Persona 5's Confidant Arcana, Read by a Working Tarot Reader

About once a month, a client in their twenties sits down, sees the Hermit come up, and says "oh, that's Futaba." They are not wrong, exactly. Persona 5 has taught more young people the names of the Major Arcana than any deck sold in a bookshop, and I would rather someone arrive knowing the cards through a video game than not at all.

The difficulty is that the game teaches the cards through characters, and characters carry a lot of story that the card does not. When someone reads the Lovers as "Ann" or Death as "Doctor Takemi," the meaning they reach for can drift a long way from what the card says in a spread. So I sat down with the full list of Confidants from Persona 5 Royal and asked a simple question of each one: if a client learned this card from this character, would they read it well?

How the game uses the arcana in the first place

In Persona 5, each friendship you build is a Confidant, and each Confidant is tied to one arcana. Spending time with that person raises their rank from 1 to 10, and carrying a Persona of the same arcana when you visit them earns extra progress. The Personas themselves, the spirits you fuse and fight with, are sorted into the same arcana groups, so the cards become a filing system for the whole game.

A detail that surprises tarot students: the series follows the older Marseille ordering, with Justice at VIII and Strength at XI. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck that most beginners buy swaps those two. If you learned the numbers from the game and then picked up a Rider-Waite deck, that is why the eighth card looks wrong to you. I mention the same swap in choosing your first tarot deck, since it trips up people who come from either direction.

Royal also adds two arcana that are not in a standard 78-card deck: Faith, for Kasumi Yoshizawa, and Councillor, for Takuto Maruki. Faith has a loose precedent in the older 97-card Minchiate decks, which include the theological virtues. I know of no historical deck with a Councillor card, and I would treat it as the game's own invention.

Card by card: where the game helps and where it misleads

Here is my honest grading. "Close" means a client who learned the card from this character would read it fairly well. "Partial" means they would get one layer and miss another. "Misleading" means the character pulls the meaning somewhere unhelpful.

I left a few out of the table because they need more than a line.

The Devil, Temperance and the Hanged Man

These three are the strongest matches in the game, and I suspect the writers knew the cards well. Ichiko Ohya, the journalist who drinks too much and cannot let go of a missing colleague, is the Devil read properly: attachment, compulsion, the chain you could take off but do not. Sadayo Kawakami, a teacher working nights to pay off a debt that is not really hers, sits in exactly the balancing act Temperance describes. Munehisa Iwai, the ex-yakuza airsoft shop owner caught between his old life and his son, is as good a picture of the Hanged Man's suspension as I have seen in any illustrated deck.

Fortune and the Wheel

Chihaya Mifune, the fortune teller, is tied to the Fortune arcana, which corresponds to the Wheel of Fortune. Her story is about her believing that fate is fixed until the protagonist shows her otherwise. That is a decent lesson, and it lines up with how I read the card myself in reading the Wheel of Fortune without fatalism. The trouble is that her storyline is also about a scam, and some clients now associate the card with being cheated, which it does not mean.

The advice I hear and would not repeat

Some teachers tell students who learned from Persona to forget the game entirely and start the cards from scratch. I think that wastes something useful. A character you spent forty hours with is a powerful memory hook, far stronger than a keyword list. Of the 22 Major Arcana, I would say about 14 Confidants point a student in roughly the right direction.

What I do suggest is pruning. Keep the characters for the cards where the match is close, and consciously replace the misleading ones. The Tower is the clearest case. Shinya is a cheerful kid who learns that winning is not everything. Nothing about him prepares you for the card's sudden break, the lightning, the structure you trusted falling at once. Students who read the Tower through Shinya tend to soften it into "a small lesson," which is a serious misreading in a spread about a job or a relationship.

The Lovers needs the same treatment. In the game, Ann's arc is about standing up for herself and a friend, which is actually closer to the card's meaning than the usual romantic reading. But because the Confidant system lets you date her, players tend to remember the card as romance. Pull it in a career reading and they look puzzled.

Reversals, which the game never touches

Persona only ever shows the arcana upright. If you learned from the game, reversals will feel foreign, and you may be tempted to skip them. That is a legitimate choice; plenty of working readers do. If you do use them, our note on what tarot reversals change explains how I handle them without doubling the number of meanings you have to memorise.

One exercise for this week

Take your deck and pull out the 22 Major Arcana. For each card, write the Persona 5 character on a sticky note and, under it, one sentence of the card's meaning in your own words. Where the character and the sentence agree, keep the note. Where they pull in different directions, cross out the character and write a person from your own life who fits better. You will likely end up crossing out six to eight of them, and those are exactly the cards you were most at risk of misreading. If you are still building a routine around the full deck, starting a practice without memorising all 78 cards picks up from there.