Planetary attribution
The tarot cards of Venus
Attraction, value, pleasure and what is worth having.
Venus takes The Empress, which is the deck's most generous card and a good match. Venus governs both love and money in traditional astrology, because both are about what you value and how you attract it, and The Empress covers exactly that ground.
Its pips are the deck's warmest: the bond formed, the homecoming celebrated, the self-sufficiency earned. Venus also picks up the Five of Swords, which is a reminder that a planet of attraction is also a planet of wanting, and wanting is not always kind.
6 cards
The trump first, then the numbered cards that carry the same attribution.
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.
Venus in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Venus. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Venus on Memento Astra