Glossary

The vocabulary, plainly.

Tarot has its own words for things, and most of them are older than most religions. Here are the ones you'll meet inside Querent, defined in a way you can actually use.

A

Ace: The one of any suit. Aces are pure suit-energy at its origin point — the seed of fire (Wands), water (Cups), air (Swords), earth (Pentacles). A reading heavy with aces is a reading about beginnings.
Affirmation: A short sentence drawn from a card's meaning, written in the first person and present tense, used as a focus or daily reminder. Querent surfaces an affirmation per card; pick one that you would actually say out loud.
Arcanaalso: arcanum (sing.): Latin for ‘secrets.’ The deck divides into the Major Arcana (twenty-two trump cards) and the Minor Arcana (fifty-six suit cards). The split is structural, not hierarchical — minors are not minor in importance.
Astrological correspondence: A planet or zodiac sign assigned to a card. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn formalized most of the modern correspondences in the 1880s — the Sun to The Sun, Pluto/Scorpio to Death, and so on. Querent stores both for every applicable card.

C

Card combination: Two or more cards read together to surface a meaning neither would carry alone. Three of Swords next to The Tower means something different than either card alone. Querent's knowledge base ships with one hundred and fifty-plus pre-written combinations.
Celtic Cross: A ten-card spread popularized by A.E. Waite in 1910 and the most widely used spread in the English-speaking tradition. Long, thorough, and overkill for most questions — three cards usually beat ten.
Court card: The Page, Knight, Queen, and King of each suit. Sixteen cards total. Often read as people in the querent's life, but they can also represent the querent in a particular mode, or a quality the situation is calling for.
Cut: Splitting the shuffled deck into stacks before the cards are drawn. Some readers cut left-handed (the heart's hand). Mechanical, not magical — but a useful pause between question and answer.

D

Daily cardalso: card of the day: A single card drawn at the start of the day with no specific question — a frame for what to notice. The lightest possible reading; the easiest one to keep up.
Deck: The seventy-eight cards as a physical or virtual whole. Querent's reading engine works against a single canonical deck (Rider–Waite–Smith imagery) but draws meanings and citations from RWS, Thoth, and Marseille traditions in parallel.
Dignityalso: elemental dignity: How a card's energy is amplified, weakened, or distorted by the cards around it. Two same-element cards strengthen each other; opposing elements (fire and water, air and earth) weaken each other. A central technique of the Golden Dawn tradition.

E

Element: Fire (Wands · will), Water (Cups · feeling), Air (Swords · thought), Earth (Pentacles · body, work, money). The four classical elements assigned one per minor suit. Many majors carry an element too — Death is Water, The Tower is Fire.

F

Focus: A short phrase naming what the reading is about. Not the same as the question — ‘love’ is a focus, ‘will my ex come back’ is a question. Querent uses the focus to weight which facet of each card to surface.
Fool's journey: A reading of the twenty-two majors as a story arc — the Fool (zero) sets out and meets each archetype in order until arriving at the World (twenty-one). Popularized by Eden Gray and Rachel Pollack. Useful as a teaching frame, less useful as an interpretive rule.

G

Golden Dawnalso: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Late-Victorian English magical order (founded 1888) whose initiates wrote most of the modern tarot tradition — Waite, Crowley, Israel Regardie. The astrological, Kabbalistic, and elemental correspondences in any contemporary deck almost certainly trace back to them.

H

Hebrew letter: A letter of the Hebrew alphabet assigned to each major arcanum, by way of the Tree of Life. Aleph to The Fool, Beth to The Magician, and so on. Borrowed from Kabbalah by the Golden Dawn; not original to tarot.
Hermetic: Adjective for the Western esoteric tradition that braids together Egyptian magic, Greek philosophy, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism. Crowley's Thoth deck is the most explicitly Hermetic of the three traditions Querent reads from.

I

Ill-dignified: A card weakened or distorted by surrounding cards of opposing element. An ill-dignified Knight of Wands is a reckless Knight; an ill-dignified Three of Cups is a celebration that won't keep its footing.
Imagery: The visual content of a card — what's pictured, in which deck. Querent stores RWS, Thoth, and Marseille imagery separately for each card because they're often saying different things with the same name.

J

Jumperalso: leaper: A card that falls out of the deck during shuffling. Some traditions read jumpers as additional information from the deck; some ignore them. Mechanical decisions, not metaphysical ones — but pick a rule and stick to it.

K

Kabbalahalso: Qabalah: Jewish mystical tradition centered on the Tree of Life, ten sephiroth, and twenty-two paths between them. The Golden Dawn mapped the twenty-two majors to the twenty-two paths, which is why Querent stores a Tree of Life path on every major arcanum.

