A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana. The Chaos Tarot adds one extra — 79 cards total — with the inclusion of The Glitch, a card unique to the system that represents systemic disruption and unexpected emergence.
The Breakdown
- 22 Major Arcana — The Fool through The World (plus The Glitch in Chaos Tarot). These are the heavyweight archetypes: Death, The Tower, The Star. They mark turning points and deep themes.
- 56 Minor Arcana — Four suits of 14 cards each (Ace through 10, plus Page, Knight, Queen, King). In Chaos Tarot: Codes, Networks, Signals, and Vectors.
For context, other divination systems use very different scales: Elder Futhark has 24 runes, Lenormand uses 36 cards, I Ching works with 64 hexagrams, and Geomancy operates on just 16 figures. The number of symbols in a system isn't about complexity — it's about granularity. Tarot's 78 cards offer a fine-grained vocabulary; Geomancy's 16 figures achieve similar depth through combinatorial positions in the shield chart.