What does arcana mean?

Arcana means “secrets” or “mysteries.” It is the plural of the Latin arcanum, a hidden thing, and in tarot it names the two groups of cards in a 78-card deck: the 22 Major Arcana and the 56 Minor Arcana.

What does arcana mean in everyday English?

Outside tarot, arcana means specialist knowledge that only insiders understand. Dictionaries define it as secrets, mysteries, or knowledge known to only a few people.

You’ll see it in phrases like “the arcana of tax law” or “baseball arcana.” There it means the obscure details that take years to learn. The tone is often a little playful: calling a rule “scoring arcana” tells the reader that only devoted fans will follow it.

Tarot keeps the older, more serious sense of the word. For tarot writers, the arcana are hidden teachings carried in pictures.

Arcanum, arcana and arcane: singular, plural and adjective

Three related words cause most of the confusion.

In the US, arcana is usually pronounced ar-KAY-nuh, and ar-KAH-nuh is also common. Arcanum is ar-KAY-num, and arcane is ar-KANE.

Strictly, arcana is plural, so “the Major Arcana are the 22 trump cards.” In casual tarot talk people also use it as a singular, as in “my arcana is the Star.” Everyone understands both. In careful writing, keep arcanum for one card and arcana for several.

Where does the word arcana come from?

The Latin adjective arcanus means “closed, hidden, secret.” It is usually traced to arca, a chest or strongbox, the same root behind the English word “ark.” Something arcane is, quite literally, kept in the box.

The noun arcanum came to mean a secret or a mystery. Early chemists and physicians, including the Swiss doctor Paracelsus, used it for a secret remedy whose recipe was guarded. English borrowed arcane in the sixteenth century and arcanum not long after. By the nineteenth century the words had settled into their modern sense of obscure, specialist knowledge, and that is the meaning tarot writers took up.

How did tarot cards come to be called arcana?

Tarot did not start as a book of secrets. The earliest known decks were made in northern Italy in the 1440s as playing cards for a trick-taking game. Their picture cards were called trionfi, “triumphs,” the ancestor of our word “trump.”

The mystical reading arrived three centuries later. In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the trumps were the remains of an ancient Egyptian book of wisdom. There was no evidence for this, but the idea caught on. In the nineteenth century French occultists linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the writer Paul Christian is usually credited with popularizing arcanes majeurs and arcanes mineurs, the greater and lesser secrets.

The English terms spread through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for Arthur Edward Waite. That deck’s numbering is the one this site uses. For the full history of the split, read Major vs Minor Arcana.

Major and Minor Arcana: the two groups of cards

A tarot deck splits its 78 cards into 22 Major Arcana, the named cards from the Fool to the World, and 56 Minor Arcana, the four suits of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. When someone talks about “your arcana,” they nearly always mean one of the 22 Major Arcana. The Major vs Minor Arcana guide explains how the two groups differ, and the tarot card meanings page has every card.

What does “your arcana” mean?

Your arcana, also called your arcana number, birth arcana or personal arcana, is the Major Arcana card that your birth date adds up to. You add the digits of the date and, while the total is above 22, add the digits of the total. The number you land on is your card, and 22 stands for the Fool, which is printed as 0.

For March 15, 1990: 0 + 3 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 9 + 9 + 0 = 28, then 2 + 8 = 10, the Wheel of Fortune. The arcana calculator does this for you and shows each step.

Tarot readers treat this card as a theme to reflect on, not a prediction. Someone with the Hermit might notice how often time alone shapes their best decisions. Someone with the Chariot might see both their drive and their urge to control.

There is more than one way to turn a date into a card. You can calculate your arcana number by hand with each method, and if two sites disagree, the cause is usually one of the differences between calculators.

Arcana in games, shows and fantasy

The word turns up well beyond tarot, and these uses send a lot of people searching:

• Dungeons & Dragons. Arcana is an Intelligence skill that covers knowledge of spells, magic items and planes of existence. Arcane magic is the studied magic of wizards. Both draw on the “specialist knowledge” sense of the Latin.
• Persona video games. The Persona series sorts characters and their summoned Personas by tarot arcana, using the Major Arcana names plus a few invented ones. Persona Arcana Explained shows how the games line up with real tarot.
• Arcane. The animated series set in the League of Legends world uses “arcane” for raw, dangerous magic. It has no link to tarot.
• Mortal Kombat (2021 film). Here arcana is a fighter’s hidden inner power, marked by a dragon birthmark. It is a film invention.

If a game or show sent you here and you want to know your own card, the arcana calculator gives it to you from your birth date in a few seconds.