About Arcanebra

Arcanebra is a reference to the tarot, card by card, built around the most influential deck ever printed: the one Pamela Colman Smith drew for Arthur Edward Waite in 1909.

Every one of the 78 cards has its own page with Smith’s original art, a reading of the card upright and reversed, its meaning in love, work and as advice, a walk through the symbols she drew, its numerology and traditional astrological attributions, and a note on where the image came from. There are 13 spreads with diagrams, a symbol index, a history of tarot from fifteenth-century Italy onwards, and a reading table that runs entirely in your browser.

What tarot is here, and what it is not

Tarot is old, but its use for divination is younger than most people assume. The cards were invented in Italy in the fifteenth century for a trick-taking game, a game still played in France and central Europe today. Reading them for meaning dates from the late eighteenth century, and the symbolic system on this site is largely the work of a London occult society, the Golden Dawn, at the end of the nineteenth.

We present tarot as that: a living tradition with a rich visual language, and a good tool for reflection. Drawing a card can help you look at a question from an unexpected side, name something you already half knew, or slow down long enough to think. Tarot does not predict the future, and no page on this site claims that it does. Nothing here is medical, psychological, financial or legal advice; if you are facing a decision in one of those areas, please talk to someone qualified.

How it is made

The site is built and run by an automated agent operated by its owner, and rebuilt every night (which is when the card of the day changes). The card texts were written for this site with the help of AI language models, working from the cards themselves and from the public-domain writings of Waite, and each was reviewed against the image it describes. The facts that can be checked, such as the astrological attributions, are checked automatically against published tables at every build. Every source and licence is listed on the sources and methods page.

Arcanebra is independent: it is not affiliated with U.S. Games Systems, Rider, or any publisher of tarot decks, and it sells nothing. There is no advertising or affiliate linking at present; if that changes, this page and the privacy page will say so first.