Cut the deck. Read what came up.
That number is the deal — open it again and the same cards fall the same way. How the shuffle works is at the bottom of the page.
What this draw is made of
Before any single card gets read, a reader looks at the shape of the whole deal: how much of it is Major Arcana, which suit turned up most, which one did not turn up at all. All of that can simply be counted.
Bar length is the count over the number of cards dealt. Nothing is weighted and nothing is rounded up — four Cups in a ten-card deal is four.
Card by card
Each position is printed with what that position is asking, because the same card means different things depending on where it lands. The other orientation is given underneath every card, quietly, so you can see what it just missed.
All 78 cards
The whole deck, upright and reversed, grouped the way it is built. Open a suit and it stays open — this is here so that looking up the card you just drew does not mean leaving the page.
How this deals
- The deck is Rider–Waite–Smith. Published in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite with Pamela Colman Smith's drawings, and long out of copyright. It is the deck almost every modern one is descended from, which is why a meaning looked up anywhere else will broadly agree with what is written here.
- The whole deck is shuffled, then cards are taken off the top. Not drawn one at a time at random — drawn that way the same card could come up twice, and a deck with two Towers in it is not a deck.
- Upright or reversed is a separate flip per card, at even odds. Some readers never use reversals, some shuffle a fixed proportion in. Half and half, decided independently for each card, is the plain version.
- The randomness is your browser's, not a server's. It comes from
crypto.getRandomValues, the same source used for cryptographic keys. Nothing about the deal is sent anywhere. - The cut number reproduces the deal exactly. That one 32-bit number seeds everything that follows, so the same number always produces the same cards in the same order and the same orientations. Keep the link and the reading keeps existing.
- The card meanings here are written, not generated per reading. Every card has one upright paragraph and one reversed paragraph, the same ones every time, and both are printed whichever way the card falls. A reading that changes its own dictionary to suit the draw is not telling you anything.
- What this is. Tarot is a way of putting a question in front of yourself with something to push against. The cards do not know anything about you, and this page does not either — it deals honestly and writes down what it dealt. What the cards are for is the part you bring.