Who Shares Your Card
Everyone born on your calendar day has the same tarot card you do! The Tarot Almanac calls it your Bearing, and it's a simple calculation. Sum your birth month and birth day. Here are twenty-two famous people, one for each card.
You've probably looked up who was born on your birthday. Most people have. And one thing you can do with that info is also understand how everyone born on your calendar day has the same birth tarot card you do, in other words, the same Bearing, which is what we call the way a person looks at the world.
Add your birth month to your birth day. That's it. February 18 is 2 plus 18, which is 20, and card 20 is Judgement. There are twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana, numbered from zero, so anything over twenty-two wraps around to the start and keeps counting. Here are twenty-two famous people, one for each card.
The twenty-two
| Born | The sum | Their Bearing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rihanna | February 20 | 2 + 20 = 22 | The Fool |
| Nina Simone | February 21 | 2 + 21 = 23 | The Magician |
| Whoopi Goldberg | November 13 | 11 + 13 = 24 | The High Priestess |
| Taylor Swift | December 13 | 12 + 13 = 25 | The Empress |
| Virginia Woolf | January 25 | 1 + 25 = 26 | The Emperor |
| George Harrison | February 25 | 2 + 25 = 27 | The Hierophant |
| Aretha Franklin | March 25 | 3 + 25 = 28 | The Lovers |
| Sophia Loren | September 20 | 9 + 20 = 29 | The Chariot |
| Oprah Winfrey | January 29 | 1 + 29 = 30 | Strength |
| David Bowie | January 8 | 1 + 8 = 9 | The Hermit |
| James Baldwin | August 2 | 8 + 2 = 10 | Wheel of Fortune |
| Billie Holiday | April 7 | 4 + 7 = 11 | Justice |
| Barack Obama | August 4 | 8 + 4 = 12 | The Hanged One |
| Frida Kahlo | July 6 | 7 + 6 = 13 | Death |
| Freddie Mercury | September 5 | 9 + 5 = 14 | Temperance |
| Tina Turner | November 26 | 11 + 26 = 37 | The Devil |
| Jimi Hendrix | November 27 | 11 + 27 = 38 | The Tower |
| Whitney Houston | August 9 | 8 + 9 = 17 | The Star |
| Michelle Obama | January 17 | 1 + 17 = 18 | The Moon |
| John Lennon | October 9 | 10 + 9 = 19 | The Sun |
| Toni Morrison | February 18 | 2 + 18 = 20 | Judgement |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | October 11 | 10 + 11 = 21 | The World |
George Harrison gets the Hierophant, which is the card for teachers and for people who carry a tradition. Harrison studied sitar under Ravi Shankar, converted to Hinduism, and spent the rest of his life practicing it. John Lennon was born in October and gets the Sun instead; his light shone incredibly bright. I love Whitney Houston carrying hope with her, Hendrix's electric guitar striking down everything false; Tina Turner's desires ruling her and those around her.
How one Bearing plays out in four people
February 18 gives 20, Judgement. Toni Morrison was born on it in 1931, Yoko Ono in 1933, Audre Lorde in 1934, John Travolta in 1954.
Judgement is card twenty, the call near the journey's end. As a lifelong orientation it means you are built for the honest life review the way some people are built for avoidance. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for novels about slavery and what came after it. Lorde described herself as "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" and published a book about her own breast cancer two years after the mastectomy. Ono and Travolta, I think, have asked for honesty from themselves and others in quite different ways.
January 17 gives 18, the Moon: Michelle Obama, Betty White, Muhammad Ali, Jim Carrey. The Moon is the card for reading a room by feel instead of by argument. Interesting to think of how that might play out for each of them. How they each use/used intuition to feel their way through life.
The most interesting and rarest Bearing
February 20 is 2 plus 20, which is 22. There are twenty-two cards and the first one is numbered zero, so the sum goes all the way around the wheel and lands back at the beginning.
Zero is the Fool. Rihanna, Kurt Cobain, Sidney Poitier.
The Fool is card zero, the one who steps off the cliff edge with a light bag and an open face, and as a lifelong orientation it means you meet the world ready to start, that the route gets invented as you walk it, that you're allowed to be new at things and to start over as many times as a life requires. They each certainly created a path never taken.
It's also one of the two rarest cards to be born under. There are 366 possible birthdays and twenty-two possible Bearings, and they don't divide evenly, because very few dates add up to two and very few add up to forty. Most sums land in the middle. The Hanged One covers 21 days of the year. The Fool covers 12.
You don't need anyone's age
Mariah Carey has never confirmed the year she was born. She calls her birthday an anniversary and leaves it there.
But we've got her. March 27 is 3 plus 27, which is 30, which wraps to 8. Strength, card eight, the turn from outer force to inner power. As a lifelong orientation it means you are built for presence the way some people are built for noise. Oprah Winfrey has it too, from January 29, and so does Maya Angelou, from April 4. Different days, same card. Same embodied strength.
Find yours
The older way of doing this adds the whole date including the year, then folds the total down to a smaller number. It's a real method with a long history and it answers a slightly different question. We keep the date whole, which reaches all twenty-two cards.
Your own sum takes about as long as reading this sentence. Add the month, add the day, and if you go past twenty-two, keep counting from zero.