How we write our guides

Our card descriptions start from what is actually drawn on the card. When we describe the Three of Swords as a heart pierced by three blades beneath rain clouds, that is not interpretation — it is a description of the picture, and you can check it yourself.

The meanings attached to those pictures are a different kind of thing. They are cultural conventions, built up over roughly two centuries of writing, reading, and revising. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck was published in 1909; the card meanings most people know today were largely codified in the decades that followed, partly by Waite himself and partly by later authors. We describe this lineage rather than presenting the readings as timeless facts.

• The card images themselves — the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and published in 1909. The artwork is in the public domain, and the files we use are the public-domain scans hosted by Wikimedia Commons. We did not redraw, recolour or re-render them.
• Established tarot literature — for historical background and the conventional upright/reversed readings. Where sources disagree, we say so rather than picking one and presenting it as settled.
• Golden Dawn attributions — the occult titles and astrological decan assignments that appear in some card histories (for example the numbered Minor Arcana each carrying a title such as “Lord of Sorrow”). These are historical facts about how the deck was constructed, and we attribute them to that tradition rather than treating them as part of the card’s meaning for a modern reader.
• Published descriptions, where they differ — occasionally accounts differ on a detail of a card’s imagery, such as how many coins appear among the vines on the Nine of Pentacles. Where that happens we describe the scene without asserting a number, rather than inventing a precise figure.

• No invented card details. If we are not confident about a specific object in a card’s illustration, we describe the general scene instead of inventing a plausible-sounding detail.
• No copied text. Card descriptions are written for this site. They are not reproduced from other tarot sites, and the images are only used where the rights allow it.
• No medical, legal or financial guidance. Not in card descriptions, not in type guides, not in readings. Where a card touches grief, anxiety or conflict, we describe the tarot interpretation and stop there.
• No predicting events. We do not write about tarot as a method for foretelling the future, because it is not one.

The Major Arcana were the original library — 22 cards. The 56 Minor Arcana were added later as a single body of work, and the process is worth describing because it is where quality usually slips.

Each card was written individually from its own canonical keyword set and its own depicted scene, then checked as a group for repetition. The check is not cosmetic: a library generated from a fixed template with the subject swapped produces 56 cards that read like one card 56 times, and that is the failure mode we were explicitly guarding against.

The cards were then audited for cross-card duplication at the sentence and phrase level, for stray untranslated text, and for internal links that point nowhere. A card was only considered finished once it passed all of those.

If a card description is wrong, if a historical claim is inaccurate, or if something is simply badly written, tell us. Use the contact link in the site footer and, if you can, include the URL.

We would rather publish a correction than defend a mistake. When we change something substantive, we update the review date shown at the top of the page.