Tarot Draw

This deals a spread and then, for every card, shows you what the three major deck traditions call it, how they number it, and what each attributes to it.

It does not tell you what the cards mean for you, and it does not answer a question. What it does instead is more useful, and no other tarot site seems to do it: it shows you that the three traditions genuinely disagree, and exactly where.

The four disagreements worth knowing

Two trumps have different numbers. In the Marseille, VIII is Justice and XI is Strength. The Golden Dawn swapped them so the sequence would line up with the zodiac — Strength at VIII with Leo, Justice at XI with Libra — and both the Rider-Waite and the Thoth follow the swap. If you draw either of those cards, the tool says so. A reader working from a Marseille and a reader working from a Rider-Waite, both looking at card VIII, are looking at different cards.

Two trumps have different astrological attributions. Crowley swapped the attributions of the Emperor and the Star on the authority of a line in his Book of the Law — "Tzaddi is not the Star". Every other Golden Dawn deck gives the Emperor Heh and Aries; the Thoth gives it Tzaddi and Aquarius. This is a doctrinal disagreement inside a single lineage, and it is still argued about.

The court cards do not line up at all. The Thoth's Knight is the Rider-Waite's King. The Thoth's Prince is the Rider-Waite's Knight. Someone saying "I drew the Knight of Cups" has told you nothing until you know which deck they were using.

And the pip cards are not the same kind of object. This is the largest difference and the least discussed. A Marseille five of cups is five cups in an arrangement — a pattern, with no scene, no figures and no story. A Rider-Waite five of cups is a cloaked figure with their back to two standing cups and three spilled ones. Pamela Colman Smith illustrated all fifty-six minor cards in 1909 and it changed the practice permanently: a Marseille reader works from number and suit, and a Rider-Waite reader works from a picture. Those are two different methods, not two illustrations of one meaning.

What is generated rather than listed

The twenty-two trumps are written out, because their differences are irregular and have to be.

The fifty-six minor cards are built from the Golden Dawn's own rules rather than copied from a table — the suit follows the element, the thirty-six cards from two to ten take the thirty-six decans in order, cardinal signs taking the two-three-four of their suit, fixed the five-six-seven and mutable the eight-nine-ten, and the decan rulers running in Chaldean order from Mars on the first decan of Aries. That means the rule is doing the work and can be checked, which is the whole idea.

The four aces have no decan, for the plain reason that there are thirty-six decans and thirty-six cards from two to ten.

Reversals

There is a switch for them, because whether an upside-down card means something different is a live disagreement rather than a rule. Reading reversals is standard in most English-language practice and descends from Etteilla in the 1780s. Many Marseille readers do not use them at all, and point out that a pip card with no scene has no orientation to be reversed in the first place.

What this does not do

It does not answer anything. It shuffles honestly — Fisher-Yates over the browser's cryptographic random source, with rejection sampling so the modulo does not skew the deal — deals the spread, and then describes the cards. Nothing is recorded and there is no reading to come back to.

The history of the deck, the eighteenth-century invention of its Egyptian origin story, and what the evidence actually supports are all in the Library.