Tarot Card Meanings for All 78 Cards

Major Arcana vs Minor Arcana: what’s the difference?

The 78 cards of the tarot are split into two groups. The 22 Major Arcanacards (The Fool, The Magician, The Lovers, The Tower, The Star, and so on) represent life’s big themes — spiritual lessons, turning points, archetypal forces. When a Major card shows up in a reading, it’s usually pointing at something structural. This is the terrain of the soul, not the weather.

The 56 Minor Arcanacards are divided into four suits — Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles — and they speak to the everyday: emotions, action, thoughts, and material life. They tell you what’s happening right now, not what the deeper pattern means. A reading full of Minors points at current conditions; a reading full of Majors tells you something important is shifting underneath.

Most readings mix both, and the ratio matters. If you pull mostly Minors, the situation is grounded in the day-to-day. If you pull mostly Majors, pay attention — the deck is telling you this moment is a turning point.

How to use this card meanings library

Every card page is written to help you actually read the card, not just look up its definition. You’ll find eight sections on each: a quick upright and reversed meaning, what the card says about love, what someone may be feeling, what they may be thinking about you, career guidance, spiritual meaning, symbolism, and the practical advice the card is offering you right now.

Reversed meanings aren’t “negative versions” — they’re the same energy, but blocked, internal, or delayed. A reversed Star isn’t the absence of hope; it’s hope that’s gone quiet and needs you to reach for it. Read reversals as the shadow side of the same card, not its opposite.

The fastest way to internalize card meanings is to pull a single card every morning, read the quick meaning, and then watch how the day unfolds through that lens. By the time you’ve done it for thirty mornings, you’ll know these cards the way you know the faces of people close to you.

The four Minor Arcana suits at a glance

Each Minor suit has its own domain. Knowing the suit gives you 70% of the meaning before you even open the card page.

• Cups (Water): emotion, love, relationships, intuition, creativity, what’s felt but not yet spoken.
• Wands (Fire): action, passion, energy, creative work, career ambition, the spark before the project starts.
• Swords (Air): thought, communication, conflict, clarity, the stories we tell ourselves, truth and its cost.
• Pentacles (Earth): money, work, the body, home, material security, slow growth and long-term investment.