Glossary

Adding the digits is a way of pairing trumps by number. Take the Roman number on a trump and add its digits together. Death is XIII, and 1 + 3 = 4, so Death joins the Fours. The habit is older than it looks: in 1889 the French occultist Papus called it “theosophic reduction”. The Fool is zero, so he stays out, and the Wheel of Fortune, X, can count as a ten or as a one. Neither Waite’s book nor Book T does this. Try it as a game that sets far-apart cards side by side.

Alchemy is the old art of changing one substance into another. Alchemists worked with furnaces, glass flasks and slow fire. They hoped to turn common metals into gold, and to find one medicine for every illness. They wrote their secrets in riddles and strange pictures, and their work helped lead to modern chemistry. The psychologist Carl Jung read their books for years. He came to see their recipes as pictures of inner change, in which opposites in the soul are slowly joined.

Anima and animus are Latin words for soul and mind. The psychologist Carl Jung used them for an inner figure of the other sex. In a man’s dreams, he thought, the soul often comes as a woman, the anima. In a woman’s dreams it comes as a man, the animus. This figure can lead you inward, toward what you don’t yet know about yourself. Many readers today drop the rule about sex. The inner figure can wear any face, in a dream or on a card.

An archetype, in the psychologist Carl Jung’s sense, is a pattern deep in every human mind that shapes the pictures people make. The mother, the trickster, the wise old man and the hero are examples. You never see the pattern itself. You see the forms it takes: a goddess, a grandmother, a queen on a tarot card. The word comes from Greek, where it first named the original model that copies are made from. Many tarot writers, Sallie Nichols among them, treat the Major Arcana as a gallery of archetypes.

Book T is the Golden Dawn’s own guide to the tarot. The order taught it to members of an inner grade. Aleister Crowley printed it in 1912, in his magazine The Equinox, as “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”. It describes each card closely and gives each one a title: the Queen of Wands, for example, is “The Queen of the Thrones of Flame”. It also ties the court cards and the numbered cards to stretches of the zodiac.

The classical planets are the seven lights that old sky-watchers saw wandering against the fixed stars: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The word “planet” comes from the Greek for wandering. Before telescopes these seven were all the planets anyone knew, and the Sun and Moon counted among them. Saturn is the slowest. It takes nearly thirty years to go round. The Golden Dawn gave seven of the trumps one planet each: the Tower has Mars, the Sun has the Sun, and the World has Saturn.

The collective unconscious is the psychologist Carl Jung’s name for a layer of the mind that everyone shares. Your personal unconscious holds your own forgotten or pushed-away memories. Below it, Jung thought, lies something older, full of patterns that shape images all over the world. He called these patterns archetypes. That, in his view, is why the same figures turn up in myths, fairy tales and dreams far apart in time and place: a great mother, say, or a wise old guide.

Each suit has four court cards: the King, the Queen, the Knight and the Page. They are the people of the suit, like a small royal household. Modern playing cards have three. Waite notes that many old packs had a Knight, who usually took the Queen’s place. The Golden Dawn called the four King, Queen, Prince and Princess, and gave each one an element inside the element of its suit. The Queen of Wands, for example, is the water of fire.

A decan is one third of a zodiac sign. Each sign covers 30 degrees of the sky, so a decan covers ten, and the whole zodiac has 36 of them. The Golden Dawn gave each of the 36 numbered cards from Two to Ten one decan. The Two of Wands, for example, sits in the first decan of Aries. The court cards cover wider stretches that cross from one sign into the next.

Divination is the old art of looking for hidden things in signs. People have looked for them in the flight of birds, in rites and omens, and in cards. The word comes from the Latin divinatio, and behind it stands divinus, “of a god”. So to divine was once to read what the gods might be saying. Waite called his ten-card spread “An Ancient Celtic Method of Divination”, yet he called card reading a subject “in which I have no part”. This site leaves the foretelling out and looks at the cards as pictures.

An equinox is one of the two days in the year when day and night are nearly the same length all over the earth. The word comes from the Latin aequinoctium, from aequus, equal, and nox, night. The March equinox falls around 20 March, and the September one on the 22nd or 23rd. Even then they are only nearly equal: the day wins by a few minutes. North of the equator, March opens spring and September opens autumn. South of it, the seasons run the other way. In astrology the sun enters Aries in March and Libra in September.

