What is tarot, really?
Not fortune-telling. Tarot is a structured way to set a situation down in front of you and look at its shape. Start anywhere below.
What tarot is, and isn't
Tarot is a deck of 78 images with a long, shared vocabulary. A reading lays some of those images out in a pattern and reads the relationships between them.
It gives you language for what's hard to name, and a mirror for what you already half-know. It doesn't tell the future or hand down a ruling about anyone. What resonates is yours to keep; the rest you can set down.
The 78 cards
A tarot deck has two halves. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana carry the big, archetypal weather — the forces a life moves through. The 56 cards of the Minor Arcana fill in the texture of daily life across four suits.
Most modern decks descend from the 1909 Rider–Waite–Smith deck, whose illustrated scenes made the Minor Arcana readable at a glance. AuLun's default deck is its own art, but the structure is the same one every reader shares.
Browse every card in the Library →The Major Arcana
The Majors run from the Fool (0) to the World (21) — often read as a single arc, the journey of becoming. When several turn up in a spread, the reading is about something structural, not a passing mood.
Cards like Death, the Tower, and the Devil sound ominous and aren't: Death reads transformation, the Tower sudden upheaval, the Devil attachment. AuLun reads them as patterns, never as predictions of literal events.
Suits & the Minor Arcana
The four suits each speak to a register of experience. Wands are drive, will, and creative fire. Cups are feeling, intimacy, and the inner life. Swords are thought, conflict, and clarity. Pentacles are work, body, and the material world.
Each suit runs Ace through Ten, a small narrative from first spark to full expression. Where the suits fall in a spread tells you which part of life the reading is really about.
Court cards
Each suit has four court cards. They can stand for people in your life, for a way of carrying yourself, or for a part of you stepping forward — a Page learning, a Knight pursuing, a Queen holding, a King directing.
Reading the court is less about "who" and more about "what posture." The same King of Swords can be a person, a tone you're taking, or one you're up against.
Reversals
A reversed card is one that lands upside down. Many readers treat it as the card's energy turned inward, blocked, or still forming rather than as a simple opposite.
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Plenty of skilled readers don't use them at all. What matters is that you read consistently, so the cards keep their meaning across a reading.
How a spread works
A spread is a layout where every position has a job. The same card means something different in "what's behind this" than in "where it's heading." Position is half the meaning.
Choosing a spread is choosing the shape of the question. A few positions for a quick read; many for a situation with moving parts.
The three-card spread
Three cards, read as a small story: most often past, present, and future, or situation, action, and outcome. It's the cleanest way to see an arc without getting lost in detail.
It's the best place to start, and the spread AuLun draws for a free daily reading.
Try a three-card reading →The Celtic Cross
The Celtic Cross is the classic deep read — ten cards in a cross and a staff. It holds the heart of a situation and what crosses it, the recent past and near future, and a staff that climbs from your own posture through outside forces to where it all points.
It's a lot to hold at once, which is the point: it's for questions with real weight and many moving parts.
Reading in pattern, not prediction
A good reading doesn't tell you what will happen. It shows you the shape of where you're standing: what's load-bearing, what's pulling against what, who's acting on whom in the story the cards are telling.
AuLun reads that shape candidly and in pattern language, and lays it back to you so you can test it against what you already know. Resonance is the test, and you're the one who runs it.
Begin a reading →