How to read tarot cards
What tarot is, and what it isn’t
Tarot is a deck of 78 illustrated cards. Every card carries a theme: setting out, choosing, losing, making peace, running out of steam, celebrating. Drawing a card for a question gives you a picture to hold up against your situation.
Tarot is a tool for reflection, not a fixed prediction. The cards don’t name dates, diagnose illness, promise money or make decisions for you. An alarming card is a prompt to look at the theme it raises and think about what you can do with it.
A card’s meaning never stands alone. It comes from your question, the card’s position in the spread and the cards around it. The Five of Cups in the Past position might point to a loss at the root of the situation; in the Future position, to a disappointment the current course could lead to.
Upright and reversed cards
A card can land the right way up, called upright, or upside down, called reversed. An upright card shows its theme in the open, ready to work with.
A reversed card isn’t simply the opposite of the upright one. It can point to a block: the card’s energy is there but runs into something. It can point to an excess: so much of a quality that it gets in the way. Or it can show the theme turned inward, playing out in thoughts and feelings rather than in the world.
Take the Eight of Pentacles reversed. Its meanings include abandoning a skill, which is a block, and perfectionism, which is too much polishing. Strength reversed can speak of suppressed anger: the strength is still there, turned inward. Your question and the neighbouring cards will tell you which reading fits. If a spread is full of reversed cards, ask yourself what’s stuck, or what you’re not letting yourself show.
The major and minor arcana
The deck has 22 major arcana, from the Fool, numbered 0, to the World, numbered XXI. They deal with major life themes and turning points, and they’re often read as a single road: the Fool sets out and meets the other cards one by one. Each major arcanum’s page on this site shows where it stands on that road.
The 56 minor arcana fall into four suits of 14 cards: an ace, the numbered cards from two to ten, and four court cards, the page, knight, queen and king. The minors are about everyday life: how the big themes play out in an ordinary week.
The mix tells you about scale. Many major arcana point to a turning point. If almost every card is a minor, the situation is made of day-to-day matters, and much of it is in your hands.
The four suits
The suit tells you which area of life a card’s theme is playing out in.
Wands stand for energy, initiative and creativity, for what fires you up and drives you forward. On the 1909 cards they’re living branches in fresh leaf.
Cups stand for emotions, relationships and intuition: what you feel, what you long for and what you’re missing.
Swords stand for thought, decisions and conflict. Many of the cards show quarrels, wounds and sleepless nights, but a sword also cuts through confusion, so the suit is also about clarity and decisions that are overdue.
Pentacles stand for resources, work, the body and practical results. On the cards they’re gold coins marked with a five-pointed star. The suit is about what you can touch: work, skills, home, how you feel in your body, the fruit of steady effort.
Numbers and court cards
A minor card’s number shows what stage its suit has reached. The ace is a new possibility. Two is choice, balance or exchange. Three, growth and first results. Four, structure, stability or a pause. Five, friction and the need for change. Six, regaining balance and moving on. Seven, testing your intentions and taking stock of where you’re headed. Eight, movement, effort and building a skill. Nine, nearing the finish and a personal summing-up. Ten, the end of a cycle and the step into the next.
Suit and number together give you the core of a meaning. Five is friction, Swords are thought and decisions, and the Five of Swords is a conflict where winning may cost more than it gives.
The four court cards are four ways of relating to the suit’s theme. The page is learning, news and curiosity. The knight is pursuit, action and a way of moving forward. The queen is mature inner mastery of the suit’s quality; the king is its mature outward use. A court card can stand for someone in your life, but more often it shows a role you’re playing yourself.
How to put a reading together
Before you look at the cards, name your question and the role of each position. A position is a frame: the same card answers different questions in the Past position and in Hopes and fears.
Then read each card in its position. Start with the picture: what’s happening, where the figures are looking, what you notice first. Then bring in the meaning, upright or reversed, and take from it what bears on your question.
Once you’ve read the cards one by one, look for what they share: a suit that keeps turning up, figures that echo each other, several major arcana together. Look for tensions too, where one card pulls forward and another holds back. That’s usually where your choice lies.
End with a possible action or a better question. And don’t treat symbols as inevitable events. The Tower in a spread invites you to ask what can no longer stand.
How to phrase your question
Open questions about you and what’s within your reach work best: “What do I need to know about my relationship?”, “What lesson is this situation holding for me?”
Keep to one subject. Ask about work and love at once, and the positions get tangled. Yes-or-no questions are worth turning into open ones: instead of “Will it work out?”, ask “What would help it work out?”
Some questions tarot can’t answer: diagnoses, financial or legal forecasts, exact dates. Those belong with a doctor, a lawyer or a financial adviser. The same goes for what someone else is thinking: a spread speaks about your situation and your part in it.
In the Arkana bot, the reading takes your question into account: a language model writes it from the meanings of the cards you drew. The more clearly you describe the situation, the closer the answer will come to it.