Tarot: whose cards are we reading?
Kyra Ourania needs a name and what’s on your mind. The deck will tell her the rest.
How an online tarot reading works
A tarot deck has 78 cards. The 22 best known are the Major Arcana: the Fool, the Magician, the Lovers, Death, the Sun and the rest. In the simplest spread you draw three cards. The first speaks about the past, the second about the present and the third about the future. If a card comes out upside down, its meaning changes.
Here it works the same way, with a virtual deck. You shuffle, cut, pick three cards and Kyra Ourania turns them over one by one. The pictures come from the classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909. The cards come out at random every time, so two readings rarely say the same thing.
- Do I get different cards every time?
- Yes. The cards, their positions and whether they come out upright or reversed change with every reading. With the same name, the deck tells you the same thing for three hours.
- Does it tell my future?
- About as much as an aunt with a deck of cards in the living room. Kyra Ourania reads the cards by their usual meanings, for fun. It isn’t a prediction.
- Can I read someone else’s cards?
- Yes. Enter their name and pick what’s on their mind.
- Do you keep my name?
- No. Your name and topic stay on your device. The server only counts how many readings there have been.
- Can I do a love tarot reading?
- Yes. Pick “Love” or write your question in your own words, e.g. “will they text me?”. Kyra Ourania reads the same three cards with her mind on matters of the heart.
- Which deck do you use?
- The classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909. It’s the best-known tarot deck and its artwork is now in the public domain.