Shuffle. Cut. Draw.
Choose the positions, hold a question in mind, and lay the cards one by one.
Each reading starts with a fresh deck. Cards stay out once drawn; a new shuffle can bring the same card again.
Three cards
0 / 3 cardsThe deck is already shuffled. Choosing a card removes it from this order and closes the gap.
Position guide & source
Read each card with its position and its neighbours. An outcome position describes a possible development for reflection.
How the deck is handled
Every eligible card has the same chance at each position before the draw. The complete order is fixed when the deck is shuffled. A cut moves the top packet underneath; dealing takes the next card, while choosing takes the face-down card at that place. Neither action generates another result.
Reversals are optional. When enabled, each card independently has a one-in-two chance of being reversed, fixed before any card is drawn. This is an explicit digital convention; physical shuffling does not prescribe a universal reversal rate.
A significator is deliberately chosen and set aside before shuffling, so it cannot also appear in the spread. Choosing only the major arcana changes the deck to twenty-two cards. The question stays in this page’s memory and never enters the shuffle.
The shuffle uses Fisher–Yates with the browser’s Web Crypto randomness and rejection sampling to avoid modulo bias. There is no balancing of suits, suppression of recent cards, favourable-card weighting or fallback to weaker randomness. This models a uniformly shuffled deck; it does not claim supernatural accuracy or perfect physical randomness.
Other traditions of laying the cards
Spreads are families of practices, not a closed catalogue. Short pulls, three-card sequences, crosses, relationship and decision layouts, Horseshoes, astrological circles, calendar readings and Qabalistic arrangements all admit variants. The presets identify the version used here; custom positions allow a different layout to be named before the draw.
Waite’s Celtic method uses a selected significator and ten cards. His forty-two-card method instead rearranges packets and removes a significator; the thirty-five-card continuation uses the undealt remainder in unequal rows. These packet procedures are described in the archive, rather than presented as ordinary fixed-position presets.
The Golden Dawn’s Opening of the Key is a sequence involving packets, a significator, counting and pairing, with further operations involving houses, zodiacal signs and the Tree. It is not simply a ten-card Tree spread. Study the five operations →
Marseille and French cross methods can use a calculated synthesis, whereas the five-card cross here draws its centre from the deck. Yes-or-no assignments differ between readers; no card is forced into a favourable answer. Physical jumpers depend on handling and are not simulated as extra messages.
The 22 paths
click a path or a sephirahThe major arcana are the 22 paths that join the ten sephiroth; the pip cards of each suit are the sephiroth themselves in each of the four worlds (Wands in Atziluth, Cups in Briah, Swords in Yetzirah, Pentacles in Assiah); the court cards are the four letters of the Tetragrammaton within each suit.
Major arcana
click a column header to sortThe 36 decans
Chaldean order from Aries · click a column header to sortThe 16 court cards
Waite · Golden Dawn / Thoth · Tetragrammaton · rulershipHow to read the court-card table
Waite kept the conventional names (King, Queen, Knight, Page), but his deck follows the structure of the Golden Dawn, in which the Fire member of each suit is the King mounted on horseback and the Air member is the Prince seated in a chariot. For this reason Waite's Knight, the mounted figure, corresponds to the Golden Dawn King and to the Thoth Knight (Yod, Fire of the suit), while Waite's enthroned King corresponds to the Prince (Vau, Air of the suit). Queen and Page correspond to the Queen (Heh, Water) and the Princess (Heh final, Earth). This is the key for transposing any text of Crowley's onto the deck the practitioner holds in hand.
Kings, Queens and Princes each rule thirty degrees of the ecliptic beginning in the last ten degrees of one sign and running through the first twenty of the next, so that each governs the final decan of one sign and the first two of the following one. The Princesses rule no decans; each governs one quadrant of the heavens around the North Pole, the same quadrant that is the throne of the Ace of her suit.
Naming the card without seeing it
A shuffled deck is cut and one card is drawn, face down. Say what it is before turning it over. Everything is recorded; the rate expected by pure chance is marked on the bar alongside.
Draw the card from the physical deck, face down. First click: the guess. Second click: the card that was drawn. The attempt is recorded at once and the board clears for the next.
