Major Arcana, Modern Meaning
When we first started working on The Arcana Club, we knew one thing for sure: we didn’t want to create just another tarot deck. There are so many beautiful decks already out there full of history, symbolism, and meaning but we wanted something that felt a little more like us. Something modern, personal, and grounded in the things that actually fill our lives today.
The Major Arcana cards have always held a kind of magic. They tell the story of transformation - of beginnings, endings, and everything in between. But as we started exploring their traditional meanings, we realized that while the essence of each card still resonated, the imagery and tone often felt distant from the world we live in now.
We wanted to bring that story into the present.
For us, “modern tarot” doesn’t mean rewriting the rules or discarding tradition. It means reinterpreting timeless ideas in ways that feel real and relatable. So when we began creating our Major Arcana cards, we asked ourselves: what would The Fool, The Lovers, or The Tower look like in our world - in coffee shops, in city apartments, in the quiet spaces between emails and meetings and to-do lists?
That’s how our Major Arcana, Modern Meaning deck began to take shape.
We kept many of the classic symbols and energies but gave them a subtle shift, enough to make them feel familiar yet fresh. You’ll still find nods to the traditional tarot archetypes, but they now live in scenes that could just as easily exist in your own life. The Fool became The Child, standing at the edge of something exciting and uncertain. The Lovers became a symbol of connection, not just romance - two figures meeting between a bridge for reconnection, partnership, or friendship. And The Tower? Well, that one became a little less doom a little more focus on the clean up and the need for mess at times.
We didn’t want to lose the structure or meaning of tarot because tarot is huge. There are so many ways people interpret and use it, and that diversity is what makes it so special. Our goal wasn’t to change what tarot is, but to translate it into our own language, one that speaks to modern life, modern feelings, and the small rituals that ground us.
For us, one of those rituals has always been coffee and tea. ☕🍵
From the very first idea for The Arcana Club, our friendship has been built around long conversations over warm drinks - I always order a black coffee, and Allison always reaches for matcha tea. It became such a natural part of our creative process that we couldn’t help but bring it into the cards themselves. You’ll see a tiny coffee mug on each card. This represents our very first deck, “The Brew” we call it. In the future we plan to come out with more decks but for now it seemed fitting to honour the coffee theme for that’s how this whole mail club idea steamed from.
Every card we designed was a reflection of that energy. Each one carries a piece of us, our humor, our perspective, our cozy aesthetic, and our desire to make tarot approachable for anyone who wants to explore it. These cards mean more to us than the traditional deck ever could, because we built them from the ground up - every phrase, every icon, every detail has our fingerprints on it.
And while our Major Arcana deck may look a little different from the classic one, the heart of it is still the same. It’s about change, growth, and reflection - only now, it feels like it’s happening right here in our world.
So when you pull a card from The Arcana Club, you’re not just holding a symbol from the past - you’re holding a piece of our story, too.
A reminder that magic evolves, friendships create, and even the oldest archetypes can find new life in a warm cup of coffee and a shared idea.
