Why does The Emperor correspond to Aries and not to Leo?

Because the correspondence has nothing to do with the card’s character. It comes from where the card sits in a sequence the Golden Dawn locked in around 1888, and that sequence runs on an alphabet. The tradition pairs the twenty-two Major Arcana with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and some of those letters are themselves tied, in an ancient text called the Sefer Yetzirah, to a sign, a planet or an element. The Emperor takes the letter Heh, which belongs to Aries, the first sign of the zodiac. Aries opens the cycle the way The Emperor opens the order. So nobody read The Emperor and decided it felt like Aries: the pairing was inherited whole, from a system of letters. You can spot echoes of meaning after the fact (The Emperor’s authority does rhyme with the pioneering drive of Aries), and they make the table easier to remember, but the structure is what rules here, not intuition.

Are the tarot-astrology correspondences true?

They’re true in the sense that they form a coherent system, handed down and widely shared, not in the sense that any card is astronomically wired to a sign. The whole table was codified at the end of the nineteenth century by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, then carried forward by Waite for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and by Crowley for his Thoth Tarot. It’s a school’s convention, brilliant and useful, but you can put a date on it: tarot began as an Italian card game in the fifteenth century, with no tie to astrology at all. Saying so plainly costs the system nothing. A correspondence doesn’t have to be a fact of nature to be a good thinking tool: it hands you a grid for crossing two symbolic languages, as long as you keep in mind that you’re the one weaving the link, not the sky.

How do you read a drawn card and an astro transit together?

Start from the card, translate it into its correspondence, then check where that planet or sign sits in the sky right now. Say you draw The Moon as your card of the day: its correspondence is Pisces, so you can ask what the Pisces register is stirring in you (imagination, blurred boundaries, sleep, intuition) and, if you want to go further, look at where the real Moon is that day. Draw the Wheel of Fortune and its correspondence is Jupiter, so the question turns toward expansion, opportunity, the luck you set in motion. The card doesn’t predict the transit, and the transit doesn’t dictate the card. The two light up the same theme through two different doors, and the overlap is the interesting part: when a card lands on a transit already live in your sky, the signal grows louder.

What’s the difference between the correspondence of the trumps and that of the suits?

Each of the twenty-two Major Arcana carries one precise correspondence (a sign, a planet or an element), while the four suits of the Minor Arcana carry only the four elements, shared across whole families at a time. Wands belong to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Pentacles to Earth: a correspondence of tone, not of a single body. That means a minor card doesn’t send you to one isolated planet but to an elemental climate, the one shared by the three signs of that element. A reading full of Cups speaks of a Water moment (emotions, bonds, Cancer-Scorpio-Pisces); a reading thick with Swords speaks of an Air moment (thought, speech, tension, Gemini-Libra-Aquarius). The trumps point to a precise word in the astro language, the suits set the background mood.

Tarot

Tarot and Astrology: The Golden Dawn Correspondence Map

This guide is part of the series Tarot explained: 78 cards, history, and reading as a mirror (part 3 of 7).

The Golden Dawn system links every Major Arcana card to a sign, a planet or an element: twelve trumps carry the twelve signs (The Emperor for Aries, The Moon for Pisces), ten carry the seven classical planets and three elements, and the four suits of the Minor Arcana mirror the four elements. To draw a card is to light up the transit it governs. These correspondences are a tradition, fixed around 1888, not an astronomical fact.

By Jade Nohemia 9 min read June 16, 2026

You probably know what The Emperor means, and you may know what people pin on Aries. What this article hands you is the thread between the two, and the whole table those threads make. Because behind modern tarot sits a quiet grid, where every Major Arcana card answers to a sign, a planet or an element. That grid has a name and a date: it comes from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which fixed it in London around 1888. Ever since, it has run through the two most widely circulated decks in the world, the Rider-Waite-Smith and the Thoth Tarot. Here it is in full, explained, then put to work.

One thing up front, because it colors everything that follows. These correspondences are not an astronomical fact. Tarot was born as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy, with not the faintest link to the sky; the tie to astrology was woven much later, by a particular school. It’s a tradition, coherent and rich, not a law of nature. Saying so takes nothing from the tool: it just lets you use it with clear eyes.

Where does the tarot-astrology table come from?

To see why a given card goes with a given sign, you need the mechanics, and they’re simpler than people expect. They don’t rest on the character of the cards at all.

The Golden Dawn starts from a single idea: the twenty-two Major Arcana line up with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And an ancient text, the Sefer Yetzirah, already sorts those twenty-two letters into three groups: three “mother” letters tied to the three primordial elements, seven “double” letters tied to the seven planets of ancient astrology, and twelve “simple” letters tied to the twelve signs of the zodiac. Lay the trumps onto the letters, in order, and you inherit three elements, seven planets and twelve signs without lifting a finger. Twenty-two cards, twenty-two attributions, every slot filled.

