Let me first explain a little about the Tarot. A standard deck has 78 cards, 22 major cards, or Major Trumps, or Greater Arcana, and 56 minor cards, Four Suits or Lesser Arcana. This dissection of the deck makes it a little easier to understand how it meshes in with the Tree of life, since there are 22 'paths'. The only problem is that there are 10 spheres (also known as paths, but from a diagrammatic point of view, they are spheres, and the paths link them. Although they really shouldn't be thought of that way) and 56 cards left over. However, just as in a deck of playing cards, there are 10 numbered cards, aces (being equivalent to ones) to tens, and four court cards per suit. So, the numbered cards are assigned in groups of fours, i.e. four aces, four twos etc. to each sphere. As you will see, these cards have not been simply placed in numerical order with the numerical order of the paths, but have correspondences to the names of the paths.

There are many designs of decks available on the market at the moment, and for anyone who wishes to further study the Tarot, the author gives the advice that you should seek a deck that has symbolism that meshes well with your mind. Let it 'sing' to you with its symbolism.

These correspondences have been taken from the Golden Dawn's workings, and have been derived from the Crowley Thoth deck. This deck was actually designed with Kabbalah working in mind. The names of some of the cards in the Thoth deck differ from the Rider-Waite deck, but the ideas are the same. The Rider-Waite deck names have been used here only because of the author's preference for the symbolism of this deck over the symbolism of Crowley's.

On top of this, the suits have been assigned to the four worlds as such: Wands to Atziluth, Cups to Beriah, Swords to Yetzirah, and Pentacles to Assiah. Also, the 16 left over 'Court cards' (the Kings, Queens, Knights and Pages) have been assigned to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton as so: Kings to the swift action of Yod of (I)HVH, Queens to the steadfast forces of He of I(H)VH, Knights to Vau of IH(V)H and Pages to the He of IHV(H).