Major Arcana

The Major Arcana

The word "arcana" implies something of mystery. It suggests a sense of profundity that is deliberately veiled. The root "arc" traces a subtle link to the dark phase of the moon and the crescent shape of a boat traversing the orb of Night.

In the Tarot, twenty-two of the seventy-eight cards are collectively known as the Major Arcana or Major Trumps. While the precise origin of these twenty-two illustrated cards is best left to scholarly debate, the true mystery is how they have kept up with the times.

Over a period of 600 years these cards have undergone numerous design alterations, yet have still managed to arrive in the 21st century relatively in tact. Disguised within the naïve game of Tarot, this set of twenty-two major arcana became the perfect keep safe for an ancient code of wisdom that would otherwise not have survived the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. I refer to this mysterious code as the Twenty-Two Cipher. Though the cadence of these cards, both numerical and positional, has changed numerous times in their recorded history, this seems to have had little effect on the Tarot as a bountiful repository of both esoteric and mundane knowledge.

One of the pivotal precepts of tarot is the correlation between these twenty-two Major Arcana and the twenty-two letters/sounds of the early Phoenician alphabet (ancestral) parent of the contemporary Roman alphabet. Thought to originate between 1500 and 1200 BCE, the Phoenician (Northern Semitic) script succeeded in correlating a system of twenty-two specific sounds with twenty-two consonant characters (there were no vowels ascribed). These representations of sounds could then be adaptively arranged into words and phrases that were unobtainable with hieroglyphs. This amazing phonetic "invention" represents an extraordinary leap in human communication that was further refined and formalized by the Hebrews and other Semitic peoples.

Undoubtedly the paleo-Hebrew version is the most important of several earlier branches of the aleph - bet (Hebrew alphabet). Their scribes are also credited with assigning religious connotations and numerical values to each character, effectively creating an alphanumeric code still in use today. An unwritten law of the universe might explain the survival of this system, over many others, by stating that "continual adaptation sustains continual utilization."

Essentially, this alphabet, and the Twenty-two Cipher it contains, has served as the mouth of the Old Testament, and carried the code of the Bible (Hebrew and Christian) throughout its numerous translations, over thousands of years. The Cipher is also evident in the number of generations from Adam to Jacob, in the number of works of creation, in the paths of the Kabalah's Tree of Life, in the Book of Psalms, and in these twenty-two Arcana of unknown origin. Displaying sleight of hand abilities, it seems to have re-surfaced in Europe in the late thirteenth century CE. In the guise of the twenty-two Major Arcana, the Cipher performed an amazing act of transformation (see card XIII-The Crossing) by reuniting pictograms with the original WORD. This same Cipher appeared as a recurring numerical anomalies of 21.6 and 22 in Paris during the course of the creation of this Tarot. It may also be said that the 22 Cipher delivered the Hebrews ultimate revenge to the Pharaohs by deciding the future course of the written word thus sealing the fate of the reign of the hieroglyph.