The Magazine

Topic Tarot

The 78 cards, the spreads, the reversals and how to read a pair as one sentence.

Free tools in this topic

Draw a tarot readingCard meaningsCard combinationsYes or no tarot

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In short

The 78 cards, the spreads, the reversals and how to read a pair as one sentence. Every tarot feature from the daily magazine, in eleven languages, with the free tools behind each one.

  • Write the reading down before anything resolves. Tarot journals are the only honest way to measure your own accuracy.
  • Do not re-draw for the same question. The second spread answers your discomfort, not your question.
  • Reversals are optional. Pick a rule — blocked, delayed, internalised or ignored entirely — and keep it for a year.
  • Court cards are situations as often as people. Ask what stance the card describes before you cast a friend in the role.
Tarot
  • The Tower

    The Tower

  • The Star

    The Star

78

Cards

22

Major arcana

3,003

Card pairs

9

Spreads

The four suits and what they govern

Suit tells you which department of life a minor card belongs to before you read a single keyword.

SuitElementDomainReads as
WandsFireDrive, work, creationMomentum and will
CupsWaterFeeling, bondsRelationship and mood
SwordsAirThought, conflictClarity and its cost
PentaclesEarthBody, money, craftMaterial consequence
Major arcana—Life chaptersConditions you do not control

Origins

Tarot began as a card game. The trionfi decks of fifteenth-century northern Italy added a fifth suit of trumps to an ordinary pack, and for three hundred years the cards were played rather than read. Divinatory use arrives in eighteenth-century Paris with Etteilla, and the symbolic system most readers now use was built in London around 1909 by Arthur Waite and Pamela Colman Smith.

That deck's innovation was to illustrate the minor arcana with scenes rather than pip arrangements, which is why a modern reader can tell a story from a spread without memorising a table. The features in this topic follow that lineage: image first, keyword second, and always a check against what the question actually was.

The Method

  1. Fix the question before you shuffle

    An open question produces a readable spread. A yes-or-no question produces an argument with the deck.

  2. Read the picture before the meaning

    Say aloud what is happening in the image. The keyword should confirm your description, not replace it.

  3. Read positions as grammar

    A card in the past position is a cause; the same card as the outcome is a consequence. Position changes the tense, not the card.

  4. Read pairs as one sentence

    Adjacent cards qualify each other. Two cards read together carry more information than either read alone.

Practice Notes

  • Write the reading down before anything resolves. Tarot journals are the only honest way to measure your own accuracy.
  • Do not re-draw for the same question. The second spread answers your discomfort, not your question.
  • Reversals are optional. Pick a rule — blocked, delayed, internalised or ignored entirely — and keep it for a year.
  • Court cards are situations as often as people. Ask what stance the card describes before you cast a friend in the role.
  • A spread that reads as flat usually means the question was too large. Cut it into a smaller one and draw again tomorrow.

Myth & Truth

Commonly said

The Death card predicts a death.

In practice

It marks an ending that has already begun and asks you to stop propping it up. Traditional readers treat it as one of the most constructive cards in the deck.

Commonly said

A deck must be gifted to you.

In practice

A twentieth-century folk rule with no historical basis. Buy the deck whose images you can actually read.

Questions Readers Ask

How many cards should a beginner draw?

One a day for a month, then three. A ten-card Celtic Cross drawn in your first week produces more confusion than insight.

Do the card meanings on this site follow a specific deck?

The Rider–Waite–Smith tradition, because its imagery is public domain and almost every modern deck is a variation on it.

What are card combinations?

Fixed readings for each pair of cards — every one of the 3,003 possible pairs has its own page, because most of what a spread means lives in how neighbours modify each other.

Is a digital draw as valid as a physical shuffle?

For practice, yes. The randomiser is genuinely random; what matters for the reading is the attention you bring to the question.

Continue the Thread

Draw a reading

Nine spreads, full interpretations.

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Card meanings

All 78 cards, upright and reversed.

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Card pairs

How any two cards read together.

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