Book T — The Golden Dawn's 78 Cards

Book T is the Golden Dawn's own book of the tarot, set down mainly by S. L. MacGregor Mathers around 1888 and kept for initiates. Crowley printed it in The Equinox I(8), London, 1912. It is public domain.

This deck is Book T and only Book T: its order, its titles, its words. It is not the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Waite and Smith drew their pictures in 1909, from inside the same Order, and those pictures sit in a deck of their own, Golden Dawn Tarot — Book T with Rider-Waite-Smith Imagery.

Pictures (Oct 21 2026). Every card is painted, with its Golden Dawn symbols (element, sign or planet, Hebrew letter) drawn on the card and its name set as text under it. Each painting was prompted from Book T's own words for that card; the earlier line art, iconography and linocut sets stay under the sidebar's Selections → Pictures. Book T describes no picture for the twenty-two Keys, so their prompts start from each Key's title. Each prompt, beside the Book T passage it comes from, is in the prompts file.

Decks painted from Book T. Book T describes the cards in words; the printed Golden Dawn decks are later painters' readings of it, listed on one page. The first complete one, Robert Wang's Golden Dawn Tarot (1977–78), was painted under Israel Regardie's direction. Wang later called his own figures "badly drawn, strange little wooden figures" and turned to a Jungian deck instead (his autobiography, Expelled from Nursery School, 2011, p. 20, archived PDF).

This site's note. Book T's first four symbols: the roots of the four elements. Read the chapter on the 1912 page.

This site's note. Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess of each suit: an element within an element. Read the chapter on the 1912 page.

This site's note. The Twos to the Tens, one for each decan of the zodiac, starting from Leo. Read the chapter on the 1912 page.

This site's note. The trumps, each a Hebrew letter and a path on the Tree of Life. Read the chapter on the 1912 page.