The system under the pictures

Why is the Emperor's throne decorated with rams? Why does a lion sit beside the woman in Strength, and why do the ten coins on the Ten of Pentacles hang in such an odd pattern? None of it is decoration for its own sake. The deck in these pictures was drawn over a diagram, and once you know the diagram is there, you start to see it everywhere.

You don't need the diagram to read the cards. Many fine readers never learn it. But it explains a great deal, and it's worth knowing that it exists.

Where the diagram came from

Lesson II told you how, after 1781, French occultists began linking the tarot to Egypt and to the Hebrew alphabet. Éliphas Lévi tied the twenty-two Major Arcana to the twenty-two Hebrew letters. In 1888, in London, William Wynn Westcott and Samuel MacGregor Mathers founded a magical society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and turned those hints into a complete system. Their tarot teaching was set down in a document called Book T.

Among the Golden Dawn's members were the poet W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and the two people who made the deck you have been studying: Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith. So it is no surprise that their 1909 deck is full of the Order's ideas.

Behind all of this sits an old way of seeing the world, which scholars call correspondence: the belief that what happens in the heavens and what happens on earth are truly connected, not just alike. If planets, signs, letters and cards all describe the same order, then each card should have its place in that order. The Golden Dawn set out to find it.

How the diagram works

The scheme has a place for every card.

• The twenty-two Majors take the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Those letters were already divided, in an old Hebrew text called the Sefer Yetzirah, into three groups: three "mother" letters for the elements, seven "double" letters for the seven classical planets, and twelve "simple" letters for the twelve signs. So each Major gets an element, a planet or a sign through its letter. The Emperor is Aries, hence the rams. Strength is Leo, hence the lion.
• The four suits take the four elements, as you learned in lesson X.
• The thirty-six numbered cards from Two to Ten take the thirty-six decans, the ten-degree slices of the zodiac, each ruled by a planet.
• The Aces are the roots of their elements, and the courts are mixtures of elements.

The Majors are also given the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life, a Kabbalistic diagram of ten spheres joined by lines. And the ten numbers of each suit match those ten spheres. Rachel Pollack points out that Smith laid out the ten coins of the Ten of Pentacles in exactly the Tree's pattern.

One card, read through the diagram

Here is the Empress, card III. In the Golden Dawn's system she carries these attributions:

Now look at the card again. Her shield is heart-shaped and carries the sign of Venus. Her crown has twelve stars, one for each sign. Grain ripens at her feet. The planet of love, beauty and fruitfulness is drawn into the picture, and her path joins the two great principles the Tree calls father and mother. Followers of the Golden Dawn read her as a doorway, which is exactly what her letter means.

The numbered cards work the same way. Lesson XI read the Eight of Swords as effort in the mind, perhaps thinking yourself into a corner. In Book T that card is the first decan of Gemini, ruled by Jupiter, and its title is "Shortened Force": a great deal of energy spent on small things, pulled one way and then another. The bound, blindfolded woman of 1909 is that idea drawn as a person.

Where the systems disagree

It would be tidy if there were one true table. There isn't.

• The French scheme differs. Lévi and later Papus began the Hebrew alphabet at the Magician, not the Fool, so most cards get a different letter. The Empress becomes Gimel. She keeps Venus, though: she is one of the few cards where the two schools agree on the planet.
• Crowley changed it again. In his Thoth deck he moved the letter Tzaddi from the Star to the Emperor, and gave the Star the Emperor's letter.
• Even the Golden Dawn bent its own rules. In Marseille order, Leo would fall on Justice and Libra on Strength. The Order swapped the two cards so that the lion and the scales matched their signs, which is why Strength is VIII in the 1909 deck. And it never fixed the fact that the planet Moon belongs to the High Priestess, while the card called the Moon is Pisces.
• Decans can be divided more than one way. The cards follow the old Chaldean order of the planets. The lesson on decans in the intermediate astrology course teaches a different scheme, so don't be surprised when the two tables disagree.

When you read about card astrology, ask which system a writer is using. Here we follow the Golden Dawn's, because it is the one the 1909 deck was drawn around.

What to take from this

• The 1909 deck was drawn over a diagram: the Golden Dawn's scheme of letters, planets, signs, elements and decans.
• It explains the pictures. Rams for Aries, a lion for Leo, Venus on the Empress's shield.
• The systems disagree, and a good reader knows which one is in use.
• You can read without it. It is a second way of seeing the cards, not a test.

Next, tarot among the divining arts: the cards as one instrument in a larger family.