The figures, forces and qualities depicted in the Major Arcana are highly archetypal. The viewer with no previous knowledge of Tarot tradition will immediately get a sense of what each card conveys, though the full richness of meaning will only be gained through study and application. This resonance of the cards with the human psyche can be expressed in many ways, from Carl Gustav Jung's theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious to the all-encompassing spiritual archive of the occultists' anima mundi ("world soul") or akashic records. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), Jung wrote: "The collective unconscious is common to us all; it is the foundation of what the ancients called 'the sympathy of all things'." The Major Arcana is one of the great doorways to this archetypal realm.

The Trumps are not merely a collection of 22 individual images: they follow an ordered sequence from I to XXI, with the Fool unnumbered or assigned 0. The Fool is sometimes placed in order before the rest of the Trumps, after them, between XX and XXI, or sometimes no place at all. The sequence is important and can be viewed in many ways; for example, as an allegory of the evolution of the soul. The most usual ordering and attribution of the Trumps is as follows (illustrations from the Marseilles Tarot):

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