The four elements are fire, water, air and earth. Around 450 BC the Greek thinker Empedocles called them “the four roots of all things”: everything, he thought, was a mixture of the four. The Golden Dawn gave each suit one element. The Wands are fire, the Cups water, the Swords air and the Pentacles earth. They also gave elements to the court cards and the signs of the zodiac. You don’t have to believe the world is made of them. They also work as four ways of looking.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a magical order, started in England in the late 1880s. Its members studied old Western magic, astrology and the Kabbalah. They fitted the tarot into one big system of links: each suit got an element, and each trump got a Hebrew letter and a place in the sky. Their guide to the cards is Book T. Waite and Smith were both members, and the 1909 deck follows the order’s tables in places. Book T’s table of the trumps lists Strength straight after the Chariot and Justice after the Wheel, and the 1909 deck numbers them to match, VIII and XI: a swap Waite made “for reasons which satisfy myself”.

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, the same number as the trumps. Antoine Court de Gébelin and the comte de Mellet first paired the cards with the letters in 1781. In the 1850s the French writer Éliphas Lévi made his own pairing. The Golden Dawn later made another, starting with the Fool and Aleph, the first letter. Each letter also stands on a path of the Tree of Life. Waite knew these pairings but kept them out of his book. He thought “nearly every attribution is wrong”, and readers still disagree.

Individuation is the psychologist Carl Jung’s word for the long work of becoming who you are. He thought of it as growing whole over a lifetime. In his picture it happens as you meet figures from inside: a shadow, an inner man or woman, a wise old guide, and in the end something larger than your everyday self, which he called the Self. These figures turn up in dreams, stories and pictures. Some tarot writers, like Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot (1980), have read the Major Arcana as a map of this journey.

The Kabbalah is a Jewish mystical tradition. It grew in medieval Provence and Spain, and its best-known book, the Zohar, appeared around 1300. Kabbalists pictured the life of God flowing down through ten spheres, the sefirot, joined by 22 paths. Christian scholars borrowed it in the Renaissance, and later occultists borrowed it again. The Golden Dawn laid the tarot over this map, with the numbered cards on the spheres and the 22 trumps on the paths. Waite wrote a whole book about it, The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah (1902).

The Major Arcana are the 22 big picture cards of the tarot, numbered from 0, the Fool, to XXI, the World. The other 56 cards form the four suits. “Arcana” is Latin for secrets. Waite called them the Trumps Major, or Greater Arcana. The old name, trumps, comes from their first use: they began as the trump cards of an Italian card game in the 1400s. Each one shows a single strong figure or scene, like the Magician, Death or the Star. All 22 are on the Major Arcana page, in order.

The Minor Arcana are the 56 cards of the four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. Each suit counts from Ace to Ten and then has four court cards. Waite called them the Lesser Arcana. They are close cousins of ordinary playing cards: swapping Cups for Hearts, he wrote, was only “an accidental variation”. In most older packs the numbered cards showed only rows of suit signs. In the 1909 deck every numbered card except the Aces has a scene, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith.

Claudius Ptolemy was an astronomer who watched the sky from Alexandria in the second century. His Tetrabiblos, or “four books”, is a book of astrology, and it was still being read many centuries later. In 1822 J. M. Ashmand put it into English, working from a later Greek paraphrase by the scholar Proclus. In it Ptolemy gives each planet one or two signs as its houses, the places where it is most at home. The Sun has Leo and the Moon has Cancer. Mars has Aries and Scorpio.

The Pythagoreans were the followers of Pythagoras, a Greek thinker of the 500s BC. He grew up on the island of Samos and later founded a community at Kroton, in southern Italy. They had a saying that “all things are assimilated to number”. So for them each number from one to ten had a character of its own, and many names. Later Greek writers, such as Nicomachus, passed those names on. In 1816 the English scholar Thomas Taylor gathered them in a book called Theoretic Arithmetic. Their most famous figure is the tetractys.

A sefira is one of the ten spheres on the Tree of Life. The plural is sefirot, and older English books spell them sephira and sephiroth. Each one has a Hebrew name. Samuel Mathers put them into English in 1887 as Crown, Wisdom, Understanding, Mercy, Severity, Beauty, Victory, Splendour, Foundation and Kingdom. He notes they were also called numerations, so each sefira is a number as well as a place. The Golden Dawn gave every numbered card the sefira of its number. Every Three sits in Understanding, and every Ten in Kingdom.

