A card for today

What this is, and what it is not

Nothing here is random on each refresh. It is the same card every time you open this page today and a different one tomorrow, because a card that changed when you reloaded would be a slot machine.

It does not predict anything. There is no reading here that says what will happen or who will get in touch, because a deck cannot know that and neither can we. What a card is good for is being handed a frame you did not choose, and noticing what you think about it.

How the deck was made

The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana are drawn one at a time: a ring, two pillars, a broken tower, engraved rather than illustrated. The fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana are built the way pip cards have always been built — one emblem per suit, laid out in the traditional arrangement, with a mark for the rank on the courts.

Their meanings are composed the same way, from four suits and fourteen ranks rather than fifty-six separate paragraphs. That is not a corner being cut: the Minor Arcana is already structured as an element crossed with a number, and saying so is more honest than pretending each of the fifty-six was written on its own.

How today’s card is chosen

Today’s date on your device and, if you have saved them, your birth details are turned into a number, and that number picks one of the seventy-eight cards and whether it lies upright or reversed. The card changes at midnight by your device’s clock. Without saved birth details, everybody who opens the page on the same date sees the same card; with them, the card is your own. The working happens in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.

How to read it

Turn the card, read the short line and the paragraph under it, then ask where in your day that idea already shows up. A card of the Major Arcana is read as a broad situation. A card of the Minor Arcana is its rank applied to its suit: Cups are feeling and attachment, Swords are thinking and what gets said, Pentacles are work, money and the ordinary week, and Wands are drive and what you actually want. The ranks run from the Ace, a start, to the Ten, the full weight of it, followed by the Page, Knight, Queen and King.

So the Eight of Swords reads as movement in thinking and what gets said: effort going in, or a departure from where you were. Drawn reversed, it is the same idea met with more resistance, not its opposite.

The Major and Minor Arcana

A tarot deck has seventy-eight cards. Twenty-two are the Major Arcana, numbered from 0, The Fool, to XXI, The World. The other fifty-six are the Minor Arcana: four suits of fourteen cards each, ten numbered cards and four court cards. In the card game the twenty-two were simply the trumps. The names Major and Minor Arcana came from French occultists of the nineteenth century, who took arcana, Latin for secrets, as their word for the cards, and the names have stayed with the deck ever since.

Where the cards come from

The oldest tarot cards that survive were painted for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century. The game was called trionfi, later tarocchi, and the twenty-two picture cards were its trumps. Games of that family are still played, French tarot and Austrian Tarock among them. The woodcut pattern known as the Tarot de Marseille then fixed the look of the cards for centuries, with plain pips on the numbered cards, which is the tradition this deck follows. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards held the wisdom of ancient Egypt, a claim with no evidence behind it, and within ten years the Paris card reader known as Etteilla had issued a deck made for reading. The deck most modern meanings follow was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for A. E. Waite and published in London in 1909. It put a scene on every numbered card.

Names and numbers that differ between decks

Pentacles are also called Coins or Disks, and Wands are also Batons, Staves or Rods; they are the same suits. Strength and Justice change places: this deck numbers Strength VIII and Justice XI, as Waite did, while the Marseille order has Justice at VIII and Strength at XI. Many readers also give each suit an element, Cups water, Swords air, Wands fire and Pentacles earth, a scheme fixed in this form by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century. If a book or another site names a card differently, it is most likely one of these three differences and not a different card.

More from the deck

When one card is not enough room, three cards look at where you are, what is in the way and what would help, and the Celtic cross lays out ten. Your tarot birth cards come from adding up your birth date instead of drawing. For something measured from the sky rather than drawn, the index for today counts the angles the planets are making to your birth chart.