Tarot Glossary — Decan, Sephirah, Elemental Dignity & More

"Pip" comes from playing-card vocabulary: a dot or suit symbol repeated on the face of a non-court card. Marseille tarot uses classical pips — the Two of Cups is simply two cups arranged symmetrically, with no figure or scene, and readers worked purely from number + suit. The Rider-Waite-Smith revolution of 1909 was to illustrate the pips as scenes (the Two of Cups becomes a betrothal image), which is why pip-style minors and scenic-style minors now feel like two different reading registers even though they depict the same abstract number-plus-element.

Pollack draws on petroglyphs, Aboriginal art, Indigenous American imagery, and world mythologies for its visual vocabulary — deliberately stepping outside the RWS scenic convention. Suit names are also renamed (Trees / Rivers / Birds / Stones) to open the reading beyond Wands / Cups / Swords / Pentacles. It reads very differently from RWS — more like meeting a picture language than decoding a familiar one — and is often picked by readers who want a second deck that unsettles reflexive habits.

Philippe Camoin is a direct descendant of the printing family that continued Nicolas Conver's workshop. Working with Jodorowsky, whose own tarot practice is Marseille-rooted and therapeutic (see psychomagic), they spent nearly a decade reconstructing what they believed the 1760 palette and line must have been before centuries of reprint drift. The result is favored by Marseille-lineage readers who want a working deck closer to 18th-century print than late-20th-century reinterpretations.

Companion text The Book of Thoth (1944) pre-dates the deck itself by 25 years; neither creator lived to see it in print. Harris's projective-geometry training (learned at London's Rudolf Steiner House — Anthroposophy, not Theosophy) underwrites its distinctive mathematical aesthetic. It carries the fullest systematization of any tarot family — Hebrew letters, decans, zodiac, elemental attributions — and is therefore the deck of choice for readers already trained in Kabbalah or astrology.

The Chaldean order ranks the seven classical planets from slowest (Saturn, outermost) to fastest (Moon, closest). Cycling through the sequence one decan at a time — starting with Mars at Aries 1, since Mars rules Aries — distributes thirty-six planetary rulers evenly across the wheel. The pattern closes cleanly: Pisces's third decan lands on Mars again, completing five and a seventh full loops. Golden Dawn tarot inherited this allocation for the 36 pip cards.

Fire triplicity = Aries / Leo / Sagittarius; water = Cancer / Scorpio / Pisces; air = Gemini / Libra / Aquarius; earth = Taurus / Virgo / Capricorn. The four tarot Pages take no degree range: in the Golden Dawn system each rules a quadrant of the heavens around the pole rather than a slice of the zodiac. The senior courts (King / Queen / Knight) straddle decans; the Pages stand outside the dated wheel.

Because of precession of the equinoxes, the two zodiacs have drifted about 24° apart over the last two millennia — a tropical "Aries Sun" may map to sidereal Pisces. Lunarcana and Golden Dawn tarot both use the tropical zodiac throughout; every date range, decan boundary, and degree value on /guide/astrology assumes tropical. Mentioning the distinction matters only when a reader cross-references Vedic material.

The synodic month measures the moon's cycle relative to the sun (and thus to us, on Earth), not relative to the fixed stars — that faster cycle is the 27.32-day sidereal month. When tarot practice talks about a "lunar cycle," it almost always means the synodic one: new moon → full moon → new moon. Eight named phases divide this arc; each is a different gradient of illumination, not a discrete event.

Because the synodic cycle is ~29.5 days, a calendar month occasionally fits two full moons — roughly once every 2.5 years. The term also has an older, rarer sense: the third full moon within a season that holds four. Either way, "blue" is about statistical scarcity, not hue (the moon can appear faintly blue after large volcanic eruptions, but that is a separate optical phenomenon). For ritual use, a blue moon marks a redoubled release cycle — the same intention, two chances.

The practice descends from the Golden Dawn's visionary travel along the paths of the Qabalistic Tree of Life; the word itself became common in later twentieth-century occult writing. Modern tarot usage is gentler: pick a single card, half-close your eyes, and imagine stepping into the scene — notice the ground, the light, what the figure says without speaking. Ten minutes is plenty. Write afterwards. Pathworking is not channeling or possession; it's a disciplined use of imagination that often surfaces material ordinary introspection cannot reach.

