46 terms

Tarot glossary

Tarot is full of words that books use without stopping to define: querent, significator, pip, decan, dignity. Here is all of it in one place, with a note on which ones we deliberately do not use.

Doing a reading

Clarifier: An extra card drawn to shed light on one that did not open. Legitimate once. Drawing repeatedly until something pleasant appears is how a reading stops meaning anything, which is why the Cut and Clarify spread has a hard stop built into it.
Position: One slot in a spread, with a stated meaning. Reading a card without reading its position is the most common beginner mistake and produces a list rather than an answer.
Querent: The person the reading is for. From the Latin for "one who seeks". If you are reading for yourself you are both the reader and the querent, which is the source of most of the difficulty in reading for yourself.
Reader: The person interpreting. Not a title anybody confers: you are a reader the first time you lay out cards and say what you think they mean.
Reading for yourself: Doing both jobs at once. Harder than reading for somebody else, because you already know which answer you want and the deck cannot see you reaching for it.
Significator: A card chosen in advance, rather than drawn, to stand for the querent or the question. Traditionally a court card picked by the querent's appearance or age. Nothing on this site uses it: the matching conventions are unreliable and the practice removes a card from the deck before you have started.
Sitting: One session with a querent, which may contain several spreads. The word survives from face-to-face reading and is still used for online sessions.
Spread: A layout with named positions, each of which gives its card a job. The same card means something different in "the obstacle" than in "the advice", and that is the entire point of using one.

The deck and its parts

Ace: The One of a suit, and read as its own category rather than as a first step. An Ace is the element itself being offered, before anything has been done with it. The Aces.
Arcana: Plural of arcanum, Latin for a secret or a mystery. A deck is divided into the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. "Arcanas" is not a word, though you will see it.
Card back: Usually a symmetrical design, and that is deliberate: an asymmetrical back tells you which way up a card is before you turn it, which quietly removes reversals from the deck.
Court card: The sixteen figures: a Page, Knight, Queen and King in each suit. The hardest part of the deck, because the card will not tell you whether it means another person, you, or an approach. The court cards.
Deck: Seventy-eight cards. Anything with a different count is either not a tarot deck (an oracle deck) or is missing something.
Face card: A playing-card term that people carry over to mean a court card. Harmless, and it will get you looked at oddly in a tarot group.
Major Arcana: The twenty-two trump cards, numbered 0 to 21, that sit outside the four suits. They describe conditions that are structural rather than situational. The Major Arcana.
Minor Arcana: The fifty-six suit cards: four suits of fourteen, Ace through Ten plus four court cards. Ordinary life at its actual scale. The Minor Arcana.
Pip: A numbered minor card, Two through Ten. From the marks on a playing card. In older decks the pips were literally that, ten cups arranged on a plain background, with no scene to read.
Suit: One of the four families of the Minor Arcana: Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles. Each carries an element and a domain.
Trump: Another name for a Major Arcana card. From the original card game, where these cards beat any suit card. The game came first; the divination came three hundred years later.

Technique

Cleansing: Resetting a deck between readings, by knocking it, sorting it back to order, moonlight, incense or whatever your practice uses. What it demonstrably does is mark a boundary between one reading and the next, which is worth something regardless of what you believe about the rest.
Combination: Two cards read as one statement rather than as two answers. Most of the meaning in a spread lives in the joins. Card combinations.
Cut: Splitting the shuffled deck and reassembling it, traditionally with the left hand and traditionally by the querent. Ritual rather than mechanism: a cut adds almost nothing to a properly shuffled deck.
Deck interview: A modern practice: a spread laid the first time you use a deck, asking what it is good at and how it wants to be worked with. Read as a way of getting to know a deck rather than as a conversation with one.
Elemental dignity: How two neighbouring cards read against each other according to their elements. Fire and Air feed each other, Water and Earth nourish, Fire and Water conflict. The oldest relational technique in tarot and the first thing an experienced reader checks. Tarot and astrology.
Jumper: A card that falls out of the deck while shuffling. Some readers treat it as significant and read it; some put it back. There is no agreed rule and it is worth deciding yours before it happens rather than after.
Reversal: The practice of reading upside-down cards as carrying a modified meaning. On this site reversals are a genuine coin flip per card, and they can be switched off in your account.
Reversed: A card that comes out upside down. Most readers take it as the same force turned inward, blocked or unexpressed, rather than as the opposite meaning. Plenty of readers do not use reversals at all, which is a legitimate choice and not a shortcut.
Shuffle: Randomising the deck. Physically this is riffle, overhand or a wash across the table. Here it is a Fisher-Yates shuffle over a cryptographic random source, which is genuinely random rather than merely unpredictable to you.
Upright: A card the right way up from the reader's point of view. The default reading of a card.

