Tarot is a deck of 78 illustrated cards. It began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, and only from the late eighteenth century did writers in France start to read it as a book of symbols. The deck most people picture today is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to the design of Arthur Edward Waite and published in 1909. Every card guide on this site describes that deck.
We treat tarot as a tool for reflection, not a proven way to predict events. A card is a picture with a long history of meanings attached to it, and drawing one can be a good way to look at a question from an angle you had not tried. That is how the guides below read the cards: what each picture shows, what it is traditionally taken to mean, and a question to take away.
How the deck is built
- The Major Arcana: 22 cards, from The Fool (0) to The World (XXI), often read as the big themes and turning points of a life.
- The Minor Arcana: 56 cards in four suits of fourteen: Ace to Ten, then Page, Knight, Queen and King. The suits carry the four classical elements: Cups (Water: feelings and relationships), Wands (Fire: energy and ambition), Swords (Air: thought and conflict) and Pentacles (Earth: work, money and the body).
Where a guide gives the astrology of a court card, it follows the Golden Dawn scheme, in which the Rider-Waite-Smith Knight is the Golden Dawn King and the Rider-Waite-Smith King is the Golden Dawn Prince. Other authors assign the court cards differently, so treat those links as one tradition among several.
Upright and reversed
A card can land upright or upside down. Readers who use reversals usually read a reversed card as the same energy blocked, delayed or turned inward, rather than its opposite. Many readers ignore reversals altogether; both approaches are common.
The cards that frighten people
Death, The Tower, The Devil and the Ten of Swords look alarming, and they are the cards people most often look up in a hurry. None of them is read as a literal prediction by serious readers. Death, for example, is traditionally a card of endings that make room for something new. Each guide explains the card calmly.
Draw a card
Try the free tarot card of the day: draw one card, read what it means, and use its question for the day.