The cards and the stars

The pairing of tarot and astrology is younger than the cards. It was worked out in London in the 1880s and 1890s by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who gave each of the seventy-eight cards a place in a single scheme of elements, planets and signs. Two of its members went on to make the decks most readers learn from: Arthur Waite, whose deck with Pamela Colman Smith appeared in 1909, and Aleister Crowley, whose Thoth deck was painted by Frieda Harris during the Second World War. Both keep the Golden Dawn's pairings, and so does Dream Logic.

None of this changes what a card means in a reading here. It is another way into the card — a reason the Three of Cups feels like early July, or why The Tower and The Emperor share something hard and red.

The four elements

The oldest layer is the simplest. Each suit belongs to one of the four classical elements, and each element to three signs of the zodiac.

• 🜂 Fire — the Suit of Wands: will and desire. The element of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius.
• 🜄 Water — the Suit of Cups: feeling and intuition. The element of Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.
• 🜁 Air — the Suit of Swords: the mind and speech. The element of Gemini, Libra and Aquarius.
• 🜃 Earth — the Suit of Disks: the body and the material. The element of Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn.

Some readers also weigh the elements against one another when cards fall side by side. Fire and air feed each other, as do water and earth; fire and water, or air and earth, work against each other; and a card beside another of its own element is strengthened by it. It is a way of reading the space between the cards — worth knowing, though the readings on this site do not depend on it.

The major arcana

The twenty-two majors take the rest of the scheme between them: three the elements, seven the planets known to the ancient world, and twelve the signs of the zodiac.

The elements

The three elemental majors are fire, water and air. Earth has no major of its own; the Golden Dawn gave it, as a second duty, to The Universe. Modern astrologers add the three planets discovered since — Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — to the same three cards.

The planets

The signs

The year in the minor arcana

The Twos to the Tens — thirty-six cards — are the thirty-six decans: the zodiac cut into slices of ten degrees, each about ten days of the Sun's year. Each sign holds three, and each decan is ruled by a planet, taken in turn in the old order Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, beginning with Mars at the first point of Aries.

The suit comes from the sign's element, and the number from the sign's place in its season: the first sign of each season (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) holds the Twos, Threes and Fours; the middle sign the Fives, Sixes and Sevens; the last sign the Eights, Nines and Tens. So the year begins at the spring equinox with the Two of Wands, Mars in Aries, and ends with the Ten of Cups, Mars in Pisces.

The court cards

Each court card is an element within an element. The Knight is the fire of its suit, the Queen its water, the King its air and the Page its earth — so the Queen of Wands is water of fire: warmth that is also receptive, the hearth rather than the blaze. (Readers disagree about the Kings and Knights; we follow Crowley, whose mounted figure is fire, and some books swap the two.)

The Knights, Queens and Kings each rule thirty degrees of the zodiac, running from the last ten degrees of one sign through the first twenty of the next — so every sign is shared between two courts.

The Pages — earth of each suit — hold no stretch of the zodiac. With the Aces, they stand outside the wheel.

The Aces

The four Aces are the elements at their root: pure fire, water, air and earth, before any planet or sign has given them a shape. In the Golden Dawn's scheme they turn the whole sky around the pole, each over a quarter of it.

The deck's own cards

Transcendence stands where other decks have Judgement or the Aeon, and keeps that card's fire; modern astrologers give it Pluto. The Observerse, the seventy-ninth card, belongs to no tradition, so we have given it spirit — the fifth element, the one beyond the four, as the card stands beyond the seventy-eight.

The cards of each sign

Each sign has its own major, the major of its ruling planet, three decans and a share of two court cards.