Tarot card meanings

Each card written out in full: what it means upright, what changes when it is reversed, how it reads in love, work, and money, and what is happening in the picture. All seventy-eight are here.

These are the Rider-Waite-Smith meanings, the version most decks descend from. Treat them as a starting point. A card means something slightly different depending on the question you brought and the cards around it, and no reference page can know either of those.

Major Arcana

Twenty-two cards for the large forces: the turns a life takes rather than the days it is made of. When several appear at once, the reading is usually about something structural.

Minor Arcana

Fifty-six cards in four suits, for the texture of a week rather than the shape of a chapter. Each suit owns a domain: Cups feel, Pentacles build, Swords think, Wands want.

Cups

Water. Emotions, relationships, intuition.

Pentacles

Earth. Material world, wealth, career.

Swords

Air. Intellect, conflict, truth.

Wands

Fire. Passion, creativity, action.

If you are new to this, start with the Major Arcana. They carry the widest meanings and they are the cards you will recognize first in a spread.

If the question you brought is a closed one, every card's yes or no leaning in both directions is collected on yes or no tarot, with the argument for treating a one-word answer as the start of the reading.

If you have no particular question and want one card to carry around for a day, tarot card of the day deals one here in the browser, upright or reversed, with the method for reading a single card that has no position around it to lean on.

If you want the whole deck on paper rather than on a screen, the tarot card meanings chart puts all 78 in one table, keywords and a line each way, and prints to two sheets.

If seventy-eight is too many to start with, the tarot birth card calculator reduces a date of birth to one or two of the Major Arcana, which is a reasonable way to pick a first card to learn properly rather than skimming all of them.

If the card came out upside down, all 78 reversed tarot card meanings sit beside their upright versions in one table, which is the quickest way to see that a reversal is the same card in a different condition.

Meanings are the lookup half of reading. The other half is what the cards do beside each other, which is the subject of how to read tarot. If you have only just opened a deck, tarot for beginners is the shorter way in.

If you are holding two cards and want what they say together, tarot card combinations collects every pairing on this site in one place, with what a pair is doing that neither card does alone.

There is also a page on what Reflecta is, if the waitlist is a step too early.