23 July to 22 August · Fixed Fire · ruled by Sun
The tarot cards of Leo
Fixed fire, and the sign of Strength.
Leo is fixed fire: warmth that sustains rather than ignites. Strength is the trump, and the image says the thing directly. A woman closes a lion's jaws with her hands and no visible effort, which is the whole Leo argument: real power does not need to be demonstrated by force.
The decans run through the middle Wands, and they are the deck's account of competition: the Five as scrappy rivalry, the Six as public victory, the Seven as defending a position from higher ground. Leo gets the run about being seen, which is either flattering or pointed depending on the day.
Note that Strength sits at VIII in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and at XI in older French ones. That swap was made to fit exactly this zodiac scheme.
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.
Leo in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Leo. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Leo on Memento Astra