Why The Major Arcana Is So Relevant To Pop Culture

From their humble beginnings as a parlour game in 15th-century Italy, those 22 mysterious cards lurking in every tarot deck or the Major Arcana, have traveled far and wide around the world. Now it is perhaps just as easy to find The Fool or The Tower on some album cover as it is to actually find them in a fortune teller's lair. And while all this is fine, how did these mystical images come to dominate art and popular culture so thoroughly despite being of fictitious and what the common man would call 'superstitious' beginnings?

The most important factor that comes into play here is that well, let's be honest, the Major Arcana cards are cool. Each card is a mini masterwork, full of symbolism to make even the most pretentious art critic swoon. Artists have riffed off these images for centuries-from Salvador Dalí's surrealist take on the deck to Niki de Saint Phalle's towering Tarot Garden in Tuscany. It's like catnip for creatives; no artist in the world can resist a chance to get their own spin into The Hanged Man or maybe even The Moon? Archetypes are everything for the minds behind this, and the Major Arcana goes above and beyond assigning those roles, it tells you a story of each one's importance.

These cards have burrowed deep into pop culture. See "The Devil" card and you just know something bad is coming. Not even indie-bands are immune with the influence of the Tarot, you see musical acts with names like "Temperance" and "The Hermit" everywhere. It's like visual shorthand for "we are deep and mysterious, honestly."

Literature hasn't been left untouched either. T.S. Eliot scattered references to the tarot throughout "The Waste Land" and Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series makes the cards a central part of its plot. Even Y.A. novels aren't immune: teenage protagonists now discover themselves living embodiments of The Empress because once again, the fact remains: archetypes are important. They are grand, they are astute, and they tell a story for you when you need them to.

Imagine a problem. You know a lot about a character by their appearance. Picture a woman with straight shoulders, blonde and blue-eyed. She has no backstory and its a crucial flaw in your plot because she's simply not a very compelling character and no one wants to understand or even come to accept her place in the narrative structure. Here's a solution: you can storyboard a scene into your plot where this blonde, blue-eyed woman with straight shoulders goes to see a tarot reader and finds herself face to face with a pick of three cards: Death, The Chariot and Wheel of Fortune. She is very confused by this, horrified even, and it will tell you more about her character than anything else in the entire story: she is afraid of change, she may run away from it, but change is coming and when it does, chances are that she may not like it.

See? The Major Arcana makes archetypes fun, and hence it deserves its place as a long standing media darling.

Fashion is also always looking for the new thing, and the Major Arcana has caught its eye. Runways often see more tarot-inspired designs than you would imagine, anything from shirts to haute couture evening gowns gets The Star or The Lovers slapped across it.

So what's behind this enduring fascination? Is it because of the way cards really touch upon universal, archetypal human experience? Or maybe we just want a little mysticism in our mundane lives. Whichever it is, the Major Arcana cards are going nowhere. They will keep cropping up in our art and in our stories and in our culture as reminders that sometimes life really is all about the cards and maybe, these cards are about you.

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