The body of the work is divided into 22 chapters, called "letters", with a foreword by the author and an afterword by Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian nominated to be a cardinal.

Each tarot card is taken as an "arcanum," which the author defines in part in Letter I: The Magician as "that which it is necessary to 'know' in order to be fruitful in a given domain of spiritual life.

He writes that they "are neither allegories nor secrets ... [but] authentic symbols ... [which] conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation."

Sources cited in the work are many; the most common ones are the Bible and the Zohar, followed by an array of saints, theologians, mystics, philosophers, occultists, and other writers, notably including Henri Bergson, Buddha, Goethe, Jung, Kant, Eliphas Lévi, Nietzsche, Fabre d'Olivet, Origen, Papus, Joséphin Péladan, Philip of Lyons, Plato, St. Albertus Magnus, St. Anthony the Great, St. Augustine, St. Bonaventura, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Francis of Assisi, St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Ávila, St. Thomas Aquinas, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Rudolf Steiner, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Laozi, Hermes Trismegistus, and Oswald Wirth (major entries taken in alphabetical order from the index).

There is also a scanned image available of the typewritten hand-corrected French manuscript mimeograph that was used for the most authoritative and complete editions of the book.