Memento Arcana: Tarot, and Where It Meets Astrology
The sibling site to this one is a tarot reference. That sounds like a change of subject, and it is not: the minor arcana is a map of the zodiac at ten degree resolution, and almost nobody learning tarot is told.
Memento Arcana is the tarot site built alongside this one. Same builder, same house rules, one shared sign-in.
If you came here for astrology, a tarot site sounds like a change of subject. It is not, and the reason is more interesting than either site's front page lets on: the minor arcana is a zodiac map, and the two subjects have shared a spine since the nineteenth century.
What the site actually is
Not a reading service and not a shop for decks. A reference, and a tool.
- All 78 card meanings, upright and reversed, each with what the card is read for in love, work, money and health, plus the symbolism in the picture and where it came from.
- Free readings in every classic spread, drawn on the server from a cryptographic random source across all 78 cards, with a real coin flip for each reversal. Nothing is weighted toward comfortable cards.
- A course that teaches the deck in order, starting from what tarot is and is not.
- A card of the day, the same card for everybody, worked out from the date.
- A glossary and a cheat sheet for the vocabulary, which is where most people give up.
There is no language model in any of it. Every meaning was written out, and every reading is composed from those written meanings rather than generated on the spot.
The part that will interest an astrologer
The 36 decans.
A decan is a ten degree third of a zodiac sign, so the zodiac has 36 of them. They are old: Egyptian in origin, groups of stars used to tell the hours of the night, absorbed into Hellenistic astrology and carried forward through the medieval and Renaissance traditions.
The minor arcana has 36 pip cards, the two through ten of each suit. In the 1880s the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn mapped one onto the other, and that mapping is why a Rider-Waite-Smith deck carries a planet and a sign on those cards at all. Waite and Smith were both members of the order. The attributions were not decoration.
The rule is tidy once you see it:
- Suits follow the elements. Wands fire, Cups water, Swords air, Pentacles earth.
- Ranks follow modality. Within each element, the cardinal sign takes two, three and four, the fixed sign takes five, six and seven, and the mutable sign takes eight, nine and ten.
So the Five of Cups is the first decan of Scorpio, the Eight of Wands is the first decan of Sagittarius, and so on for all 36. The whole minor arcana is the zodiac at ten degree resolution.
You can read it from either end. This site's decan pages list all 36 with their tarot attribution, and Arcana's card and astrology pages come at the same mapping from the card side.
Both sites compute those attributions from the rule rather than transcribing a table, and each one's tests check its answers against the other's data. If the two ever disagree, one is wrong and the build says so.
How to use the two together
Your Sun sits in a decan, and which one depends on the exact degree rather than the date range, which is why it needs a real chart rather than a birthday. Cast one on the birth chart calculator, read off the degree, then look up that decan.
The same works for any placement. A Moon at 14 degrees of Taurus is the second decan of Taurus, which the Golden Dawn gave to the Six of Pentacles. Whether that tells you anything is your call. That it is the inherited attribution rather than something invented for a website is not in question, and that distinction is the whole reason both sites exist in the shape they do.
If you want the reverse direction, Arcana's birth card works from a date of birth, and its court card decoder is where the elemental dignities an astrologer already knows turn out to be the same machinery.
What the two sites share underneath
One account. The same sign-in that holds your saved charts here holds a reading journal on Arcana.
And a rule about language. Neither site says what will happen to you. This one says what a placement is associated with, that one says what a card is read for, and both leave the sentence about your future to you.
Where to start
The card of the day costs nothing and needs no account. If you would rather start from the connection than the introduction, read the decans page here first, then the astrology attributions there. It is the one place where two of these three sites genuinely share a spine.