Correspondences
Tarot glossary · also attributions
A correspondence is a pairing of a card with something outside the deck: Wands with fire, The Magician with Mercury, a trump with a Hebrew letter. The idea goes back to the occultists of 1781 and to Eliphas Lévi in the 1850s, but most correspondences used in English today were fixed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 1880s and spread through the Rider–Waite–Smith and Thoth decks. French occultists use a different set. None of them was part of the original Italian card game. Readers use them as extra layers of meaning, and many read well without them.
