Tarot

How this works

Tarot began as tarocchi, a card game played in 15th-century Italy, with an extra suit of picture cards as trumps. It was first read for meaning in 18th-century France: Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed an Egyptian origin for it in 1781, with no evidence, and Etteilla soon after made a deck for reading.

These are the 22 trumps, the major arcana, as Pamela Colman Smith drew them in 1909 to the direction of Arthur Edward Waite. Smith went uncredited for decades. Her drawings are traced here to clean lines from scans of the 1909 printing, and the meanings under each card follow Waite’s own list in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), in plain words.

The deck is shuffled with your browser’s cryptographic random numbers, by the Fisher–Yates method, so every order of the 22 is as likely as any other. Cards are always upright. The first single card you draw on a day is marked as today’s card in your readings, and there’s always a fresh deck to draw from. A question or a place, under Options, is kept with the reading in this browser only.

What it isn’t. It can’t see what’s coming. People use it to look at a question from somewhere new.