Free Tarot Card Reading Online

An honest note before you draw

Tarot is entertainment and cultural history. The cards have no predictive power, and there is no evidence that a shuffled deck can foretell events or reveal facts you do not already have. This page does not pretend otherwise. It offers a random image with a paragraph attached, which is a decent way to think out loud: an unexpected theme makes you argue with it, and the argument is the useful part.

Where the cards came from

Tarot began as a card game in northern Italy in the 15th century. The pack added a fifth suit of illustrated trumps to an ordinary four suit deck, and those trumps became the Major Arcana. Fortune telling with the pack is a later habit, documented in France from the late 18th century, and the occult systems around it belong to the 19th and early 20th centuries rather than to any ancient tradition.

A full deck holds 78 cards. Twenty two are the Major Arcana, numbered from The Fool at zero to The World at twenty one, and those are the ones this page uses. The other 56 are the Minor Arcana in four suits, usually Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles, each running Ace to Ten and closing with Page, Knight, Queen and King. The best known pack, published in London in 1909 and known as Rider Waite Smith, mattered because its Minor Arcana were fully illustrated with scenes rather than plain suit symbols, which made them far easier to interpret. The titles used here follow that pack.

How this draw is decided

The 22 Major Arcana live in a list inside the page. Pressing Draw copies the list, runs a Fisher Yates shuffle over the copy, and takes the first one, three or five entries for the spread you chose. Dealing from a single shuffled copy means no card can appear twice. Orientation is rolled separately per card, at roughly a 30 per cent chance of reversal, which is why whole readings often come up upright. A reversed card turns its number and symbol upside down and swaps in different text.

A little arithmetic makes the scale clear. A single card draw has 44 possible results, 22 cards by two orientations, so a named card upright is about 3.2 per cent and reversed about 1.4 per cent. A Past, Present and Future spread has 22 by 21 by 20, or 9,240, possible card orders before orientation is counted at all. Nothing is weighted toward pleasant cards and nothing carries over between draws.

The spreads and what each position asks

• Single card: one prompt, best when you know the topic and want something to push against.
• Past, Present and Future: a three step narrative. Treat Future as the current direction of travel, not a forecast.
• Five card cross: Present, Challenge, Root, Recent Past and Possible Outcome. Root is the useful one, since it asks what has sat underneath the situation longer than you have been thinking about it.

Using a spread as a writing exercise

Say you are weighing up whether to leave a job. Write the question down, then draw three cards: suppose Past gives The Tower reversed, Present gives Strength upright and Future gives The Star upright. The three paragraphs ask about a shake up you braced against, about patient courage rather than force, and about where hope is worth tending. None of that is about your job, yet five minutes of writing against those headings tends to produce something specific: what the disruption cost, what steadiness looks like now, what you would want if the fear were handled. The cards supplied headings and you supplied every fact.

Drawing is free and no reading is logged or saved between visits, so write down anything worth keeping. Card faces use CSS and Unicode symbols rather than images, so the artwork reproduces no published deck. Everything happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded to a server.

Elsewhere on the site

For a single card with a yes, no or maybe headline, drawn from all 78 cards, go to Yes or No Tarot. Rune Casting does something similar with the 24 Elder Futhark characters. On the astrology side there is Birth Chart, a printable Birth Chart Poster and Chinese Zodiac, plus number pages such as Numerology Calculator and Angel Numbers. If you would rather make a symbol than read one, try Sigil Maker.

Questions people ask about tarot

Is tarot real, and can these cards predict my future?

No. There is no evidence that tarot predicts anything, and this page is offered as entertainment and as an introduction to the deck. The draw is a random pick attached to reflective writing, so treat it as a prompt and make your own decisions.

Which cards are in this deck?

The 22 Major Arcana, from The Fool numbered zero through to The World numbered twenty one. The 56 Minor Arcana suit cards are not included in this draw.

How often does a card come out reversed?

About three times in ten. Orientation is rolled separately for each card in the spread, so an all upright reading is common and does not mean anything in itself.

Can the same card appear twice in one spread?

No. The deck is shuffled once and the cards are dealt off the top of that shuffled copy, exactly as a physical deck would behave.

What do the five positions in the cross mean?

Present, Challenge, Root, Recent Past and Possible Outcome. Root refers to the longer standing background of a situation, and Possible Outcome is best read as the direction of travel if nothing changes.