three cards.
past, present, future, drawn with cryptographic randomness, so don’t argue with the results.
knock three times to clear the deck
✧ the table is set ✧
the deck’s papers · history & mechanics
About This Deck.
Tarot began around the 1440s in northern Italy as tarocchi, a card game for aristocrats. Fortune-telling came three centuries later, when French occultists reimagined the trumps as a book of secrets. Naturally, I’ve digitised it, so we can channel the quattrocento aristocrat and the French occultist within.
The deck here is the Rider–Waite–Smith of 1909: Arthur Waite supplied the system, and the artist Pamela Colman Smith drew all 78 cards in about six months. The artwork on these cards is hers.
The Deal
This table deals the 22 major arcana only. Three cards land as past, present and future, drawn with cryptographic randomness. Each card carries its traditional meaning, written differently for each seat, because the same card says one thing about where you have been and another about where this is going.
under the hood · crypto.getRandomValues, rejection-sampled: every card exactly as likely as every other
The Knock
Knocking three times before the deal is a working reader's ritual: it clears the last question's energy from the deck so yours starts clean.
under the hood · three taps, counted honestly. the deck will not deal early
The Thread
Every trump belongs to one of six arcs, and the reading is assembled from how your past feeds your present, where your present sends your future, and what the final card asks of you: over nine thousand possible spreads, each with its own read.
under the hood · a 36-bridge by 36-trajectory matrix with six closings. composed, not canned
The Quintessence
The quintessence comes from early French cartomancy's tirage en croix, a spread read with the majors only, exactly like this one. Sum the three trump numbers and cast out 22 until a single trump remains: that card crowns the reading.
under the hood · (past + present + future) mod 22. the maths shows its working above
The Elements
When an elemental line appears, it follows the Golden Dawn's Book T. Every trump carries an astrological attribution and through it an element; the cards flanking your present can feed it or fight it. Fire and water quarrel, air and earth too, and matching elements strengthen each other.
under the hood · flanks scored against the centre: agreement amplifies, opposition dampens, a split stays quiet
The Moon
Divination is always situated in its moment, so each reading is sealed to its real sky: the moon's actual phase at the second you draw. The same three cards on a different night are a different reading.
under the hood · pure arithmetic: one known new moon plus the synodic month of 29.53059 days, the same sums sailors and almanacs use