Tarot cards: free reading, all 78 meanings

What tarot cards are

A tarot deck is 78 cards divided into two groups. Twenty-two of them, the Major Arcana, run in a single numbered sequence from The Fool to The World and stand for the large forces in a life — the chapter you are in. The other fifty-six, the Minor Arcana, split into four suits of fourteen and describe the texture of ordinary weeks: what you are building, what you feel, what you are arguing about, what you are paying for.

The cards do not know anything. What they do is force a structured look at a situation from angles you would not have chosen yourself, including the one you were avoiding. That is the whole mechanism, and it is enough to be useful without being supernatural.

The reading at the top of this page draws three cards from the full deck, free and without an account. Below is what each of the 78 cards means, how the common spreads work, and how the shuffle on this page is actually built.

The 78 tarot cards

Knowing which group a card belongs to tells you how much weight to give it. A spread heavy with Major Arcana is usually pointing at something structural. A spread of mostly Minor Arcana is usually about the week, not the decade.

The 22 Major Arcana and what they mean

One line each, upright. Reversals are covered further down.

The four suits of the Minor Arcana

Each suit runs Ace through Ten, then four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen and King. The number tells you how far along the situation is; the court cards usually point at a person, or at the role you are playing.

Tarot spreads

A spread is just an agreement about what each position means, made before the cards are turned. That agreement is what stops a reading from becoming whatever you wanted it to say.

The reading on this page uses the three-card spread, because it is the smallest one that still shows a relationship between cards rather than a single verdict. The first card names the energy you are working with, the second names what stands in the way, and the third points at where your attention is best spent.

Order matters. The same card means something different in the first position than in the third — The Tower as your current energy is a description, The Tower as guidance is a warning. A reading is the relationship between the cards, not a list of them.

Reversed cards

A card that lands upside down is read reversed. It is not the opposite of the upright card and it is not bad news. Most readers treat it as the same force turned inward, blocked, or overdone — the Ace of Cups upright is an offer of feeling, reversed it is the same feeling with nowhere to go. If reversals do not help you, ignoring them is a legitimate choice with a long history behind it.

How the deck is shuffled on this page

The shuffle runs entirely in your browser. Your name, your date of birth and your chosen focus are combined with today’s date into a seed, and that seed drives the draw. Two consequences follow, and both are deliberate:

• Your reading is stable for the day. Reloading the page will not hand you a different set of cards. A reading you can reroll until you like it is not a reading.
• Tomorrow it changes. The date is part of the seed, so a new day gives a new draw.

Nothing you type is sent to a server, and nothing is stored. Roughly three cards in ten come up reversed, which is about what an ordinary physical shuffle produces.

Your birth card

The date of birth does one more thing besides seeding the shuffle. Add up every digit of the date and keep reducing until the total falls between 0 and 21, and you land on one of the 22 Major Arcana. That is your birth card, and it is the one card in this reading that never changes — not tomorrow, not in ten years. It is shown under the spread.

This is an old numerological practice rather than anything we invented, and readers disagree about how much weight it deserves. Treat it as a lens on the pattern you keep returning to, not as a verdict.

Questions worth asking

Tarot answers open questions far better than closed ones. “Will he call me” gives you a card you will argue with. “What am I not seeing about this” gives you something to work with. Before you draw, get the question into a form that could not be answered yes or no.

Readings on this site are for entertainment and self-reflection. They are not medical, legal, financial or psychological advice.