen practice. The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as the are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything."
– Shunryu Suzuki

The Major Arcana of the Tarot is one of two major divisions of the Tarot deck, the other being the Minor Arcana. The word "Arcana" is from the Latin for "hidden" - implying hidden or secret knowledge that is known only to initiates. It is the Major Arcana that is the primary thing that distinguishes a Tarot deck, particularly one used for divination or other occult (also from a word for "secret") practices from an ordinary deck of playing cards.

A full exposition of the history of the Tarot and playing cards is beyond the scope of this article, however, a brief introduction is in order. The cards of the Major Arcana appear in Italy around the middle of the thirteenth century, roughly a century after the first mention of playing cards in Europe. These early playing cards were apparently introduced from Muslim north Africa from the Mumlek Empire and were used in a game called "Deputies". Being of Muslim origin, they had only designs and writing on them and no pictures of people as that was strictly forbidden by Islamic law. Most likely the Moslem world received the concept of playing cards from China and other points east where playing cards of one sort or another may be very ancient.

Some of the very first mentions of to Tarot come from northern Italy in about the middle of the 1400s. One deck in particular, the Visconti-Sforza, is particularly well know, if for no other reason that there full examples of it that survive to this day. Painted for the Visconti-Sforza Ducal Court in Milan by artist Benefacio Bembo, this early Tarot deck already had the cards of the modern Major Arcana including highly esoteric ones such as The Hanged Man. However, the term "Major Arcana" was not yet being applied to this addition to the ordinary deck of playing cards. They were simply called trionfi, that is to say "triumphs" or trumps. They were used along with the ordinary playing cards and served as a permanent trump suit in the game of tarocci, a trick taking game that was similar to modern bridge or whist.

There, to be sure, changes to the Major Arcana over the ensuing centuries, but on the whole the trumps have remained mostly the same. This leads one to speculate where Bembo got the ideas for his cards, especially the more obscure cards such as The Hanged Man. Was there some pre-existing set of esoteric cards that were used perhaps as flash cards would be today to help preseve and teach some gnostic or othe essoteric knowledge? We will perhaps never know.

Today, the Tarot is best known as a tool of divination and the Major Arcana is an important part of the divinatory process. The Major Arcana cards contain Archetypal images. An archetype is something that connects with the subconscious or unconscious in a universal manner. In the study of semiotics, there are three quite different terms that are often used interchangably in every day speach, but that have significant differences. Those terms are: sign, symbol and archetype. The pioneering Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, distinguished signs from symbols by stating that a sign stands for something known, as a word stands for its referent, where as a symbol, is used to stand for something that is unknown and that cannot be made clear or precise. An archetype (from the Greek for 'arche' (first) + 'typos' (model)) is the model of a thing, person or behavior from which all others of that kind are derived. To Jung, there were certain archetypes that were universal, that all humans could recognize and connect to the specific patterns of their experience in the same manner as all other people without any cultural connection one to the other. This connection came not from culture or experience, but from what Jung called the Collective Unconscious.

In the Tarot The cards of the Major Arcana go beyond signs, beyond symbols, straight to archetypes. In a sense they are symbols, but they are symbols that stand in for archetypes and should not be confused with the archetype itself, which is ineffable. This is reminiscent of the famous Zen Koan, "The finger pointing to the Moon is not the Moon". Don't confuse the symbol with the concept which is symbolized by it, especially when that concept is an archetype.