20 January to 18 February · Fixed Air · ruled by Saturn
The tarot cards of Aquarius
Fixed air, and the sign of The Star.
Aquarius is fixed air: conviction, distance, and a commitment to how things ought to be. The Star is its trump, and it is the gentlest card in the deck given to the sign most often described as cold. Both are about a long view. The Star is what remains after The Tower, and it works by being far away and steady rather than by being warm.
The decans are the middle Swords: the Five as winning at a cost to everyone, the Six as leaving somewhere for somewhere quieter, the Seven as taking what you need without asking. Air at its most strategic, and not always at its most admirable.
Traditional rulership gives Aquarius to Saturn, which is what this scheme uses. Modern astrology gives it Uranus.
The trump
The Major Arcana card that carries the sign itself.
The three decans
Each sign covers thirty degrees, divided into three ten-degree decans. One numbered card each, and they run in order through the sign.
The court card
The figure who carries the sign. Court attributions vary more between traditions than any other part of this system, because the Golden Dawn courts straddle two signs rather than sitting inside one.
The other eleven signs
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.
Aquarius in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Aquarius. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Aquarius on Memento Astra