Dictionary of Tarot
29 terms across 6 categories.
Card Structure
Court Cards
The 16 face cards: Page, Knight, Queen, and King of each suit.
Major Arcana
The 22 trump cards of the tarot deck, numbered 0-XXI.
Minor Arcana
The 56 suited cards divided into four suits of 14 cards each.
Pip Cards
The numbered cards (Ace through Ten) of each suit.
Trump
Another name for the Major Arcana cards, from the Italian 'trionfi' (triumphs).
Divination
Cartomancy
Fortune-telling or divination using playing cards or tarot cards.
Celtic Cross
The most widely used tarot spread, consisting of 10 cards in a cross-and-column layout.
Querent
The person for whom a tarot reading is being performed.
Reversal
A card dealt upside-down, traditionally indicating altered, blocked, or shadow meanings.
Significator
A card chosen to represent the querent or the question before the reading begins.
Spread
A specific layout pattern for dealing tarot cards, where each position has a defined meaning.
History
Court de Gebelin
Antoine Court de Gebelin (1725-1784), who first claimed tarot had Egyptian occult origins.
Eliphas Levi
Alphonse Louis Constant (1810-1875), the occultist who linked tarot to Kabbalah.
Etteilla
Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738-1791), the first professional tarot cartomancer.
Sola Busca
The first complete 78-card tarot deck with fully illustrated (scenic) Minor Arcana, engraved c. 1491.
Visconti-Sforza
The oldest surviving tarot cards, painted in Milan c. 1440-1450 for the ruling Visconti and Sforza families.
Interpretive Method
Dialectical Reading
A reading method where reader and querent engage in mutual exploration rather than one-directional interpretation.
Fool's Journey
The concept of the Major Arcana as a narrative arc of spiritual development from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI).
Structural Reading
Reading the overall patterns of a spread (suit prevalence, trump density, number sequences) before interpreting individual cards.
Kabbalah
Decan
A 10-degree division of the zodiac, used to assign astrological correspondences to Minor Arcana pip cards.
Elemental Dignity
The system of elemental interactions between adjacent cards in a spread.
Hebrew Letter
One of 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each assigned to a Major Arcana card.
Path
One of the 22 connecting lines on the Tree of Life, each corresponding to a Major Arcana card.
Sephirah
One of the ten emanations on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, each corresponding to a number in the Minor Arcana.
Traditions
Book T
Mathers's secret Golden Dawn document establishing tarot-Kabbalah-astrology correspondences.
Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888-1900), the magical society that systematized modern tarot correspondences.
Rider-Waite-Smith
The most widely used tarot deck, created in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith.
Tarot de Marseille
The historical French tarot pattern, the oldest continuously produced tarot design.
Thoth Tarot
Aleister Crowley's tarot deck, painted by Lady Frieda Harris (1938-1943).