Card library

Tarot card meanings: all 78 cards

Every card in the tarot deck, upright and reversed, with what it can mean in love, at work, as someone’s feelings and as a yes or no. These are the fixed meanings behind every Lanterndeck reading, so you can always check what a card in your reading means.

The Major Arcana: 22 cards

The Major Arcana are the deck’s big themes, numbered from 0 to XXI. Read in order they tell a story, from The Fool’s first step to The World’s completed circle, through choice, discipline, solitude, change, loss, hope and renewal. When a Major turns up, the question usually touches something larger than the day-to-day.

Wands: fire, 14 cards

Wands are the suit of energy and making: ambition, projects, creativity and the drive to start things. In a reading they usually speak to what you want to do and how much fuel you have for it. Too much fire burns out; too little and nothing gets lit.

Cups: water, 14 cards

Cups are the suit of feeling: love, friendship, intuition and the inner weather of a relationship. They tend to come up when the question is really about how something feels, whatever it seems to be about on the surface.

Swords: air, 14 cards

Swords are the suit of thought and words: decisions, conflict, truth and the stories we tell ourselves. They have a reputation for being hard cards, but most of them describe a mind at work, sometimes sharp and clear, sometimes caught in a loop.

Pentacles: earth, 14 cards

Pentacles are the suit of the practical and the physical: work, home, time, effort and the slow building of something real. In a reading they point to what you can touch and tend, from a daily routine to a long project.

How to read a card’s meaning

Each card has two faces. Upright, it shows its meaning plainly; reversed (drawn upside down), the same theme is blocked, turned inward, overdone or only starting to emerge. A reversed card isn’t a bad card. It’s the same subject seen from another side.

Then there’s the question. The same card reads differently when you ask about love, about work or about how someone feels, so every card page gives each of those, plus the card’s lean on a yes-or-no question. A lean is the card’s mood, not a verdict.

Finally, the card’s place in a spread colors it: The Tower in the past is a shake-up you’ve lived through, while The Tower as the challenge is a structure that may not hold. The spread guides explain every position, and what a tarot reading is covers the rest.

Numbers and court cards

Each suit runs from Ace to Ten, then four court cards. The Ace is the suit’s idea in its purest, newest form; the middle numbers are the work, the friction and the adjustment; the Ten is the suit’s theme at its fullest, sometimes too full.

The court cards (Page, Knight, Queen and King) are best read as ways of acting rather than as other people: the Page as curiosity and first attempts, the Knight as pursuit and momentum, the Queen as mastery held inward, the King as mastery put to use.

Download the card library

The whole library is free to download as JSON: all 78 cards with their keywords and their general, love, work and feelings meanings, upright and reversed, plus each card’s yes-or-no lean with its reason and a reflection question. It’s the same text the pages and readings use.

Download the library (JSON)The yes or no chart for every card