Correspondence to Playing Card Suits

[Joan Marie]

I'm working on a project and need to know the correspondence between the 4 Tarot "suits" and those of regular playing cards.

In trying to verify what I thought I knew, I saw some conflicting information.

I think the most accepted/recognised correspondence is:

Cups = Hearts
Pentacles = Spades
Swords = Clubs
Wands = Diamonds


Can anyone weigh in on this? Is there a fixed correspondence or is it open to interpretation as some seem to imply?

[Nemia]

These are the correspondences like Paul Huson assigns them, also Ana Cortez. I personally read:

Spades: Swords
Hearts: Cups
Clubs: Wands
Diamonds: Pentacles

These are the suits in the Arcana Tarot, too, a hybrid of playing cards with tarot trumps. Many websites use the associations, too (one example).

This works better with German suits, too. (I'll dig in my books and notes to find out more).

[Joan Marie]

Spades: Swords
Hearts: Cups
Clubs: Wands
Diamonds: Pentacles

This was what I thought they were too. It makes way more sense to me personally.

But according to A. E. Waite, it's what I put in my original post. I was under the impression that his way was the most accepted but now it doesn't really seem so.

[Nemia]

Really? That's interesting, I didn't know that. Where does Waite write about it? I always thought the Golden Dawn used the suits like I wrote them down. But there are so many different systems...

Especially since playing cards were read in many different traditions, and often, they didn't really take the elements into account. Today, we are so used to sort everything according to the four elements, but when I look at the many oral traditions concerning baraja, magyar, skat cards... they're all read differently. I tried to make a list and collected basic suit meanings... wow, that turned out very confusing

[Joan Marie]

Really? That's interesting, I didn't know that. Where does Waite write about it? I always thought the Golden Dawn used the suits like I wrote them down. But there are so many different systems...

Especially since playing cards were read in many different traditions, and often, they didn't really take the elements into account. Today, we are so used to sort everything according to the four elements, but when I look at the many oral traditions concerning baraja, magyar, skat cards... they're all read differently. I tried to make a list and collected basic suit meanings... wow, that turned out very confusing

I know! I thought it would be such an easy question.

Waite writes that in the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. I read that online and then checked the actual book to verify and it's true. (page 16)

Apparently it also appears in Geddes and Grosset Guide to the Occult and Mysticism (which I don't have)

here's website I saw it discussed: http://www.tarotteachings.com/tarot-an ... ences.html

[Nemia]

Thank you for the link! Maybe it's easiest either to decide on one system and then stick with it, or simply to forget the system and learn the playing card's traditional system (go Pre-GD). That's by the way how Lenormand works for me. I don't look at the elements at all, and the playing card symbols only play a role in court or person cards for me. (I'm glad I have them on the cards though and wouldn't buy Lenormands without them).

Oh, and here is a nice link from Cartomancy.

http://cartomancy.forumotion.com/t5-lin ... d-meanings

All those different systems and traditions......

[Joan Marie]

I had no idea this would be such a rabbit hole!
I guess I should have known.


Those are really interesting links about playing cards.

[Charlie Brown]

There's a different and lengthy post of suits somewhere in Cartomancy, if I understood and remembered correctly (and I may not) it isn't so much that diamonds aren't pentacles but what are the non-French suits. If someone says that acorns are wands and acorns are diamonds, well then....

I'm don't know what exactly your project is, but I've never seen a mass market tarot book with different assignments. I'm hard pressed to see it miring you in too much controversy unless you're trying to write a definitive historical text.

[Joan Marie]

It's really more of an art project so no need to go too far into the weeds.

It is interesting though that I thought I was asking a simple question and it opens all these doors. It just shows how endlessly interesting and challenging all of of this is.

[Amoroso]

The correspondence that JM first mentioned is indeed written in the Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Waite:

There remain the four suits, being Wands or Sceptres--ex hypothesi, in the archæology of the subject, the antecedents of Diamonds in modern cards: Cups, corresponding to Hearts; Swords, which answer to Clubs, as the weapon of chivalry is in relation to the peasant's quarter-staff or the Alsatian bludgeon; and, finally, Pentacles--called also Deniers and Money--which are the prototypes of Spades

The one that Nemia mentioned follows the correspondence from Le Tarot Divinatoire by Papus, which was published a bit earlier. In the first chapter:

Les Bâtons sont devenus les trèfles de nos cartes actuelles ; les Coupes sont devenues les coeurs ; les Epées sont devénues les piques ; les Deniers sont devenus les carreaux.

or

Wands became the Clubs of modern playing-cards, Cups became Hearts, Swords became Spades and Coins became Diamonds.

There's a third set by Mathers. In The Tarot, he displays this chart:

Anthony Louis in Appendix A of his book Tarot Beyond The Basics says that this is the correspondence that Etteilla used. This is also implied by Foli in Chapter XIX of his book Fortune-Telling By Cards. Etteilla wrote a book on cartomancy before he published his work on the Tarot in 1781. I haven't checked this Tarot book tho. If all of this is accurate tho, is the Mathers/Etteilla suits correspondence the earliest one?