How it works
What you do
Say what it is about
One optional choice: a relationship, work, a decision you are weighing. It changes which part of the card’s meaning you are shown, and nothing else.
Shuffle the deck
Press shuffle. The deck is put into an order and sealed before you see any of it, and it does not move again.
Pick your card
The cards are face down and you take whichever one you want. We never pick for you, and no card is made likelier to appear than another.
Read what it says
You get the written meaning for the card you drew, together with the historical source it came from. A free one-card reading involves no AI at all.
The details, if you want them
None of this is needed to have a reading. It is here so that every claim above can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The shuffle
When you start a reading, the server shuffles the deck using a cryptographically secure random source: the same class of randomness used for security keys, not the ordinary one built into a web page.
The shuffle uses Fisher-Yates with rejection sampling. That second detail matters more than it sounds: the obvious shortcut for picking a random card makes some cards slightly likelier than others. We do not take it.
Before you pick anything, we compute a fingerprint of the shuffled order and store it. You can see it on the selection screen, and after your reading we show you everything that went into it so you can recompute it yourself.
Your choice
You pick the card. Nothing about your question, your history or your behaviour influences which card is where, and no card is weighted to appear more often.
Whether a card lands upright or reversed is decided at the same moment as the shuffle and sealed by the same fingerprint, so it cannot be adjusted once you have chosen.
Where the meanings come from
Every card meaning is written by us and grounded in a public-domain historical source: A. E. Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, published in 1910. Each reading shows you the page it came from.
We keep the traditional meaning first, including the parts modern practice has quietly dropped. Waite’s reading of The Star leads with loss and offers hope only as a second interpretation. We say so rather than pick the nicer one.
Nothing is published until a person has read it. Automated checks run first, rejecting deterministic language, medical and legal claims, statements about what someone else secretly thinks, and anything designed to frighten you into buying again. But the checks are a floor, not the review.
Where AI fits
A free one-card reading involves no AI at all. What you read is written text, selected for the card you drew.
For longer readings, AI helps connect several cards together. When it does, it only ever sees the approved meanings for the cards you actually drew. It is not asked what it remembers about Tarot, and it can never choose, change or re-draw a card. Anything AI-assisted is labelled as such.