Tarot reading online: how a three-card reading works
What happens in a three-card reading, from the question you bring to the last card you turn, and how to begin one here.
A tarot reading online follows the same order as a reading across a table. You bring a question, the deck is shuffled, three cards are laid down, and each card is read for the place where it falls. Only two things change on a screen: a computer does the shuffling, and you read the words in your own time instead of hearing them.
This guide walks through a three-card reading step by step, with the cards of the Visconti–Sforza tarot, painted for the Dukes of Milan in the fifteenth century. Whenever you are ready, you can begin a reading of your own: the draw and your first card are free.
Begin with the question
The question you bring shapes everything after it, so it is worth a minute. Tarot answers open questions far better than yes-or-no ones. "Will I get the job?" leaves the cards nothing to say once they have said yes or no. "What do I need to understand about this job?" gives them room to show you something.
A useful question is about you, not about what someone else will do, and it names one situation. If you are unsure where to start, choose the area of life that is calling for your attention:
- Love and connection: "What is this relationship asking of me now?"
- Purpose and direction: "What would help me choose between these two paths?"
- Change and becoming: "What am I ready to leave behind?"
- Creative life: "What keeps me from the work I want to make?"
You can also add one detail about what is happening in your life. A reading that knows you are moving city, or waiting for a diagnosis, or starting a business, can read the same card more closely.
The shuffle
A reader shuffles until the deck feels ready. Online, a random number generator does the same job, and it is the part most worth checking. Our draw starts from 32 random bytes made on our server by a cryptographic generator, the kind used to make passwords. From them, three different cards are chosen from the whole deck, each card equally likely, and each falls upright or reversed. Your question never touches the draw, and nobody, including us, chooses your cards. The draw is saved, so it stays the same whenever you return to it. There is more on how this works in real tarot online.
Three places: the root, the threshold and the invitation
A three-card spread gives each card a place, and the place changes what the card means. Ours reads them in this order:
- The root is what you carry into the question: a habit, a history, something learned early. The Hermit at the root might be a long habit of working things out alone.
- The threshold is where you stand now, and it is where your question is read. The Wheel of Fortune here asks what has turned around you, and what is still yours to choose.
- The invitation is a small act to carry out, not a forecast. The Sun as the invitation asks for one plain, warm thing done in daylight: a conversation, a celebration, an honest yes.
Upright and reversed cards
About half of all cards fall reversed, upside down as they are laid. A reversed card is not a bad card. It keeps the same picture, read from the other side: the card's energy blocked, overdone, turned inward or not yet arrived. Reversed, the Fool's step "has either been taken too soon or not at all". The card is the same traveller; the question is what is holding him at the edge.
Seventy-eight cards and their pictures
A full tarot deck has 78 cards: 22 trumps, now called the Major Arcana, and 56 cards in four suits of cups, coins, swords and batons. Our readings draw from the whole deck and read each card in the tradition of the Tarot de Marseille, the pattern the cards kept from the seventeenth century until the twentieth.
The pictures come from surviving Renaissance decks, and you choose which one you draw from: the gilded Visconti–Sforza tarot of Milan, the engraved Sola Busca tarot of 1491, the oldest complete deck, or the Cary-Yale Visconti tarot at Yale. Where a card is lost, it is a Fable reconstruction painted after the deck's own cards, and it is marked as one.
Reading the three cards together
Once each card has been read in its place, read the three as one sentence. Notice what repeats. Two cups suggest the question is about feeling; two swords, about a decision or a conflict. Notice who faces whom: a figure looking away from the next card can mean something not yet faced. Then read from the root to the invitation as a short story: this is what I carry, this is where I stand, this is one thing to do. Your complete reading ends with this thread written out for you, with a practice for the week ahead.
What a reading can and cannot do
Tarot began as a card game at the courts of fifteenth-century Italy, and fortune-telling came three centuries later, as the history of tarot tells. A reading does not predict the future, and it is no substitute for medical, legal or financial advice. What it does well is slow you down: it gives a familiar worry a picture, a place and a different angle, and asks one useful question back.
Begin your own reading
Choose what is calling for your attention, add your question if you like, and draw. Your three cards are turned and your first card is read in full, free, with no email or photo needed. The complete reading reads your question at the threshold, the invitation and the thread between all three, as an illustrated PDF with a portrait painted from your cards. It is $39 once, or one credit on Creator, Studio or Pro.