The tarot is composed of 78 cards, 22 of the major arcana and 56 of the minor arcana. Each card has rich imagery symbolizing an aspect of the human experience. Truly, they’re all mysterious in their own way, but some are more mysterious than others. I have chosen my top three mysterious tarot cards not because they’re scary or spooky, but because they seem to always mean more than the usual interpretation allows.

Mysterious Tarot Cards, Number One: The Moon

The Moon is the mother of all mysterious tarot cards. It represents the imagination, but it’s much more than that. It’s the instinct and the id. It’s our shadow selves, where our animal nature and our dark side exist. Yet, it’s not a terrifying card in and of itself. The moon is neither hopeful nor baleful. It’s the part of us where our personal demons — and angels — move in the shadow of our psyches. This card represents the things that trigger our fears, that cause us to react despite knowing better. The Moon thus represents the part of ourselves that is a mystery to us.

Mysterious Tarot Cards, Number Two: Seven of Cups

The Seven of Cups may represent illusions or delusions. However, it can also represent transcendence and reaching a point in which the world is one’s oyster, and one can choose their path. It can also be both. After all, it takes a little imagination and perhaps a little insanity in this world to think that one can really carve their own path and choose their own destiny. There’s no telling if one will actually achieve any of these things, and this isn’t what the card is about. “Taking the cup” is a biblical term, meaning to accept something offered by God.

Here, the person must choose a cup. The person is either overshadowed by the divine, or is the shadow. If they are the shadow, they are the dark side, or the instinctual side, the unconscious mind that makes the choices that the conscious mind rationalizes. They can only take one, or so it seems. Will they take any? The mystery is that the seven of cups doesn’t represent choice or action, but perpetual existential crisis as a condition of being human.

Mysterious Tarot Cards, Number Three: Ten of Swords

The ten of swords is one of the most malefic cards, perhaps only eclipsed by The Tower. However, unlike The Tower, which represents total, sudden destruction, leveling before rebirth, the Ten of Swords is more subtle. Here, a body lays slain with Ten Swords in its back, as the Sun peers from underneath dark clouds over the horizon. The body’s face is toward that sun, so there is still hope. The person has swords in their back, meaning they may not have seen the attack coming, or may not have suspected a thing. The attack could have come from someone close, or someone who snuck up. The swords in the back represent the things that come back to haunt us.

In a way, the Ten of Swords is our own undoing, our “rock bottom.” It’s our own inability to face our inner demons and the way that we allow them to destroy us. It’s only through the destroying that we see them for what they really are.