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Open data · version 1.1.0

StarTarot RWS historical tarot dataset

A reusable English dataset covering all 78 Rider–Waite–Smith cards. It preserves traceable historical meanings and normalizes Golden Dawn correspondences without presenting tarot as scientific prediction.

  • 78 cards
  • English data
  • CC BY 4.0
  • JSONL + CSV
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22917681

Get the data

Version 1.1.0 is published on four services: Zenodo preserves the archival release, while Hugging Face, Kaggle, and GitHub host byte-identical mirrors of the same files.

Zenodo Archival version of record with the registered DOI and all release files. Open the Zenodo recordHugging Face Dataset card with an interactive viewer of all 78 records. Browse on Hugging FaceKaggle Mirror for downloads, notebooks, and data-science workflows. Open on KaggleGitHub Every version is a tagged commit, so a diff between releases shows each corrected value. Open on GitHub

When using a mirror, match both the version number and checksums; cite the Zenodo DOI for the exact archived release.

What this dataset is

The dataset is compiled from the historical sources themselves: a transcription and page images of Waite’s book and a facsimile of the 1912 Equinox. Every value was checked against those page images. It is intended for research, digital humanities, education, cataloguing, search, and source-aware software applications.

This localized page explains the release, but the data itself is English-only. The public package is separate from the multilingual editorial text and AI prompt layer used by StarTarot.online.

Scope and contents

Each record represents one card and keeps structural metadata, historical divinatory wording, source locators, and normalized correspondences together.

Included

  • Stable identifiers and standard English RWS card names
  • Arcana, suit, rank, number, and suit element
  • Waite upright and reversed wording with section locators, plus his additional meanings for the minor cards
  • Golden Dawn title, Hebrew letter, element, planet, zodiac sign, decan and court-card sphere where assigned
  • Record-level source identifiers and integrity checksums

Not included

  • Card artwork or scans
  • Personal or user-generated data
  • AI-generated interpretations or conversation logs
  • Internal multilingual editorial prompts
  • Claims of scientific validity or guaranteed outcomes
Release files

The compact package uses open, widely supported formats and includes everything needed to inspect provenance and verify integrity.

FilePurpose
cards.jsonlCanonical nested form; one JSON record per card.
cards.csvFlattened UTF-8 table for spreadsheets and analysis.
README.mdDataset card, methodology, fields, sources, and limits.
LICENSECC BY 4.0 terms and public-domain source notice.
checksums.sha256SHA-256 integrity checks for the release files.

Provenance and verification

Two historical publications determine the data, and every value was checked against their page images. Modern literature provides context only; no field is derived from it.

Documented sources

  1. A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part III (1911; text of the 1922 reprint)

    Validated Wikisource transcription of the 1922 London reprint; every quoted line was also checked against the page images.

  2. The Equinox, vol. I, no. 8 (1912), pp. 143–210: “A Description of the Cards of the Tarot”

    Golden Dawn “Book T” material, later catalogued as Liber LXXVIII. Titles and elemental, planetary, zodiacal and decan attributions come from the tables on pp. 147–152 and were checked against a facsimile of the 1912 printing.

Normalization decisions

  • RWS numbering is retained: Strength 8 and Justice 11.
  • Court cards keep the labels printed in The Equinox itself: Knight, Queen, King and Knave, the RWS Page. Its note on p. 159 explains that the Golden Dawn Kings are called Knights there and the Princes Kings.
  • The Two of Cups reversed value is explicitly located in Waite’s additional meanings because the main entry has no reversed line.
  • Judgement and The World keep both printed attributions, “Spirit and Fire” and “Earth and Saturn”, instead of losing one during flattening.
  • Six slips in the Wikisource transcription were corrected against the page images; printer’s errors of the 1922 reprint are kept as printed and listed in the README.
  • Waite’s additional meanings (Part III §4) are kept as a separate set beside the main ones; Waite himself notes that they often disagree with them.
  • Yes/no labels are excluded because they are reading conventions, not historical card properties.
What changed in version 1.1.0

Eight values were corrected against the page images of the sources, and new fields add Waite’s additional meanings and the celestial spheres of the court cards; nothing was removed or renamed. The README lists every change with its evidence.

  • The Emperor: the Golden Dawn title is “Sun of the Morning, Chief among the Mighty”, as printed in 1912; version 1.0.0 had “Son”.
  • Knight of Wands: the title now follows the table, like every other title: “The Lord of the Flame and Lightning”.
  • Ace of Cups, Three of Pentacles and Page of Pentacles: Waite’s text lost an invisible soft hyphen and a leftover line-break hyphen (“how-ever”), and a worn comma that the transcription read as a full stop is restored.
  • Hebrew letters: three names now follow the spelling printed in The Equinox itself (Vau, Yodh, Tau), and a new field gives every letter as a character.
  • New: Waite’s additional meanings (Part III §4) for all 56 minor cards.
  • New: the celestial spheres of the twelve Knights, Queens and Kings, each 30° of the zodiac from the 20th degree of one sign to the 20th of the next.
Secondary and contextual literature

Background reading only: none of these works was used to derive any field.

  • Mathers, S. L. MacGregor (1888). The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use in Fortune-Telling, and Method of Play, &c. London: George Redway.
  • Papus [Gérard Encausse] (1889). Le Tarot des Bohémiens: le plus ancien livre du monde. Paris: Georges Carré. English translation by A. P. Morton, The Tarot of the Bohemians: Absolute Key to Occult Science (London: Chapman and Hall, 1892).
  • Ouspensky, P. D. (1913). The Symbolism of the Tarot: Philosophy of Occultism in Pictures and Numbers. Translated by A. L. Pogossky. St Petersburg: Trood Printing and Publishing Co.
  • Thierens, A. E. (n.d. [c. 1928–1930]). The General Book of the Tarot. Introduction by A. E. Waite. London: Rider & Co.; US issue Philadelphia: David McKay [1930].
  • Auger, Emily E. (2022). Review of T. Susan Chang, 36 Secrets (2021); T. Susan Chang and M. M. Meleen, Tarot Deciphered (2021); and T. Susan Chang, Tarot Correspondences (2018). Correspondences 10, no. 2: 415–419.

License and responsible reuse

StarTarot’s selection, normalization, structure, and original documentation are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Public-domain historical material remains public domain; the license does not create new exclusive rights in it.

Read the CC BY 4.0 license

Suggested attribution

StarTarot. (2026). StarTarot English RWS Historical Meanings and Golden Dawn Correspondences (Version 1.1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22917681

Limitations

  • This is a historical and cultural reference dataset, not evidence that tarot predicts events.
  • Meanings vary by school, deck, period, spread, surrounding cards, and reader.
  • Historical language can be archaic or person-specific and requires context.
  • The data must not replace medical, legal, financial, or mental-health advice.
  • Downstream model builders should document transformations, evaluation, and any added interpretations.

StarTarot.online

Explore the cards in context

Read the multilingual card guide for accessible explanations, or open the tarot spread catalog to see how card position and surrounding cards change an interpretation.

Browse all tarot cards Explore tarot spreads