The Self, with a capital S, is the psychologist Carl Jung’s name for the whole of a person: the part you know and the much larger part you don’t. Your everyday “I”, which Jung called the ego, is only one room in that house. Jung thought the Self shows up in dreams and art as circles and squares, or as a divine child or a wise figure. He called the circle pictures mandalas, from a Sanskrit word for circle. In his picture, individuation moves toward the Self.

The shadow is the psychologist Carl Jung’s name for the parts of yourself you would rather not see. Some are faults. Some are gifts you learned to hide. Jung thought you often meet your shadow outside yourself first, in people who annoy you more than they should. In dreams it often comes as a dark stranger. Getting to know it is slow work. In Jung’s view it is also the first step of individuation, the long work of becoming whole.

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was the artist who drew the 1909 deck, all 78 cards. Waite gave her careful notes for the trumps and only short ones for most of the other cards, so many small details are hers, like the black cat at the Queen of Wands’ feet. Her monogram, a little mark like a knot, sits in a corner of many cards. Her life, her other art and her own words are on the page about Pamela Colman Smith.

A solstice is one of the two turning points in the sun’s year. In June the northern half of the world has its longest day, and in December its shortest. South of the equator, it is the other way round. The June solstice falls around 21 June, and the December one around 21 December. The word comes from the Latin solstitium: sol, the sun, and a verb for standing still. For a few days the sun seems to rise and set at the same far point on the horizon. Then it turns back.

Soul-making is a phrase from the poet John Keats. In a letter of 1819 he asked his brother and sister-in-law to call the world “The vale of Soul-making”. A soul, he thought, is made by living in a world like this one. The psychologist James Hillman took up the phrase in Re-Visioning Psychology (1975). For him the soul deepens when you stay with images and let them stay rich and strange. The meditation teacher Rob Burbea called his last teachings Soulmaking Dharma.

The tarot has four suits: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. Each suit has fourteen cards, from Ace to Ten, plus four court cards. Together they make up the Minor Arcana. Ordinary playing cards have four suits too, and Waite thought the difference was small: Cups for Hearts, and so on. He called the Ace of Wands “a stout wand or club”, and in many old packs the Pentacles were coins. The Golden Dawn tied each suit to one of the four elements: fire, water, air and earth.

The tetractys is a triangle of ten dots in four rows. The top row has one dot, then two, then three, then four. Add the rows and you get ten. The Pythagoreans swore their oath by it; in Thomas Taylor’s English, the oath calls it the “fountain and root of everlasting nature”. The Greek writer Lucian made fun of this. In one of his comic dialogues, Pythagoras asks a buyer to count. The man says, “One, two, three, four.” Pythagoras answers, “Four (as you call it) is ten.” Old writers also found other fours inside it, such as the four elements and the four seasons.

The Tree of Life is a diagram from the Kabbalah. It shows ten spheres, called sefirot, running from the Crown at the top to the Kingdom at the bottom, in three columns. Lines called paths join them, 22 in all, one for each Hebrew letter. The Golden Dawn laid the tarot on this diagram. The Aces went to the top sphere, the Twos to Tens down through the other nine, and the trumps took the letters. On the Lovers, Waite gives the same name to another tree: the one “bearing twelve fruits” behind the man.

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was an English writer on mysticism and magic. He planned the 1909 deck, Pamela Colman Smith drew it, and William Rider & Son published it in London. A year later Waite brought out his guide to it, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. His notes on the cards are short and sometimes odd, and they often leave room for your own looking. Of the numbered cards he wrote that “the pictures are like doors which open into unexpected chambers”. People often call the deck the Rider-Waite or Rider-Waite-Smith deck, after its publisher and its two makers.

The zodiac is a band of sky that the sun seems to travel along through the year. Astrologers divide it into twelve signs of 30 degrees each, from Aries, the Ram, to Pisces, the Fish. The sun enters Aries at the March equinox and Libra at the September one, so the signs keep step with the seasons. The Golden Dawn gave twelve of the trumps one sign each. Justice, for example, belongs to Libra, the Scales. Each numbered card from Two to Ten also got a third of a sign, a decan.