Method and limits

What it is for

This site is a calculator and a prompt writer. It draws tarot cards, looks up their traditional correspondences, scores how they interact, and writes all of that up as a prompt. It does not interpret the cards itself. Your AI does that, from the prompt.

It is meant for studying the Thoth deck and its correspondences, for reflection, and for giving an AI the same careful groundwork every time instead of a bare list of card names.

It is not meant for decisions about health, money, law or safety, and it does not predict the future. Treat any reading, and anything an AI says about it, as something to think with rather than advice.

How a reading is made

1. Shuffle. Your seed is turned into a number (SHA-256) that shuffles the 78 cards with Python’s standard shuffler. The same seed always gives the same order, which is what lets you repeat or share a reading. A blank seed gets a random six-digit number. The shuffle is ordinary software: nothing outside the seed chooses the cards.
2. Draw. Cards are dealt from the top into the spread’s positions. For the 15-card heap and the full Opening of the Key, your significator is placed first. The full Opening of the Key reshuffles the whole deck for each operation, as the Golden Dawn method does, so a card (your significator too) can fall again in a house, sign or decan.
3. Look up. Each card’s attribution, Hebrew letter or Sephira, path and King Scale colour come from Liber 777 tables, under the mapping system you chose (Thoth by default).
4. Score. Neighbouring cards get a Book T elemental dignity. Neighbours are the next card along; in the 15-card heap they are the named pairs, and on the Tree of Life the Sephiroth a path joins:

   Elements	Score
   Same element	+2
   Friendly (for example Fire and Air)	+1
   Contrary (Fire and Water, Air and Earth)	−2
   Spirit on either side	0

   Cards are also related by where they sit in the layout; on the wheels of houses, signs and decans that means astrological aspects, counted within set orbs. These aspects belong to the layout, so they are the same in every reading of a spread; only the cards at their two ends change. The report adds the elemental balance, where the cards fall on the Cube of Space, and their Platonic solids.
5. Choose a lens. On Auto, the macro framework comes from whether the cards run down the Tree of Life towards Malkuth or up towards Kether. The report says which, and why.
6. Write the prompt. Sections 1 to 6 hold the cards and every calculation. Section 7 asks your AI to synthesise them and to describe tendencies and tensions rather than a fixed outcome, leaving the conclusion to you.

The code, tables and tests are all open source, so every step above can be checked.

Letters and solids in space

Rather than treating the Hebrew alphabet as an abstract list or the Platonic solids as isolated geometry, the report places both in three-dimensional space with two models: the Cube of Space from the Sefer Yetzirah, and polyhedral dual inversions.

• The Cube of Space. The three mother letters are its axes, the seven double letters its six faces and its centre, and the twelve simple letters its twelve edges, in Paul Case’s layout. Each Major sits where its letter sits; court cards and pips are linked through their sign.
• Dual inversions. Each card takes the Platonic solid of its element: Fire the tetrahedron, Water the icosahedron, Air the octahedron, Earth the cube. The seven planetary Majors keep the dodecahedron. Put a corner at the centre of every face of one solid and the corners make its dual: the cube and the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron, and the tetrahedron, which is its own dual. The cube’s dual is where the two models meet: its six corners are the centres of the Cube of Space’s six faces, the six directions held by the double letters, with Tav at the centre both solids share. The report notes each pair of neighbouring cards whose solids are duals.

Card maps draws both models and marks where any card sits on them.

Limitations

• The interpretation is your AI’s, not this site’s. AIs can be wrong, invent details, or answer the same prompt differently each time. Nothing here checks what they say.
• One tradition among several. Card attributions differ between systems, which is why there are three to choose from. The dignity scores (+2, +1, −2, 0) and the aspect orbs are this project’s reading of Book T and astrological practice, not the only one.
• The solids are a modelling choice. Giving the four elements their solids follows Plato’s Timaeus. Giving the planetary Majors the dodecahedron, and naming dual pairs between neighbouring cards, are this project’s own choices, not part of the Golden Dawn tables.
• The 15-card heap is a variant. It is not the classic First Operation of the Opening of the Key, which splits the whole deck into four piles.
• The pictures don’t match the Thoth deck. The Thoth paintings are still under copyright, so the cards shown are Pamela Colman Smith’s 1909 public-domain art under the Thoth names. See About the card art.
• A seed is a repeatable shuffle, not chance. If you want a fresh draw, leave the seed blank or use a new one.

About the card art

The readings use the Thoth deck of Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris (painted 1938–43). Harris’s paintings are still under copyright, so each card is shown with its counterpart from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for A. E. Waite in 1909 and now in the public domain. Both decks come from the Golden Dawn’s system, so every Thoth card has a Waite counterpart, though many go by a different name.

Each picture keeps the name Waite printed on it, as a check on the Thoth title above it. Waite printed no names on the numbered cards (2 to 10), so this site adds a banner with the Thoth title there. Where the names differ, the card also says which Waite card is pictured, for example “Pictured: Rider-Waite-Smith King of Wands”.

Court cards

The Golden Dawn named its courts King, Queen, Prince and Princess, with the King on horseback. Waite kept the older playing-card names, King, Queen, Knight and Page. Crowley renamed the Golden Dawn’s mounted King “Knight”. This site pairs the cards by rank and element, as the Golden Dawn did:

The Thoth paintings themselves can’t be shown here because they are still under copyright.

The debate

Which Waite court card goes with which Thoth one is still argued over, and the decks’ own books don’t settle it. Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) simply uses the playing-card names. Crowley’s Book of Thoth (1944) explains that his Knight is the Golden Dawn’s King, renamed. There are two common readings:

• By rank (used on this site, and the most common): the top card of each suit goes with the top card, and so on down, so the Thoth Knight is the Waite King and the Prince the Waite Knight.
• By the horse: the Golden Dawn King and Crowley’s Knight both ride horses, like Waite’s Knights. On this reading the Thoth Knight is the Waite Knight and the Thoth Prince the Waite King.

Both readings pair the Queens with each other, and the Princesses with Waite’s Pages. For more, see “Thoth vs Rider court cards” on Tarot Forum, and Michael Sternbach’s “How do the court cards of various decks really relate to one another?”, which argues for the second reading.

Suit and trumps

Waite followed the Golden Dawn in swapping Strength and Justice to VIII and XI; Crowley kept the older order, so Lust is XI and Adjustment VIII, and the printed numerals on those two pictures differ from their titles. The Magus, the Priestess and Fortune are Waite’s Magician, High Priestess and Wheel of Fortune under shorter names.

What is stored

• A reading drawn with Draw my cards (on the start page or the Pick page) is saved on the server, with its question, so its report has its own private link (a random address that search engines are told not to list).
• Shared links (/reading?seed=…), the examples and the card of the day are worked out fresh each time and not saved.
• Your last settings and your theme are remembered in your own browser only.
• There are no accounts. The question is optional, so leave out anything you would not want stored.

Found a mistake in a table or a calculation? Report a bug.