22 November to 21 December · Mutable Fire · ruled by Jupiter
The tarot cards of Sagittarius
Mutable fire, and the sign of Temperance.
Sagittarius is mutable fire: range, appetite for meaning, and movement toward something larger. Temperance is the trump, and the pairing is better than it looks. The card shows an angel pouring liquid between two cups without spilling, mixing two things into a third. That is the Sagittarian project: taking disparate experience and making a philosophy out of it.
The decans are the late Wands: the Eight as everything arriving at once, the Nine as the guard kept up too long, the Ten as carrying more than you agreed to. The sign known for optimism is given the deck's clearest run about overcommitment, which reads like a warning written by somebody who knew the type.
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.
Sagittarius in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Sagittarius. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Sagittarius on Memento Astra