Shadow work in the tarot context is an application of Jung's shadow (see the "shadow" entry above): when a card repels you or you want to re-draw, stay with it instead. Ask "what about this image makes me uncomfortable?" and write the answer, even if unflattering. Over weeks a pattern emerges. This is reflective journaling, not trauma therapy — if the material becomes distressing or destabilizing, pause the practice and consult a licensed clinician. Lunarcana's guide pages hold that line consistently.

Classical dream incubation — the Greeks at Asklepios's temples, Daoist dream-seeking monks — used a specific question and a specific sleeping place. The tarot adaptation is lighter: the card is the question. A notebook and pen must be within reach at waking, because dream recall collapses within sixty seconds of getting up. What surfaces usually doesn't "explain" the card; it answers a different, truer question you hadn't known to ask. Over months, a loose correspondence builds between certain cards and certain dream motifs — that personal map is the real product of the practice.

Borrowed from contemplative traditions (Tibetan tögal, Zen shikantaza, hypnagogic image-gazing), soft gaze asks the eyes to look without working. Hold one card at arm's length, let your focal plane go slack, blink sparingly. After two or three minutes the visual field usually starts to shimmer — edges soften, a color dominates, a detail you had not noticed arrives. Write that, not an interpretation. Gazing is not hallucination-seeking; it is a deliberate lowering of cognitive effort so that perception can report what normal scanning overrides.

Drawn from his theater and film practice, psychomagic takes unconscious material surfaced in conversation (or a tarot reading) and translates it into a concrete symbolic act — burying an object, writing and burning a letter, walking a specific route at a specific hour. The claim is not supernatural efficacy; the claim is that the unconscious takes ritual acts literally in a way it does not take verbal instructions, and that this literalism is therapeutically exploitable. Tarot is one of its inputs — the cards surface the conflict — not its core method. Jodorowsky's reading identifies a psychic pattern — a buried wound, an inherited family script — and prescribes a concrete symbolic act meant to dissolve it: ritualized, embodied, specific. The tarot he uses is a restored Marseille (Camoin-Jodorowsky, 1997). Psychomagic is not clinical therapy and Jodorowsky himself is emphatic about that boundary; it is an artist's complement, not a replacement.

Among Lakota, Diné, and other nations, smudging is a specific ceremonial act with its own protocols, not a generic "energy cleansing." The word entered wider circulation through 20th-century New Age commercialization, which also drove overharvesting of white sage. A respectful approach for non-members is to (1) use a different word — "smoke cleansing" — for the generic secular practice, (2) substitute plants local to your own tradition (sandalwood, mugwort, hinoki, rosemary, frankincense) rather than wild-harvested white sage or opaque-supply palo santo.

Much of white sage's habitat has been lost to urbanization, and poaching cases are reported regularly. The practice of smudging with white sage was criminalized for Indigenous Americans until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), which makes the 21st-century commercial boom especially fraught. California Indigenous leaders have publicly asked non-members to stop consuming wild-harvested white sage. Cultivated alternatives exist; local substitutes (see smudging) also do the same atmospheric work.

The species most traded as palo santo is Bursera graveolens, currently IUCN Least Concern and not on any CITES appendix. A different tree, Bulnesia sarmientoi, is also marketed as palo santo and has been on CITES Appendix II since 2010 — so a label reading "palo santo" does not tell you which species you have. Even within Bursera graveolens, ethical sourcing matters: the customary harvest is naturally fallen deadwood, but opaque supply chains sometimes mean standing trees are cut. Buy only from sources transparent about species and harvest method, or substitute a plant from your own tradition.

Typical widths are 1 + 4 (cardinal directions), 1 + 6 (classical mandala), 1 + 8 (full compass or elemental eight). Each radial position is a dimension — mind, vision, passion, feeling; or body, heart, spirit, shadow, light; or past wound, present pattern, future potential, core need — and the center holds the question itself. Reading order is typically center first to set tone, then the radials non-sequentially. Best for birthday self-review, year-end retrospection, life-stage thresholds; less useful for urgent tactical decisions that need a sequence.

