About This Project
Arcana Encyclopaedia
A digital humanities project presenting scholarly research on the history, terminology, and interpretive traditions of the tarot. Built using the DH Framework architecture (SQLite → Python → static HTML → GitHub Pages).
The underlying database contains 78 cards with 234 per-tradition meanings across the Rider-Waite-Smith, Thoth/Crowley-Harris, and Marseille traditions. Every card carries Golden Dawn correspondences: Hebrew letters, Tree of Life paths, Sephirotic attributions, and astrological assignments.
Interpretive Philosophy
This project approaches tarot as a psychological and narrative tool, not a fortune-telling device. It is grounded in evidence-based historiography (the Dummett school), multi-tradition fluency (RWS, Thoth, Marseille), and structural reading methods (suit prevalence, trump density, number sequences).
Project Statistics
| Table | Records |
|---|---|
| cards | 78 |
| card_meanings | 234 |
| dictionary_terms | 29 |
| timeline_events | 33 |
| sources | 9 |
| traditions | 3 |
| suits | 5 |
| number_philosophy | 11 |
| elemental_dignities | 6 |
| spread_analytics | 8 |
Data Provenance
- DETERMINISTIC — Parsed by code with no interpretation
- CORPUS_EXTRACTION — Extracted from source documents
- LLM_ASSISTED — Generated with AI assistance (marked as DRAFT)
- SEED_DATA — Hand-authored reference data
- HUMAN_VERIFIED — Reviewed and confirmed by a human scholar
Source Corpus
The project draws on a 9-book PDF corpus covering tarot history, card meanings, interpretive methods, and Qabalistic correspondences. See the Bibliography for the full list.