What Liber E asks
Liber E vel Exercitiorum (sub figura IX) is Crowley's elementary training programme, published in 1909 in the first number of The Equinox. Part V, entitled Clairvoyance, is brief and deliberately modest: it does not ask for visions, it asks for statistics. This is the point that tends to go unnoticed by those who come to it through the tarot: the exercise is not one of card reading; it is a calibration of one's own perception against chance.
Take a pack of (78) Tarot playing cards. Shuffle; cut. Draw one card. Without looking at it, try and name it. Write down the card you name, and the actual card. Repeat, and tabulate results.
Remember that one should expect to name the right card once in 78 times. Also be careful to exclude all possibilities of obtaining the knowledge through the ordinary senses of sight and touch, or even smell.
It is better to try first the easier form of the experiment, by guessing only the suit. Remember that in 78 cards there are 22 trumps and 14 of each other suit; so that, without any clairvoyance at all, one can guess right about twice in seven times by calling trumps each time.
Liber E vel Exercitiorum, V, §§1, 3, 4, 5
Crowley adds that some cards are harmonious with one another, so that to mistake the Five of Swords (the Lord of Defeat) for the Ten of Swords (the Lord of Ruin) is not so serious an error as to mistake it for the Ten of Cups; that the experiment is easier with an old pack, used for divination by someone who understood the matter; and that the student should practise for about a week, record everything, success or failure, and only then pass to the astral travelling exercises of Liber O, in which a Tarot card serves as a door. This is why the bench above keeps the log in the browser and allows it to be copied into the diary.
Why the Golden Dawn titles matter here
The names Crowley uses in Liber E, such as Lord of Defeat and Lord of Ruin, are the esoteric titles of Book T, the Golden Dawn document on the Tarot. Waite knew these titles and the astrological attributions, but deliberately omitted them from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. The images of Pamela Colman Smith, however, were drawn from them: the three spilt cups of the Five of Cups are Loss in Pleasure, Mars in Scorpio; the blindfolded figure of the Eight of Swords is Shortened Force, Jupiter in Gemini. Learning each card with its title, decan and sephirah is what later makes it possible to choose the right card as the door of an astral journey and to test the vision by the signs and names that belong to it.
Thoth Tarot Comparison
Thoth Tarot images are not reproduced because they are not in the public domain. All card images on this site are from the Rider-Waite Tarot; the Thoth names and correspondences appear as text.
Select a card to open its Rider-Waite Tarot image and notes. Marked entries differ between the two decks.
Numbers. Strength VIII corresponds to Lust XI; Justice XI to Adjustment VIII.
Letters. The Emperor and the Star exchange Heh and Tzaddi in the Thoth system. The Rider-Waite Tarot column follows the Golden Dawn attributions used throughout this site.
Suits and court cards
nomenclature| Rider-Waite Tarot | Thoth | Element · letter |
|---|---|---|
| Wands | Wands | Fire · Yod |
| Cups | Cups | Water · Heh |
| Swords | Swords | Air · Vau |
| Pentacles | Disks | Earth · Heh final |
| Knight | Knight | Fire of the suit · Yod |
| Queen | Queen | Water of the suit · Heh |
| King | Prince | Air of the suit · Vau |
| Page | Princess | Earth of the suit · Heh final |
Thelemic correspondences & Liber 777
What changes with the Aeon of Horus
Five trumps receive new names, and each name is a thesis. Strength becomes Lust, because the strength that matters is not the strength that tames the lion but the strength that rides it: Babalon upon the Beast, the joy of energy exercised. Justice becomes Adjustment, because there is no moral judgement in the universe, only balance, the Woman Satisfied who compensates every act. Temperance becomes Art, the alchemical work that fuses the opposites of the Lovers into a third being. Judgement becomes The Aeon, because the resurrection of the dead was the formula of Osiris, the dying god; in its place, Ra-Hoor-Khuit enthroned within the body of Nuit, and the child Hoor-paar-kraat before him. The World becomes The Universe, the dancer with the serpent, Saturn as matter completing itself. The Pentacles become Disks again, coins in rotation, because the matter of the new Aeon is energy.
