The Major Arcana: the journey and its mirrors

Readers often describe the Major Arcana as the Fool’s journey. The Fool (0) sets out with nothing. The Magician and the High Priestess are two kinds of power: making and knowing. The Empress and Emperor are nature and order; the Hierophant is the institution; the Lovers are the first great choice. The middle of the sequence tests the traveler: the Chariot’s will, Strength’s patience, the Hermit’s solitude, the Wheel’s luck, Justice’s accounting, the Hanged Man’s surrender, Death’s ending. Then come the hard truths and the healing: Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement, and finally the World, where the journey closes into a circle.

In this deck the journey is also a life cycle. The Fool is dodder, a vine that starts with no roots of its own and finds its host by scent. The World is Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that can live in almost every warm-blooded animal but can only complete its sexual cycle in a cat.

The Lovers (VI) and the Devil (XV) are drawn as mirror images in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck: two figures, and a towering figure above them, an angel in one and a devil in the other. Their numbers add up to 21, the World.

Treat that as a rule and every trump finds a partner: the Fool and the World (0 + 21), the Magician and Judgement (1 + 20), the High Priestess and the Sun, the Empress and the Moon, the Emperor and the Star, the Hierophant and the Tower (5 + 16), the Lovers and the Devil, the Chariot and Temperance, the Hermit and the Hanged Man. The two middle pairs depend on the deck’s numbering.

The pairs are not tradition; they are a reading game this deck plays. But they work. The Hierophant is the institution that holds you; the Tower is the same institution struck by lightning. When a trump appears, ask what its mirror would say.