About tarot

Tarot appeared in northern Italy in the first half of the 15th century — and it appeared as a game. A row of trumps, the trionfi, was added to the ordinary playing suits, producing a deck for a courtly card game that survives today as Italian tarocchi. The earliest surviving decks, the Visconti-Sforza, were painted by hand for the court of Milan; nobody looked for fortune in them.

Divinatory reading arrived three centuries later. In the 1780s the Parisian Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who signed his name backwards as Etteilla, was the first to publish a deck made specifically for divination, and tied the cards to an Egyptian symbolism they had never carried. By then the European standard had become the Tarot de Marseille: woodblock sheets from the workshops of Lyon and Marseille, blunt geometry, and minor arcana that were simply rows of swords, cups, coins and batons, with no scene at all.

At the end of the 19th century the British Order of the Golden Dawn pulled the scattered traditions into a single system: every card was assigned an element, a planet or a zodiac sign and a place on the kabbalistic Tree of Life. Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith both came out of that order. In 1909 the London publisher William Rider & Son issued their deck, and for the first time all 78 cards — the minor arcana included — carried a living scene with people and action in it. That is the language almost all English-language tarot speaks today. The 1909 illustrations have passed into the public domain; they are the ones you see on Arcanoir.

The 78 cards fall into two unequal halves. The twenty-two Major Arcana — from the Fool at zero to the World at XXI — are the large themes of a life: choice, loss, power, falling in love, rupture, completion. They speak about what happens to a person, not about what they do on a Tuesday. When a spread comes up thick with majors, it is describing a process larger than this week's decisions.

The fifty-six Minor Arcana are laid out in four suits of fourteen: ace through ten, plus four court cards — Page, Knight, Queen, King. The minors speak about the material of daily life: conversations, money, work, the body, the household. Court cards usually point either to a person or to a way of acting: the Page is the apprentice, the trial, the piece of news; the Knight is momentum and push, sometimes too much of it; the Queen holds the subject from inside, through her own state; the King holds it from outside, through decisions and responsibility.

Each suit is tied to an element and to its own area of life.

A good question does not start with “will it”. It starts with “how” or “what”. “Will he come back” is a question the cards will answer with anything at all, and you will read into them whatever you already hoped. “What is keeping us at this distance, and what can I do about it” is a question with a real answer — one you can act on by Monday morning.

One spread, one question. If three subjects are circling at once, take the one that keeps you awake and lay the others out separately. Give it a horizon: “over the next three months” is sharper than “some day”. Ask about your own moves and your own share of the situation — the part you can actually influence.

Write the question down before you see the cards; wording has a habit of quietly rearranging itself to fit whatever came up. And do not ask the same question in circles until a pleasant answer arrives. If you want to re-ask, you already have your answer and simply dislike it. Come back to the subject when the circumstances change, not when the mood does.

A reversed card is not a curse and it does not cancel the meaning. Most often it says one of four things: the card's energy is blocked, delayed, turned inward, or pushed into excess. Reversed Strength is not weakness — it is force spent on self-suppression; a reversed Ten of Swords often says the worst is already behind you.

Schools disagree. Some readers never reverse at all and read weakening or distortion from the neighbours instead: a card set between two heavy ones already sounds different. Others use reversals as a separate language of nuance. Both traditions work. What matters is choosing one and holding to it through the whole spread, rather than deciding card by card when a reversal happens to suit you.

In Arcanoir every spread carries its own reversal setting: on where reversals add something, off where the spread is read through positions and neighbours. You can see it on each spread's page, in the “Reversals” readout.

The cards are an instrument for thinking, not a licence to speak on another person's behalf. Laying out somebody's private life without their knowledge is a bad idea; ask instead about your own share of the relationship: what I feel, what I am doing, what I am waiting for, where my limit is.

Tarot does not diagnose. It does not speak about illnesses, life expectancy, pregnancies, test results, court verdicts or tax consequences. If that is the question, you need a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant, and no card replaces them. A health spread is honestly read as a spread about your state and your way of living, never as a medical finding.

Do not frighten anyone, yourself included. Death in a spread is almost never about dying; the Tower is not obliged to bring the house down. A heavy card describes a load, not a sentence, and its job is to prepare you, not to freeze you. Above all: a spread describes a tendency, and the decision stays with the person. If a reading leaves you feeling obliged to obey something, it was a bad reading.

The classical half is free and complete: the meanings of all 78 cards upright and reversed, the symbolism of the image, the spheres of life, the advice, the yes/no answer and the numerological note — all of it sits in this library and asks for neither an account nor a credit.

The paid reading does something else. The model receives your question, the spread you chose with the names and meanings of its positions, the exact cards that came up and which way round they lie, the classical meanings from this same library, and — if you gave one — your birth date. Then it writes the connection between them: not “the Fool means a beginning”, but what the Fool means in the position “what stands in the way” in your question about changing jobs. It is a text about your case, and it exists in no book.

What it is not. The model has no access to the future, to your messages, to other people, or to anything beyond what you typed yourself. It is not a doctor, a lawyer or a therapist, and it replaces none of them. It can be wrong — as any reader can be wrong, and as any text written from incomplete information can be wrong. The card of the day is computed deterministically from the calendar date and your account: it is a ritual of constancy, not a message from outside. No Arcanoir result is a verdict, and none of them takes the decision off your hands.