Tarot and the Qabalah.

The Tree of Life & the four worlds

In Hermetic Qabalah, the four suits are mapped to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton (the Hebrew name of God, YHVH), to four "worlds" of creation, and to the four court-card ranks. This exact mapping was laid out by Papus in The Tarot of the Bohemians (1889) and adopted by the Golden Dawn shortly after:

Note: the Golden Dawn's own internal system actually renames the court ranks (King→Knight, Knight→Prince, Page→Princess) to fit its own logic — the table above uses the King/Queen/Knight/Page naming this site (and most modern Rider-Waite-Smith decks) actually uses, mapped onto the same underlying four-worlds structure.

The Sephiroth & the numbered Minor Arcana

The ten Sephiroth (spheres) of the Tree of Life, from Kether at the top to Malkuth at the bottom, map onto the Ace through 10 of each suit. As you move down the tree, the energy is described as getting progressively denser and more physically manifest:

The Major Arcana: Hebrew letters & astrology

The Golden Dawn assigned each of the 22 Major Arcana one of the 22 Hebrew letters, one of the 22 connecting "Paths" on the Tree of Life, and one astrological attribution (a planet, zodiac sign, or one of the four classical elements). This is the single most widely reproduced esoteric tarot correspondence table, and — unusually for this kind of system — different esoteric lineages mostly agree on it:

Worth knowing: Golden Dawn numbering (used here, and by most Rider-Waite-Smith decks) swaps the traditional Marseille order of Strength and Justice — older French decks number them VIII and XI the other way around, which is why you'll occasionally see the astrology swapped between Leo and Libra depending which deck a source is describing.

The 36 decans, and the court cards' sub-elements

The Golden Dawn extended this same logic to the 36 numbered Minor Arcana pips (the 2s through 10s), assigning each one to a 10-degree "decan" of the zodiac and a ruling planet, cycling through the ancient Chaldean order of planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon). The 2, 3, and 4 of Wands, for instance, fall across the three decans of Aries, ruled respectively by Mars, the Sun, and Venus. The 16 court cards get a parallel treatment: each rank (King, Queen, Knight, Page) carries its own sub-element, combined with its suit's primary element, and rules a specific overlapping arc of the zodiac. Both systems are internally consistent but genuinely intricate — full decan-by-decan and court-by-court tables run to several pages in primary Golden Dawn sources like Israel Regardie's The Golden Dawn, so they're left out here rather than reproduced in part.