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The Major Arcana or trumps are a suit of twenty-two cards in the Tarot deck. They serve as a permanent trump and suits in games played with the Tarot deck, and are distinguished from the four standard suits collectively known as the Minor Arcana.〔Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett, ''History of the Occult Tarot'', London: Duckworth, 2002 ISBN 978-0715631225〕 The terms "Major" and "Minor Arcana" are used in the occult and divinatory applications of the deck, and originate with Jean-Baptiste Pitois, writing under the name Paul Christian.〔Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett. ''A Wicked Pack of Cards. The Origins of the Occult Tarot''. New York. St. Martin's Press, 1996〕 Dummett writes that originally the Major Arcana had simple allegorical or exoteric meaning, mostly originating in elite ideology in the Italian courts of the 15th century when it was invented.〔Michael Dummett. ''The Game of Tarot''. London: Duckworth, 1980. ISBN 0715631225〕 The occult significance only began to emerge in the 18th century when Antoine Court de Gébelin (a Swiss clergyman and Freemason) published ''Le Monde Primitif''. The construction of the occult and divinatory significance of the Tarot, and the Major and Minor Arcana, continued on from there.〔See Divinatory, esoteric and occult tarot for a detailed history of the construction of the occult Tarot〕 For example, Antoine Court de Gébelin argued for the Egyptian, kabbalastic, and divine significance of the Tarot trumps: Etteilla created a method of divination using Tarot: Eliphas Lévi worked hard to break away from the Egyptian nature of the divinatory Tarot, bringing it back to the Tarot de Marsailles, creating a "tortuous" kabbalastic correspondence, and even suggested that the Major Arcana represent stages of life.〔 The Marquis Stanislas de Guaita established the Major Arcana as an initiatory sequence to be used by initiates to establish their path of spiritual ascension and evolution.〔 Finally Salie Nichols, a Jungian psychologist, wrote up the tarot as having deep psychological and archetypal significance, even going so far as to encode the entire process of Jungian individuation into the Tarot trumps.〔Salie Nichols. ''Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey''. San Francisco: Weiser Books, 1980. ISBN 9780877285151.〕 These various interpretations of the Major Arcana developed in stages, all of which continue to exert significant influence on our understanding of the Major Arcana even to this day. ==List of the Major Arcana== Each Major Arcanum depicts a scene, mostly featuring a person or several people, with many symbolic elements. In many decks, each has a number (usually in Roman numerals) and a name, though not all decks have both, and some have only a picture. The earliest decks bore unnamed and unnumbered pictures on the Majors (probably because a great many of the people using them at the time were illiterate), and the order of cards was not standardized. Nevertheless, one of the most common sets of names and numbers is as follows: Strength is traditionally the eleventh card and Justice the eighth, but the influential Rider-Waite-Smith deck switched the position of these two cards in order to make them a better fit with the astrological correspondences worked out by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, under which the eighth card is associated with Leo and the eleventh with Libra. Today many decks use this numbering, particularly in the English-speaking world. Both placements are considered valid. Prior to the 17th century, the trumps were simply part of a special card deck used for gaming and gambling.〔 There may have been allegorical and cultural significance attached to them, but beyond that the trumps originally had little mystical or magical import.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「major arcana」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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