23 October to 21 November · Fixed Water · ruled by Mars
The tarot cards of Scorpio
Fixed water, and the sign the deck gives to Death.
Scorpio is fixed water: depth, endurance and an unwillingness to look away. Death is its trump, which is the correspondence that most alarms people and the one that most rewards a second look. Neither is about dying. Both are about the point where something has genuinely ended and pretending otherwise has become the problem.
The decans are the middle Cups: the Five as grief with something still standing behind it, the Six as memory that will not release, the Seven as the fantasies that grow in the gap. That is a fair account of what Scorpio does with loss, and it is more sympathetic than the sign's usual press.
Modern astrology gives Scorpio to Pluto; the traditional ruler is Mars, which is what the Golden Dawn scheme uses.
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.
Scorpio in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Scorpio. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Scorpio on Memento Astra