Tarot card meanings: all 78 cards
Upright and reversed meanings of all 78 tarot cards: the Major Arcana and the four suits of the Minor Arcana.
When the question is about you and another person, there is a spread of its own: Tarot reading for two
A tarot deck has seventy-eight cards, and each of them is a picture before it is a meaning. The deck on these pages is the Rider–Waite, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and first published in 1909, whose images many modern decks still follow. Twenty-two of its cards are the Major Arcana, the large themes of a life. The other fifty-six are the Minor Arcana: four suits of fourteen cards that deal with the days in between. Each suit counts from the Ace to the Ten and ends with four court cards — the Page, the Knight, the Queen and the King — which are often read as people, or as ways of being that a moment asks for.
Every card below has a page of its own: what the picture shows, then its meaning upright and reversed, each read through love, through work and money, and through what the card asks of you. The keywords beside each name are the short version. None of it tells the future. The cards are a way of looking at a question, for reflection and entertainment rather than prediction.
Major Arcana
The Major Arcana run from the Fool, numbered zero, to the World, numbered twenty-one. Read in order, they are often called the Fool's journey: a sequence of meetings — with will and intuition, with authority and love, with loss and with hope — that ends where a new beginning becomes possible. When one of them appears in a reading, tradition gives it more weight than a minor card: it points at the larger movement a question sits inside rather than at the details of the day.
The Fool
Upright: new beginnings, spontaneity, leap of faith
Reversed: recklessness, hesitation, naivety
The Magician
Upright: willpower, skill, manifestation
Reversed: manipulation, untapped talent, illusion
The High Priestess
Upright: intuition, inner voice, mystery
Reversed: ignored intuition, secrets, silence
The Empress
Upright: abundance, nurturing, creativity
Reversed: creative block, dependence, stagnation
The Emperor
Upright: structure, authority, stability
Reversed: rigidity, domination, lack of discipline
The Chariot
Upright: determination, control, victory
Reversed: lack of direction, aggression, obstacles
Wheel of Fortune
Upright: cycles, destiny, turning point
Reversed: bad luck, resisting change, setbacks
The Hanged Man
Upright: pause, surrender, new perspective
Reversed: stalling, resistance, sacrifice in vain
Death
Upright: endings, transformation, release
Reversed: fear of change, clinging to the past, stagnation
The Devil
Upright: attachment, temptation, restriction
Reversed: release, reclaiming power, awareness
The Tower
Upright: sudden change, upheaval, revelation
Reversed: averted disaster, fear of collapse, delayed change
The Moon
Upright: intuition, illusion, the unknown
Reversed: clarity, released fear, confusion fading
Judgement
Upright: awakening, reckoning, second chance
Reversed: self-doubt, ignoring the call, harsh self-judgment
The World
Upright: completion, wholeness, achievement
Reversed: unfinished business, delays, lack of closure
Wands
Wands are the suit of fire: drive, ambition, creativity and the will to begin. Their cards follow an idea from the first spark of the Ace to the heavy load of the Ten, and they ask what you are putting your energy into — and whether it is still yours to carry.
Cups
Cups are the suit of water: feelings, relationships, intuition and what the heart keeps. From the overflowing cup of the Ace to the family under the rainbow in the Ten, they trace how affection is offered, received, lost and found again, and they ask what you feel rather than what you think you ought to feel.
Swords
Swords are the suit of air: thought, speech, conflict and truth. They cut both ways — toward clarity and toward the pain that clarity can bring — from the raised blade of the Ace to the hard ending of the Ten. The suit asks what you believe about a situation, and whether the story you are telling yourself is the only one available.
Pentacles
Pentacles are the suit of earth: work, money, the body, home and the slow business of building. From the coin held out in the Ace to the settled household of the Ten, they are about what can be held, grown and handed on, and they ask what you are tending, and at what pace.
Upright and reversed
A card can land the right way up or upside down. Upright, it speaks in its most direct voice: the quality it names is present and within reach. Reversed, the same quality is still there but turned — blocked, overdone, held back or pointed inward. A reversal is not the card's opposite and not a bad omen; it is the same subject seen from an awkward angle, and often the more useful one to look at.
Some readers set reversals aside and read every card upright; each page here gives both, so the choice stays yours. Either way, a card offers a question rather than a forecast: what you are noticing, and what you might do with it.