Birthday tarot cards

The Sun moves about one degree a day, so a calendar date pins it to within a degree. The zodiac’s 360 degrees divide into twelve signs of 30, and each sign into three decans of 10. A birthday therefore belongs to one sign and to one of 36 decans.

In the late nineteenth century the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn gave each piece of that wheel a card. Every sign has a Major Arcana card: Aries is The Emperor, Pisces The Moon. Every decan has one of the numbered cards from Two to Ten, in the suit of the sign’s element: Wands for fire, Cups for water, Swords for air, Pentacles for earth. And every decan has a ruling planet with a Major Arcana card of its own: Mars is The Tower, Venus The Empress.

So a birthday gets three cards. The decan card is the most specific to the date. The sign card is shared with everyone of that sign. The ruler card is the accent that slice of the sign adds. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck follows the same scheme.

The dates in the table are where the Sun is at noon UTC in most years between 1980 and 2030. On the first or last day of a range the Sun can be on either side, depending on the birth year and hour; the calculator says so when it applies. This is not the tarot birth card, which comes from adding up the digits of the full birth date.