M

Major Arcana: The twenty-two trump cards numbered zero (The Fool) through twenty-one (The World). Each represents a large life-pattern, an archetype, or a stage in the soul's journey. Often the loudest cards in any reading.
Marseillealso: Tarot de Marseille: The French printing tradition of tarot, dating from the seventeenth century. Pip cards (twos through tens) are unillustrated — just suit symbols arranged geometrically. Less narrative than RWS, more numeric. Read by Jodorowsky, Dusty White, and the French school.
Minor Arcana: The fifty-six suit cards — four suits of ten pips and four court cards. Where the majors describe large themes, the minors describe daily texture: a conversation, a project, a worry, a rest.

N

Numerology: The interpretive layer assigned to a card's number. Ones are beginnings, fives are crises, tens are completions. The pattern is consistent across suits — the Five of Wands and the Five of Cups are both crisis cards, but in fire and water respectively.

O

Open vs closed question: Open questions (‘what should I notice about this job?’) draw richer readings than closed ones (‘should I take it?’). Closed questions can be answered yes/no; open questions invite the deck to actually contribute. Querent prefers open by default.

P

Page: The youngest court card of each suit. A learner of that suit's element — eager, raw, curious, sometimes careless. Often read as a child, a student, or news arriving in the suit's domain.
Pipalso: pip card: A numbered minor card (Ace through Ten). Distinguishes the forty number cards from the sixteen court cards. ‘Pip’ originally referred to the suit-symbol pips on the card; in Marseille decks, pip cards have nothing else on them.
Position: A specific slot in a spread, with its own meaning. Position one of the Celtic Cross (‘the heart of the matter’) means one thing; position three (‘the foundation’) means another. The card is the noun; the position is the verb.

Q

Querent: The person being read for. From Latin quaerens, ‘the one seeking.’ The reader can be the querent — readings for yourself are a tradition as old as the cards. The app is named after the seeker, not the deck.
Quintessencealso: quint, lesson card: A summary card derived from the others in a spread by adding their numbers and reducing to a major arcanum. A whole-reading tone-setter. Greer teaches it; many readers skip it.

R

Reader: The person doing the reading. In a self-reading, the reader and querent are the same person. Querent (the app) is always reader; you are always querent.
Reflection, not prediction: House line. Tarot earns its keep as a mirror, not an oracle. The cards do not know your future; they offer a frame for what you already half-know about your present. We hold this line in every reading.
Reversalalso: reversed: A card that lands upside-down. Not a negative card — a card whose meaning is inflected. Mary K. Greer's four reversal modes (opposite, excessive, blocked, underdeveloped) give reversed cards their nuance back.
Rider–Waite–Smithalso: RWS, Waite-Smith: The 1909 deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under A.E. Waite's direction, published by Rider & Co. The first modern deck to fully illustrate the pip cards, and still the dominant visual reference in the English-speaking world. When a description doesn't name a deck, it's almost certainly RWS.

S

Significator: A card chosen (not drawn) to represent the querent or the question, sometimes placed in the spread before any cards are drawn. Some traditions use them; many modern readers don't. Querent's engine doesn't require one.
Spread: A pre-defined arrangement of card positions used to structure a reading. A grammar for the deck. Three-card past/present/future is the simplest; the Celtic Cross is the most famous; Querent ships with twenty-seven.
Suit: One of the four families of the minor arcana — Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles. Each governs an element, a class of life-concerns, and a temperament. Querent treats the suit as a primary key when interpreting any minor card.

T

Thothalso: Thoth Tarot, Crowley deck: The deck designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943, published posthumously in 1969. More explicitly Hermetic than RWS, with Egyptian and astrological symbolism foregrounded. Read alongside Crowley's Book of Thoth.
Timing: Estimating when something will happen from the cards drawn. A traditionally weak use of tarot — the deck is good at quality and pattern, less good at calendar. Querent stores per-card timing notes anyway, with appropriate skepticism.
Tree of Life: The Kabbalistic diagram of ten sephiroth connected by twenty-two paths. The Golden Dawn assigned each major arcanum to one path; the four aces, ten of each suit, and four courts to the sephiroth. Mostly relevant to readers working in the Hermetic tradition.

U

Upright: A card that lands right-side-up. The card's primary meaning. Querent reads upright as the default and only reaches for reversed meanings when the card is actually drawn that way.

W

Well-dignified: A card strengthened by surrounding cards of friendly element. A well-dignified Three of Wands is a confident Three; a well-dignified Knight of Cups is romance that knows how to land.

Y

Yes/No reading: A reading designed to resolve a closed question with a one-card answer. Querent stores a yes/no reading per card alongside the regular meaning, but we suggest open questions over closed ones whenever the situation allows.

Z

Zodiac sign: The astrological sign assigned to a card. Twelve signs, twelve major arcana with sign attributions, plus court cards mapped to decanic thirds. Useful when the question itself is astrological; ignorable when it isn't.

Looking for a term we've missed? Tell us and we'll add it. The vocabulary belongs to the tradition, not to us — we just keep a clean copy.