A Way of Dividing the Major Arcana

I posted recently about an arbitrary way of dividing up the whole tarot by the background colour of the cards. This is sort-of a guest post because it's just to repost another way of dividing the Major Arcana taken from someone else. As always with blogging, when I post something it's because it either has already entered my inner world or I want to turn it over and let it stew.

This way is taken from a book I read years ago: Anne Lionet: Secrets of Tarot, Dorling-Kindersley, London, 2001, pp. 82 and 83. This is actually one of the books I read fairly early in my tarot reading career, and to be honest, having obtained another copy about twenty years later, I'm horribly aware of how little of it seems familiar to me, so perhaps I didn't pay as much attention as I thought I did!

It gives this way of dividing the 22 Major Arcana cards into themes, which I suppose is a more developed way of the tendency in introductory texts to divide the tarot cards into good/bad or positive/negative. So here are the categories (some cards do fall into more than one category, this isn't a mistake):

1. Enlightenment: The Emperor, The Empress, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hierophant, The Hermit and The World.

2. Responsibility (to Others): The Empress, The Emperor, Judgement, Temperance, and The Lovers.

3. Everyday Living: The Empress, Justice, and The Devil.

4. Reacting to Fate: Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, Judgement, The Moon, and The Star.

5. Cards of Light and Dark: Wheel of Fortune, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, Judgement, The Moon, and The Star.

6. Cards of Reality: The Emperor, The Chariot, Strength, and The Sun.

7. Cards of Dreaming and Doing: Temperance, The Star, and The Chariot.

8. Cards of Moving Forward: The Fool, The Chariot, Wheel of Fortune, The Sun, Judgement, and The World.

As always, when reading someone else's approach to the tarot, I'm struck by the way the cards impact different people in so many ways and have endless resonance. These themes are largely here, as I said, to make me turn them over and see what they make me think, but I just have a couple of first impressions.

The first is that I want to take the category of dreaming and doing further and see what I can do with it. I want to think about whether the whole Major Arcana, or even whole deck, could be dividing up into either dreaming or doing. The reality category also interests me because I would like to see what I can do with the idea of reality and do a similar thing to see if the deck could be divided up into reality/unreality as a whole. I personally don't do reversals because I think each card carries both the upright and reversed energies as a duality all the time, and to try to divide the two is a fruitless exercise: the entire point of paganism/magic/occultism is monism in which everything is one so certainly a card should be able to carry two different meanings at once!

The other impression, which is perhaps a caution about this division method, is that I personally would question whether you can make a category of Major Arcana cards which are *the ones* which carry meanings related to Everyday Living. I take the Minor Arcana as being more inclined towards everyday living, minor decisions, routine events, etc, and the Major Arcana as being about bigger perspectives, tendencies, and so on. Major is climate and Minor is weather, if you like, and therefore I'd be wary of assigning some Major Arcana cards to everyday stuff. Of course I'm immediately going to contradict myself by commenting that of course Major cards can mean ordinary pedestrian stuff, because the meanings are endlessly mutable, but then I did just say above that each card can carry at least two contradictory meanings at once!

I'm looking forward to thinking about these divisions and seeing where I go with them. Of course I'm still chewing over Meisner slowly in the bathroom so that will probably result in some posts at some point!