23 August to 22 September · Mutable Earth · ruled by Mercury
The tarot cards of Virgo
Mutable earth, and the sign of The Hermit.
Virgo is mutable earth: refinement, service and the patience to do a thing properly. The Hermit is its trump, and it is one of the least contested attributions in the system. Both are about withdrawing in order to see clearly, and both are frequently mistaken for coldness by people who are not doing the work.
The decans are the late Pentacles, which is the deck's most satisfying run: the Eight as craft repeated until it is skill, the Nine as self-sufficiency actually achieved, the Ten as something built that will outlast you. Virgo gets the mastery sequence, which is a fairer deal than the sign usually gets in popular astrology.
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.
Virgo in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Virgo. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Virgo on Memento Astra