Tarot Correspondences: A Complete Reference

Under every card in this deck runs a second layer of meaning: a pairing with a sign, a planet, an element, or a ten-day slice of the year. This page is the complete map of those pairings, all seventy-eight. It's drawn straight from the same deck data that powers our card library and tarot calendar, so what you read here is exactly what the site runs on.

The honest sentence, said once so you can use the reference freely: correspondences were assigned, not discovered. The system below belongs to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, built in London in 1888. It survives because a century of readers found the fits apt, and that is the only kind of truth a correspondence system has. Read it as a well-made lens. It will sharpen a reading, tie the deck to the sky's calendar, and explain why your zodiac sign has a card. It will not measure anything, and it never claimed to.

How the layers divide. The 22 Majors take the twelve zodiac signs, the seven classical planets (plus the three modern ones, in our deck's reckoning), and the elements. The forty numbered Minors split into four pure-element Aces and 36 decan cards, each ruled by a planet in a sign, one for every ten-day slice of the year. The sixteen courts take paired elements. Every entry below has its own anchor link, so any card's pairing can be pointed to directly.

Twelve Majors carry the zodiac signs, and the rest carry planets. The sign cards read as portraits of their sign's lesson; the planet cards as the deck's version of that planet's principle. One line each on why the fit stuck.

The numbered Minors run on the decan system, and it is the machinery our tarot calendar turns on. The zodiac year divides into thirty-six decans: ten-day slices, three per sign. The Golden Dawn gave each one a card from Two to Ten, plus a ruling planet. So every pip below reads "planet in sign". The planet is the decan's ruler. The sign is where it sits in the year. And for ten days each year, that card presides over the sky.

The four Aces stand outside the wheel as each suit's element in its purest form: the seed the whole suit grows from. Fire runs Aries, Leo and Sagittarius through the Wands. Water runs Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces through the Cups. Air runs Libra, Aquarius and Gemini through the Swords. Earth runs Capricorn, Taurus and Virgo through the Pentacles.

The sixteen courts sit outside the zodiac wheel and take paired elements instead. Each court is one element working through another. The first element is the rank's temperament: Knights carry fire's drive, Queens water's depth, Princes air's speed, Princesses earth's steadiness, in this deck's Golden Dawn naming. The second is the suit's territory. Read "Water of Fire" as feeling, working through the world of will and ambition, and the sixteen personalities build themselves.

At the table, correspondences work best at one of three doses. As flavour: a card's ruler adds a note to a reading, the way knowing where a word comes from deepens a sentence. As calendar: the decan cards tie the deck to the actual year, which is what our tarot calendar publishes reading by reading. As connection: the pairings are why your zodiac sign has a card, why birth cards and sign cards sometimes argue, and how the Majors' number roots rhyme with the sky.

What the system will not do is carry weight it was never built for. A correspondence is a judgement of fit that survived a century of use. Stacking pairings into predictions, personality verdicts or destiny is the same overreach, whatever vocabulary it wears. One pairing, one note, one honest question about whether it lights anything up: the same dose as every lens on this site.