← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 113/121
The Golden Dawn attributions
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a society for the study of ceremonial magic, founded in London in 1888. Among its teachings was a complete system linking the tarot to the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah and astrology. That system — set out in an Order manuscript known as Book T, attributed to S. L. MacGregor Mathers — lies behind the correspondences most English-language decks print or assume today, including the ones given in this encyclopedia.
The Major Arcana
The Golden Dawn gave the twenty-two Major Arcana to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order, beginning with Aleph for The Fool. Each letter is also one of the twenty-two paths joining the spheres of the Tree of Life, numbered 11 to 32, so each Major became a path. Through the letter each card took an astrological meaning: the three "mother" letters gave the elements (The Fool Air, The Hanged Man Water, Judgement Fire), the seven "double" letters the seven planets (The Magician Mercury, The Tower Mars, The World Saturn), and the twelve "simple" letters the twelve signs (The Emperor Aries, Death Scorpio, The Star Aquarius). To keep the signs in zodiac order, the Order swapped Strength and Justice, making Strength VIII (Leo) and Justice XI (Libra).
The Minor Arcana
The Aces became the roots of their elements, placed at Kether, the crown of the Tree. The numbered cards Two to Ten went to the thirty-six decans of the zodiac — each a ten-degree third of a sign, ruled by a planet in the Chaldean order — starting with Mars in the first decan of Aries for the Two of Wands. Each suit took the three signs of its element, cardinal, fixed and mutable in turn, and each number a sephirah of the Tree, from Chokmah for the Twos to Malkuth for the Tens. The courts were renamed King, Queen, Prince and Princess, each given an element of its own combined with the suit's — see court cards. The Order also read spreads by elemental dignity rather than by reversals.
The Rider–Waite–Smith deck
Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith were both members of the Golden Dawn. The deck they made together, published by William Rider & Son in 1909, follows the Order's structure — Strength at VIII, Justice at XI, the four elements in the suits — while keeping its esoteric teaching mostly out of sight, as Waite felt bound to do. Smith's scenes for every numbered card gave the deck its lasting influence. Aleister Crowley's later Thoth deck draws even more directly on the same system.
The French tradition
The Golden Dawn was not the first to link the tarot to Hebrew letters. In France, Éliphas Lévi in the 1850s, and later Papus in Le Tarot des Bohémiens (1889), gave Aleph to the Magician and placed the Fool near the end of the series, under Shin. Every attribution that follows from the letters therefore shifts: in the French scheme the Tower is Capricorn rather than Mars, for instance. Readers of Marseille-pattern decks often follow Lévi and Papus; neither system is the only correct one.