A card does not have one fixed meaning in a reading — the position modifies it. The Three of Swords in "present situation" describes a real current grief; the same card in "what you need to see" describes an avoided grief you have not named; in "obstacle" it is heart-pain that the next step must pass through. Good position design exploits this: designing the modifier is designing the reading. This is one of the three grammatical elements of spread design (see spread-grammar).

A Lunarcana-specific framing rather than a classical term. Position count sets tempo; position function defines what each card is asked; positional relation (linear, parallel, diagonal, radial) is the grammar the spread's shape speaks. Together these three make spread design a craft rather than an inspiration game — once you can see them separately, you can compose a new spread for a new question instead of reaching for the same stock layout every time. See /guide/designing-spreads.

The most complete surviving Mamluk pack (Istanbul, Topkapı Palace) uses Coins, Cups, Swords, and Polo-sticks — the last reshaped into Wands or Batons after transmission via Sicily and Venice. The cards were decorative gaming objects, not divinatory. Italian makers called them "naibi," a loan from the Arabic nā'ib (deputy), and the word hung on in Spanish (naipes) long after the objects changed.

Although popularized in mid-twentieth-century Wicca, each sabbat draws on older Celtic, Germanic, or pre-Christian rural markers. Samhain (31 Oct) flanks the Celtic new year; Imbolc (1 Feb) wakes the ewes; Beltane (1 May) and Lughnasadh (1 Aug) bracket the growing season. Sabbats are solar, not lunar — they align with the earth's tilt rather than the moon's phase, and often pair with nearby full moons for tarot practice.

Brought from Tang-dynasty China in the Heian era, tsukimi became its own gentle domestic ritual: pampas grass (susuki), round dumplings (tsukimi-dango) stacked as a small pyramid, and a quiet gaze at the moon. It overlaps closely with the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) observed across East Asia. For tarot practice, it pairs naturally with a full-moon release spread — the ritual already asks you to sit, look, and give thanks.

Founded in London in 1888 by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, William Westcott, and William Woodman. Members included A. E. Waite, Pamela Colman Smith, Aleister Crowley, W. B. Yeats. The Order's internal teaching papers — including the tarot-astrology-Kabbalah correspondence tables collectively known as "Book T" — went on to become the scaffolding for Waite-Smith (1909) and Crowley-Harris Thoth (1938–1943).

Not a published book but a body of ritual and instructional papers circulated within the Order. The tables it contains remain the de facto reference for Golden Dawn-lineage tarot: the 36 decans map onto minor pips 2–10 of each suit; the 22 Majors onto 22 Hebrew letters; the 12 Kings, Queens and Knights onto thirty-degree zodiac spans and the 4 Pages onto quadrants of the heavens. Crowley published much of this material openly in The Book of Thoth (1944); Waite encoded it more quietly into the Rider-Waite-Smith imagery.

Lévi called the figure "le Baphomet de Mendès" and loaded it with polar symbolism: male + female, solid + fluid, descend + ascend, day + night. He explicitly framed it as an image of reconciled opposites — a philosophical emblem, not an object of worship. Its later conflation with Satan is a popular misreading, not Lévi's own. The Devil (Major XV) pre-dates Lévi by several centuries, but the Rider-Waite-Smith Devil is drawn after his figure: Waite calls it the Horned Goat of Mendes.

Proposed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The Majors are often re-read as a monomyth — the "Fool's Journey" — with 0 The Fool as the call and XXI The World as the return, the intervening Majors as trials, mentors, and thresholds. The mapping is not Campbell's own and not exact (there are 22 Majors, not the monomyth's 17 canonical stages), but it gives a narrative-psychology scaffold that later writers like Rachel Pollack developed in detail.

The term is specifically useful in tarot / spiritual contexts, where sacred practices from other cultures (smudging, palo santo use, chakras decontextualized from Hindu traditions, shamanic drumming) often get re-packaged as generic "spiritual" product. The line between appreciation and appropriation is not always crisp, but three questions help: is the originating community asked, credited, and compensated; is the element removed from its ritual context to sell a product; and does its popularity harm the community (ecologically, economically, or by diluting the meaning)? Lunarcana's stance is to inform without moralizing — give readers the history so they can decide, and offer substitutes rooted in their own traditions.