The exchange of Tzaddi and Heh is the one point where Crowley contradicts the Golden Dawn in the attributions. The Book of the Law says, in I:57, that all the old letters of the Book are aright, but Tzaddi is not the Star. Crowley concludes that the Star belongs to Heh and the Emperor to Tzaddi, switching the two trumps between paths and gaining, in doing so, a symmetry: just as Teth and Lamed (Lust and Adjustment, Leo and Libra) already balance around the axis of Virgo, Heh and Tzaddi (Aries and Aquarius) come to balance around the axis of Pisces. For the Emperor and the Star, the card numbers stay IV and XVII; their Hebrew letters change. Strength and Justice have a separate numbering difference, shown in the table above. This guide keeps the Golden Dawn letters on the card sheets and records the exchange in the notes of the Emperor and the Star, so that both systems can be read.
The Naples Arrangement
Crowley gives the name Naples Arrangement to his explanation of the ten numbers, which makes memorizing the meanings of the pips unnecessary. Zero is the Nothing; the point, which is the one, is position without magnitude; two points give the line and with it distance, the first relation; three, the plane, the surface, form; four, the solid, matter; five, motion, without which the solid does not exist in time, and which disturbs every stability; six, self-consciousness, the centre that harmonizes; seven, eight and nine are the descents of that consciousness towards matter, successively weakness, correction by intelligence and stability recovered; ten is complete realization and, for that reason, exhaustion, which already contains the seed of the next Ace. Each pip of each suit is that number applied to an element: the five of Wands is the motion of Fire (Strife), the five of Cups the motion of Water (Disappointment), and so on. On each card's sheet, the Naples Arrangement paragraph summarizes the number; the decan and the title give the particular colouring.
The formula of the Tetragrammaton
The four suits are the four letters of YHVH, and the four court cards of each suit are the same four letters within it. The Knight (Yod, Fire) is the father who begets; the Queen (Heh, Water) is the mother who conceives; the Prince (Vau, Air) is the son who inherits; the Princess (Heh final, Earth) is the daughter who, once matured, awakens the father and begins the cycle again. Crowley insists on this last movement, which he calls the Formula of the Tetragrammaton: the Princess of Disks, pregnant in Harris's painting, contains the Ace of Wands. This is why the Aces are not cards like the others but the roots of the suits, and why the Princess of each suit is the throne of its Ace in the corresponding celestial quadrant.
How to use 777 on the card sheets
For each trump, the sheet gathers the four scales of colour (King in Atziluth, Queen in Briah, Emperor in Yetzirah, Empress in Assiah), the Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods, the animal, the plant, the stone, the magical weapon, the perfume and the magical power. For each pip, it gathers the divine name, the archangel, the angelic choir, the mundane chakra and the colours of the sephirah. Crowley says the usefulness of 777 is to let the magician construct a coherent ritual: if the Work is of Venus, the Empress gives emerald for the colour of the robe, the rose and the myrtle for the altar, sandalwood for the incense, the dove for the symbolic sacrifice, the girdle as the weapon, and love philtres as the power to be expected. For the visualization exercise of Liber O, the colour of the King scale is the colour of the door, and the other attributes are the signs by which the vision is tested: the landscape of a path of Mars should be red, hold horses or wolves, smell of pepper.
The Thelemic spread: the Opening of the Key
The Book of Thoth reproduces, in an appendix, the Golden Dawn method of divination that Crowley considered the only one worthy of the name, the Opening of the Key. In five successive operations, the deck is cut into four piles (YHVH), then distributed through the twelve astrological houses, the thirty-six decans and the ten sephiroth, and in each operation one counts from the significator according to the value of the cards (Knights, Queens and Princes count four, Princesses seven, Aces eleven, the pips their own number, the elemental trumps three, the planetary trumps nine, the zodiacal trumps twelve). The method relates each card to its decan, sephirah and elemental dignity in relation to its neighbours.
Sources: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910); Book T; Aleister Crowley, Liber 777 (1909) and The Book of Thoth (1944). Card images: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite Tarot (1909).