Systems and attributions

Birth card: The Major Arcana card your birth date reduces to arithmetically. A twentieth century numerology convention borrowed into tarot, not something the old decks did. The birth card calculator.
Correspondence: A link between a card and something outside the deck: an element, a planet, a zodiac sign, a Hebrew letter. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one. Tarot and astrology.
Decan: A ten-degree third of a zodiac sign. Each of the thirty-six decans takes one numbered minor card, which is how the Twos through Tens map onto the year. Tarot and astrology.
Modality: Cardinal, fixed or mutable: whether a sign starts things, holds them, or adapts. With the element, it is what defines a sign, and it decides which three cards a sign takes.
Personality and soul card: The two ends of a birth card reduction: the outward signature and the longer-running theme underneath it. When a date reduces in one step they are the same card. The birth card calculator.
The Fool’s Journey: Reading the twenty-two majors as a narrative from The Fool at 0 to The World at 21. A genuinely useful teaching frame, and a modern one: popularised by Eden Gray in the 1960s and 70s rather than inherited from the earliest decks. The Major Arcana.
Timing: Reading a card for when rather than what, usually by taking the suit as a unit and the number as a count. The least reliable thing tarot is asked to do, and the conventions disagree with each other. The Timing spread.
Yes/no reading: Asking a closed question and taking the card’s traditional lean as the answer. The most requested use of tarot and the one it does least well. Worth knowing that 48 of the 78 cards lean yes, which makes a yes weaker evidence than a no. The Yes or No reading.

History and decks

Cartomancy: Divination with cards, of any kind. Tarot is one branch of it; reading ordinary playing cards is another and is older in some traditions.
Golden Dawn: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a late nineteenth century British occult society. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet. Almost every attribution you will meet in a modern book comes from them. Our editorial policy.
Lenormand: A thirty-six card system named after a nineteenth century French cartomancer. Read in combinations and small grids rather than card by card, and the meanings are far more literal than tarot’s. A separate skill.
Marseille: The older French pattern, standardised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its minors are true pips with no scenes, so it is read structurally rather than pictorially. Strength and Justice sit at the opposite numbers to the RWS.
Oracle deck: Any divination deck that is not a tarot deck. No fixed structure, no set number of cards, no shared vocabulary between one and the next. Not lesser, just not comparable: a tarot meaning does not transfer.
Pamela Colman Smith: The artist of the RWS deck, paid a flat fee and credited only by her initials in the corner of each card for most of a century. The pictures everybody pictures when they picture tarot are hers.
Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS): The 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, directed by A. E. Waite and published by Rider. The most influential deck ever made, largely because Smith gave every minor card a scene to read rather than an arrangement of pips. Often called Rider-Waite, which leaves out the artist.
Tarocchi: The Italian card game the deck was invented for in the fifteenth century, and still played. Divination came later, in eighteenth century France. The cards were a game for roughly three hundred years before anybody read them.
Thoth: The deck designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris in the 1940s. Golden Dawn attributions taken further, with its own vocabulary: Princes and Princesses instead of Knights and Pages.

Definitions are a starting point. These put the vocabulary to work.

How to Read Tarot Court Cards (The Hardest Sixteen)

Court cards are difficult for one specific reason: the card will not tell you whether it means another person, you, or something you could do. Here is how to decide.

What the Numbers Mean in Tarot, Ace to Ten

Forty numbered cards look like forty things to memorise. They are ten numbers crossed with four elements, and once you see that you can construct any of them.

Yes or No Tarot: The Question It Is Worst At

The most requested reading in tarot, done honestly. How the leans are decided, why 48 of the 78 cards say yes, and what to ask instead.

Words we do not use

A glossary is also a place to be clear about what is missing. Significator is defined above and not used anywhere on this site, because picking a card by somebody appearance or age is unreliable and takes a card out of the deck before you start. Nothing here is described as psychic, and no reading is called a prediction: the cards describe shapes and trajectories, and a trajectory can be changed.

What tarot is, and is not The full course All 78 card meanings