Planetary attribution
The tarot cards of Pluto
Irreversible change, buried power and what comes back up.
Pluto takes Judgement, and only that. It is the last of the three modern planets fitted to single trumps.
Judgement is the card of the dead rising at the trumpet, which is as Plutonic an image as the deck contains: something buried is called back, and there is no version of the situation where it goes back down. Pluto's astrological demotion in 2006 changed nothing here, which says something about how attribution systems actually work.
1 card
A single trump. The modern planets were fitted to the deck long after the numbered cards were attributed, so they take one card each and no pips.
The other planets
Where these attributions come from
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late nineteenth century. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was built on that system, which is why most modern decks still inherit it.
It is a system rather than a discovery. The fifteenth century Italian decks had no astrological scheme at all, and other traditions map the cards differently. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one, and where a card is disputed its own page says so.
Pluto in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Pluto. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Pluto on Memento Astra