Every card is turned by your hand

A deck painted for the Grove

Our deck is original: all 78 cards and the card back were painted for Moonlit Grove. It follows the tradition of the 1909 deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, so the scenes and symbols you may already know are all there, in a palette of night plum, antique silver and candle gold. Tap any card in a reading to see it up close.

A real shuffle, and your own choices

When you begin a reading, our server shuffles a full 78-card deck using cryptographic randomness, the same kind of randomness used to secure passwords. Then it hands the ritual to you. You cut the deck into three piles and choose which goes on top, and you pick your cards one by one from the fan. Your cut and your picks decide which cards you get, just as they would with a deck on a table.

Reversed cards are off unless you turn them on. When they are on, about one card in three lands upside down, as it would in a hand-shuffled deck.

How your reading is written

Every word you read comes from a library of card texts written by hand: for each card, upright and reversed, in each spread position and for each focus (love, work, money, self, or simply “guide me”). Our reading engine then weaves those texts together with what makes this moment yours:

• Your own history. Cards that keep returning to you are noticed and named, so a reading can tell you when the Hermit is visiting for the third time lately.
• The real moon. The moon phase is calculated astronomically for the moment you draw, not looked up from a calendar. New Moon and Full Moon spreads are free for everyone while that moon is in the sky.
• Your birth cards and sun sign. If you add your birthday, we work out your birth cards with Mary K. Greer’s method and your sun sign, and mention them when one of those cards appears.
• Elemental dignities. Neighbouring cards talk to each other. Fire and air feed each other, as do water and earth. Two cards of one element turn up the volume, and opposites like fire and water pull against each other. The reading tells you where it happens in your spread.
• The weight of the Major Arcana. A spread full of Majors reads differently from one with none, and your reading says so.
• Repeated numbers and court cards. Three fives, or a room full of Queens, are patterns a good reader points out. So do we.
• The quintessence. The numbers of all your cards are added together and reduced to find one hidden Major Arcana card that sums up the whole spread.

The result is written instantly and is personal to you, but there is no mystery about the method. It is a careful set of rules, written by people who love tarot, applied to the cards you chose.

What tarot is, and what it isn’t

Tarot is a mirror, not a forecast. We offer it for reflection and entertainment: a set of old, beautiful images that help you think about your life from a new angle. The cards can’t see the future, and we won’t pretend they can. You are the author of your choices, and the meaning you find in a card is yours.

A reading is never a substitute for a doctor, a lawyer, a financial adviser or a therapist. If you ask about health, the law or gambling, we’ll gently suggest a question the cards can actually help with. And if you’re going through something heavy, our support page lists people who can help right now.

Questions