Tarot, plainly

Most tarot writing is either breathless or defensive. This is neither. Below is what the cards actually say, what a reading can honestly do, and how to ask something worth drawing on.

If you would rather skip the reading and simply draw, the front page is one question box and nothing else.

Start here

• Tarot card meanings — all 78 cards, upright and reversed, with what each one answers to a yes or no question.
• Yes or no tarot — what a one-card yes actually means, and where it is worth nothing.
• Free tarot reading — what Britannia Tarot gives away, and what it does with what you ask.
• Daily tarot — the one card a day habit, and why it works better than it sounds.
• Love tarot reading — the questions people actually bring, and the ones the cards handle badly.

What a reading is, and is not

A tarot reading is a structured way of looking at a situation you are already turning over. The card gives you an image and a set of associations you did not choose, and the useful part is what you notice when you hold it against your own question.

It is not a forecast. Nothing here will tell you a date, a diagnosis, or what another person is thinking. A reading that claims to is selling certainty, which is the one thing nobody has.

The deck

Every card on this site is from the 1909 London deck — drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, published in December 1909 by William Rider & Son of London, and in the public domain since 2022. It is the deck almost everyone pictures when they picture tarot, and its scenes are what make a card readable at a glance rather than a symbol to be looked up.

How to ask

Ask about your own situation, in your own words, in one sentence. "Should I take the job" reads better than "career". A question about somebody else's private mind — what they feel, what they will do — reads worst of all, because the only person whose position the card can illuminate is yours.