A real shuffle, then a reading

The deck is shuffled with a Fisher–Yates pass over all 78 cards, and every swap index is driven by crypto.getRandomValues through a rejection sampler. The rejection sampling step is the part that matters: the obvious one-liner, word % 78, carries modulo bias because 78 does not divide 2³² — the low-numbered cards would come up measurably more often forever, and nobody would notice. Orientation is one unbiased bit per drawn card, and it is drawn only when reversals are switched on, which is decided before the shuffle rather than after it. If a browser does not expose a cryptographic source, this page says so and refuses to deal rather than quietly falling back to something weaker.

The model never picks a card. The draw happens here, before you sign in and before anything is charged, and the cards are handed to the reading as fixed input. This is not a technicality. A reader that chooses its own cards chooses convenient ones — the Tower the moment you mention stress, the Lovers the moment you mention someone — and a spread that agrees with your question is worth nothing.

Because the draw is held in this browser, the reply is reconciled against it by ten checks. Five are faults that stop the reading being trusted: a card named that was not dealt, a card named differently from the one drawn, an orientation read the wrong way round, a card placed at the wrong position, and a dealt card the reading never reaches. Five more are flags: a card given the wrong suit, a card read twice, and the three pieces of arithmetic — reversed count, Major Arcana count and plurality suit — that the reading could simply have restated correctly. Any disagreement is shown to you as a finding rather than passing quietly.

The corpus is the full 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 minor across four suits, 16 of them court cards. Each carries upright keywords, reversed keywords, its suit, its element, its rank and a one-line description of the traditional image. All of it, and what a card signifies by tradition, renders immediately and free — the paid step is the synthesis alone.

Three spreads are offered. One card is the fastest useful thing a deck does. Three cards can be read in one of three frames — an arc through time, a stance, or a tension between two pulls. The Celtic cross deals ten. Every position asks its own question, and a card landed in a position means something different from the same card elsewhere; the reading has to say how the cards relate to one another and where the sharpest tension in the spread sits.

Pattern facts are computed in the browser from the draw alone, as free arithmetic: the Major Arcana count and share, the reversed and upright counts, court and ace counts, the suit and element distribution, the plurality suit and dominant element, any absent suits, and repeated ranks. Everything up to the reading — draw, card meanings, position meanings and this arithmetic — is on screen before sign-in.

Nothing to ask? Try the three-card reading about a conversation somebody keeps not having, or the Celtic cross about work that stopped feeling like it was going anywhere. Both replay a saved reading for free.

Tarot is a good thinking tool and a poor oracle. Seventy-eight images and a fixed set of positions make you look at your own situation from an angle you would never have chosen, and being asked “what is passing?” about something you have been describing as permanent is genuinely useful. So the reading talks about the present, about your stance, and about what a position invites you to consider. It does not tell you what will happen, when, or how it turns out — not because that would be improper, but because it would be made up.

Two kinds of question are declined outright, in this browser, before anything is charged. The first is anything a professional is licensed, regulated, qualified or insured to answer: medical, legal, financial, veterinary or otherwise — the test is who owes you the answer, not which subject it falls under, so a vet or a structural surveyor counts exactly as much as a doctor, and the check matches the shape of an advisory relationship rather than a list of job titles. The second is anything about another person's private life, feelings or fate, which is not yours or ours to read — including when that person is described rather than named. A guard runs on every keystroke and the run button will not enable until the question clears it.

Reading history is saved to your SkillSafe account and mirrored in this browser, with semantic search over past questions and the cards that came up. The draw and the reading export as Markdown, JSON or a cards CSV, and the draw alone exports before you have spent anything.

The card text is written for this app: a plain account of what each card has long been taken to mean, in our own words, rather than any particular published deck's companion book.