How this works

The short version

You press a button. Seventy-eight rows in a database are shuffled by a seeded random number generator, three are taken off the top, and each one is written up using the meanings stored against it, picking the version of that meaning written for whatever you said you were asking about. That is the whole trick. There is nothing else going on.

The shuffle

It is a Fisher-Yates shuffle, which is the ordinary correct way to shuffle a list, run against a generator started from a seed. No card can be drawn twice in one spread. Roughly three in ten land reversed, which is fewer than a real shuffle would produce and more than most people want.

Why refreshing does not deal a new hand

The seed is made from what you typed, the spread you chose, today's date and a secret key. Same details, same day, same cards, so reloading the page gives you the reading you already had rather than a new one. This is deliberate. A reading you can re-roll until you like it is a fruit machine, and any reader would tell you the same thing.

If you genuinely want a different hand, there is a "shuffle again" button. It uses a random seed instead, and it is honest about it.

What your details do

Four things, all of them mundane:

• What you are asking about picks which of the card's written meanings leads. Every card has a paragraph for love, work, money, yourself and a decision, as well as a general one. Ask about money and you get the money paragraph, not a general paragraph with the word money dropped into it.
• Your name is used to address you, and for nothing else.
• Your birthday is turned into a star sign, and the star sign is turned into an element: fire, water, air or earth. The reading then checks whether the cards you drew are in that element. That is a real comparison against a real draw, and it comes out "no" about as often as "yes", which is why it is worth printing.
• Your mood changes how firmly the reading is written. It does not change what it says. The Tower is the Tower whether you are feeling hopeful or hunted, and pretending otherwise would be the one genuinely dishonest thing this site could do.

What is not happening

Nothing is being divined. There is no model reading your question and deciding what you need to hear. Nobody is looking at your details and guessing anything about you. The reading feels personal because the inputs are yours, not because anything supernatural took place between the button and the page.

The part people find uncanny is usually the paragraph about the shape of the spread: how many major arcana came up, which element took it over, how many reversals. That paragraph is arithmetic. It is the least invented thing on the page, which is worth knowing.

What the cards are for

Reflection and entertainment. A tarot reading is a structured way of looking at something from an angle you were not using. That is genuinely useful and it is not the same as advice. Nothing here is guidance about your health, your money or the law, and any reading that sounds like it is should be read as the prompt it is rather than the instruction it is not.