23 September to 22 October · Cardinal Air · ruled by Venus
The tarot cards of Libra
Cardinal air, and the sign of Justice.
Libra is cardinal air: relation, balance and the discomfort of holding two sides at once. Justice is the trump, and the scales are literally the sign's own symbol. It is the tidiest correspondence in the deck and the one nobody argues about.
The decans are the early Swords: the Two as a decision refused with the blindfold on, the Three as the grief that follows an honest one, the Four as the recovery afterwards. Read together they are an unusually complete account of what deciding actually costs, which is a Libran subject if ever there was one.
Justice is at XI in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and at VIII in the Marseille, the other half of the Strength swap.
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.
Libra in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Libra. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Libra on Memento Astra