Lesson
What is Tarot
Seventy-eight pictures. A question. A pause long enough to hear yourself.
Tarot is a deck of 78 pictures and a habit of asking one honest question before you look at them. It is not a religion, a diagnosis, or a substitute for a lawyer, a doctor, or a friend who will tell you the hard sentence.
The deck most people recognize is the Rider–Waite–Smith. Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. The fronts we show are public-domain scans of that deck. The back is ours. You do not need to believe the pictures are magic to use them. You need a question you can sit with.
Two halves of the same table
Twenty-two Major Arcana cards name large weather: beginnings, endings, appetite, shame, recovery. Fifty-six Minor Arcana cards work like a daily ledger. They split into four suits — Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles — and run from Ace to Ten, then Page, Knight, Queen, King.
If you only remember one distinction: Majors name the climate. Minors name the errand.
What a reading is for
A useful reading names the cards you actually drew and ties them to the question you asked. It does not promise reunion, a job offer, or a market move. It should leave you with a sentence you can test in the room you already live in.
Play Tarot keeps a ritual in front of the essay: shuffle, pick, flip, then text. The text is written by a specialist personality — Luna, Marcus, Vera, Sage, or Orion — not by a model name on the page. When a live interpretation is unavailable, you still get traditional notes stitched to the positions on the table.
How to begin
Start smaller than you think. One card for today is enough. Three cards will hold a pattern. Ten cards will hold a map, and a map is slower.
If you want the pictures without a session, open the encyclopedia. If you want a session, name the question first. The cards are stubborn about that order.