That’s why the correspondences follow the order of the zodiac rather than the logic of the pictures. The twelve “sign” trumps run from Aries to Pisces in the very order of the arcana. Once that principle clicks, the table stops being a list to memorize and turns into a sequence that builds on itself. Robert Wang, in The Qabalistic Tarot, wrote the reference account of it; Crowley, in his Book of Thoth, made it the backbone of his deck.

The twelve arcana of the signs, from Aries to Pisces

Here’s the first block, the cleanest of them: twelve cards, twelve signs, in order. Each row reads “this arcanum governs this sign.”

Major Arcana	Sign
The Emperor (IV)	Aries ♈
The Hierophant (V)	Taurus ♉
The Lovers (VI)	Gemini ♊
The Chariot (VII)	Cancer ♋
Strength (XI or VIII)	Leo ♌
The Hermit (IX)	Virgo ♍
Justice (VIII or XI)	Libra ♎
Death (XIII)	Scorpio ♏
Temperance (XIV)	Sagittarius ♐
The Devil (XV)	Capricorn ♑
The Star (XVII)	Aquarius ♒
The Moon (XVIII)	Pisces ♓

You’ll notice the meaning of a card often lights up its sign once the pairing is set. The Emperor, all authority and command, opens the run the way Aries opens the zodiac. The Hermit, with his lantern and his retreat, echoes the patient sifting of Virgo. Justice and her scales answer the sign of Libra right down to the image. These echoes help you remember, but don’t be fooled: the place in the sequence is what rules, not intuition.

Two details of numbering are worth a word. Strength and Justice sometimes swap numbers: Waite, in the Rider-Waite-Smith, set Strength at VIII and Justice at XI, while the Tarot de Marseille does the opposite. The astrological correspondence doesn’t budge, though: Strength stays Leo, Justice stays Libra, whatever number is printed. It’s a clean illustration of the principle, that the number isn’t what makes the link, the attribution is. For what each of these cards actually means, the guide to the 22 Major Arcana walks through them one by one; here we keep only the astro thread.

The ten arcana of the planets and the elements

That leaves ten Major Arcana. Seven take the seven planets of ancient astrology (the ones visible to the naked eye, plus the Sun and the Moon), three take the three “mother” elements. Here’s the second block.

Major Arcana	Planet or element
The Magician (I)	Mercury ☿
The High Priestess (II)	Moon ☽
The Empress (III)	Venus ♀
Wheel of Fortune (X)	Jupiter ♃
The Tower (XVI)	Mars ♂
The Sun (XIX)	Sun ☉
The World (XXI)	Saturn ♄
The Hanged Man (XII)	Water 🜄
Judgement (XX)	Fire 🜂
The Fool (0)	Air 🜁

Here too the pictures speak once the link is in place. The Magician handles his tools with the quickness of Mercury, god of skill and language. The High Priestess, keeper of a veiled knowledge, answers the Moon and its secret cycles. The Empress, all fertility and warmth, sits easily with Venus. The Tower, its lightning-struck height, its sudden collapse, carries Mars, the planet of shock and rupture. The Sun takes the Sun, no surprise there. The World, the last arcanum, completion and limit, takes Saturn, the planet of boundaries and of time.

Notice that only three elements show up here: Water (The Hanged Man), Fire (Judgement), Air (The Fool). No Earth among the “mother” trumps, because the Sefer Yetzirah counts only three primordial elements. Earth gets filed with Saturn in some readings, or shows up in full on the Minor Arcana side, as we’re about to see. Crowley, in his Book of Thoth, fine-tuned a few of these attributions, but the skeleton stays the Golden Dawn’s.

The four suits and the four elements

The table of the trumps is the subtle part of the system. The one for the Minor Arcana is plain as day, and you may already know it without knowing it: the four suits mirror the four elements.

Suit	Element
Wands	Fire 🜂
Cups	Water 🜄
Swords	Air 🜁
Pentacles / Coins	Earth 🜃

This pairing is old and stable, older than the Golden Dawn in its principle. Wands, the instruments of action and drive, go to Fire; Cups, which hold and receive, go to Water; Swords, which cut and divide the way thought does, go to Air; Pentacles, the concrete and the material and the body, go to Earth. Each family of the 56 Minor Arcana carries an elemental climate this way, and with it the mood of the three signs of that element: Fire gathers Aries, Leo and Sagittarius; Water, Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces; Air, Gemini, Libra and Aquarius; Earth, Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn.

This is where tarot and the astrology of the signs meet most naturally. A reading where Cups dominate speaks of a Water moment: emotions, bonds, inner life. A reading saturated with Swords speaks of an Air moment: thoughts going in circles, words, tensions to untangle. You don’t need the grid of the trumps to feel it: the suit alone sets the elemental tone.

How do you read a card and a transit together?

None of this table is worth much if it stays on paper. Here’s how to put it to use, simply.

The principle fits in one sentence: to draw a card is to light up the register of the sign, planet or element it governs. The card doesn’t announce an event, it opens a theme, and its astrological correspondence hands you the vocabulary for that theme.

Take a concrete example. You draw The Moon as your card of the day. Its correspondence is the sign of Pisces. The question isn’t “what’s going to happen to me?” but “what is the Pisces register stirring in me today?”: the imagination, the boundaries that blur, sleep and dreams, the intuition that arrives before words, the fog you have to sit with before things come clear. The card holds out that mirror, and the correspondence gives you its edges.

A second example, more dynamic. You draw the Wheel of Fortune. Its correspondence is Jupiter, the planet of expansion and opportunity. The theme that opens is one of growth, of the luck you set in motion, of the wheel turning when there’s no point gripping it. If you do a little astrology, you can push further: see where Jupiter sits in the sky right now, in which sign it’s transiting. When a card lands on a transit already live in your chart, the overlap sharpens the signal, and that moment of coincidence is exactly what makes the exercise worth doing.

That’s what reading a crossing is: letting two symbolic languages talk to each other about one theme. Tarot comes in through the image, astrology through the sky, and you stand where the two meet. Neither one decides for you. They give you two angles on the same question, and you draw the conclusion.

Keeping the system honest

One last thing, because it protects your practice. This table of correspondences is beautiful, structured, handed down for over a century, and entirely a human invention. People built it, on a date we can name, to link two traditions that started out with nothing in common. Nothing in the sky obliges The Emperor to carry Aries; a school decided it would, and the choice stuck because it was elegant and useful.

That honesty doesn’t make the tool fragile, it makes it sturdier. You can cross tarot and astrology knowing you’re handling a grid for thought, not a revelation. That’s exactly what sets Nohemia apart: we give you the whole system, its source and its date, so you can use it with your eyes open. The rest of the tarot collection and the one on astrology are waiting, ready for you to dig into every entry of this table, card by card and sign by sign.

Frequently asked questions

Why does The Emperor correspond to Aries and not to Leo?: Because the correspondence has nothing to do with the card’s character. It comes from where the card sits in a sequence the Golden Dawn locked in around 1888, and that sequence runs on an alphabet. The tradition pairs the twenty-two Major Arcana with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and some of those letters are themselves tied, in an ancient text called the Sefer Yetzirah, to a sign, a planet or an element. The Emperor takes the letter Heh, which belongs to Aries, the first sign of the zodiac. Aries opens the cycle the way The Emperor opens the order. So nobody read The Emperor and decided it felt like Aries: the pairing was inherited whole, from a system of letters. You can spot echoes of meaning after the fact (The Emperor’s authority does rhyme with the pioneering drive of Aries), and they make the table easier to remember, but the structure is what rules here, not intuition.
Are the tarot-astrology correspondences true?: They’re true in the sense that they form a coherent system, handed down and widely shared, not in the sense that any card is astronomically wired to a sign. The whole table was codified at the end of the nineteenth century by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, then carried forward by Waite for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and by Crowley for his Thoth Tarot. It’s a school’s convention, brilliant and useful, but you can put a date on it: tarot began as an Italian card game in the fifteenth century, with no tie to astrology at all. Saying so plainly costs the system nothing. A correspondence doesn’t have to be a fact of nature to be a good thinking tool: it hands you a grid for crossing two symbolic languages, as long as you keep in mind that you’re the one weaving the link, not the sky.
How do you read a drawn card and an astro transit together?: Start from the card, translate it into its correspondence, then check where that planet or sign sits in the sky right now. Say you draw The Moon as your card of the day: its correspondence is Pisces, so you can ask what the Pisces register is stirring in you (imagination, blurred boundaries, sleep, intuition) and, if you want to go further, look at where the real Moon is that day. Draw the Wheel of Fortune and its correspondence is Jupiter, so the question turns toward expansion, opportunity, the luck you set in motion. The card doesn’t predict the transit, and the transit doesn’t dictate the card. The two light up the same theme through two different doors, and the overlap is the interesting part: when a card lands on a transit already live in your sky, the signal grows louder.
What’s the difference between the correspondence of the trumps and that of the suits?: Each of the twenty-two Major Arcana carries one precise correspondence (a sign, a planet or an element), while the four suits of the Minor Arcana carry only the four elements, shared across whole families at a time. Wands belong to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Pentacles to Earth: a correspondence of tone, not of a single body. That means a minor card doesn’t send you to one isolated planet but to an elemental climate, the one shared by the three signs of that element. A reading full of Cups speaks of a Water moment (emotions, bonds, Cancer-Scorpio-Pisces); a reading thick with Swords speaks of an Air moment (thought, speech, tension, Gemini-Libra-Aquarius). The trumps point to a precise word in the astro language, the suits set the background mood.