How a date becomes your cards

What the Almanac gives you

Every day, the Almanac gives you two cards. One is the collective card, the one we all share that day. The other is your personal card, set by your birthday. Side by side, they show you the weather of the day and your angle on it.

Each day card has a Major Arcana card behind it, and behind that are the month and the year you’re in, each with its own card. Then there’s your Bearing, set the day you were born. It’s the one card that stays with you for life.

Everything below shows how we get there. If you like, you can work a date out by hand and land on the same cards.

Why every card can come up

Traditional numerology adds up the digits of a date until it’s down to a single small number. Try that with the twenty-two Major Arcana and two things go wrong. First, you can only ever reach about half the deck. Almost the whole back half, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, never comes up. Second, it treats the cards like a list of meanings to look up. The Majors are the Fool’s Journey, an arc from the Fool at the start to the World at the end, and the order matters.

So we use a map that was already in the deck. The twenty-two Majors form a circle, the Tarot Cycle, with the Fool at 0 running around to the World at 21, then around again. Think of a clock. It doesn’t stop when it passes twelve. You keep a running total, and whenever it reaches 22 or more, you subtract 22 and keep going. (For the math-minded, that’s dividing by 22 and keeping the remainder.) That one move keeps every card in play and the whole sequence in order.

Watch one all the way through

Take February 16, a birthday. Here’s how to find its Bearing, the card you carry for life. You can do it on the back of an envelope.

Most totals don’t land so neatly, and that’s where the wheel comes in. Take another birthday, November 19.

You go past the World, around through the Fool, and land at card 8. It works like a clock, where 14:00 comes back around to 2.

One note on numbering: the Almanac places Strength at 8 and Justice at 11, the Golden Dawn ordering most modern decks follow. Older Marseille decks swap the two. If you’re checking against a deck where Justice sits at 8, that’s why.

Two readings from one calculation

The Almanac gives you two readings side by side, worked out the same way. The collective reading is the one we all share on a given day, made from the date alone. The personal reading is yours, made from your birthday added into that same date. Both have three layers, a year, a month, and a day, and each one feeds the next.

The year and month are Majors

The first two layers place you on the wheel of twenty-two. The collective year is the digits of the year added up, then wrapped. The collective month adds the month’s number to that. The personal versions work the same way, with your birth month and day added in at the first step. Your birth year doesn’t come into it, because the reading is about where you are in the cycle right now. Your personal year card is that first layer on its own, and you can look yours up for any year.

The day is a Minor, tied to its Major

The Major gives a day its shape, the archetype it belongs to. A day has a texture too, and that’s what the fifty-six Minor Arcana are for. So the day card is a Minor, chosen so it always belongs to the day’s Major. The suit comes from the Major’s element: Fire to Wands, Water to Cups, Air to Swords, Earth to Pentacles. The rank comes from the date itself. That way, the texture of your day always matches its shape.

The whole thing on one card

Here’s every formula in one place, for anyone who wants to work out a reading exactly. Wrap means subtract 22 whenever the total reaches 22 or more, the same as dividing by 22 and keeping the remainder.

Why we show you the math

We publish the whole method because we want you to be able to use it yourself.

When the math is open, you can check any card yourself, and you can see how the whole system fits together. Tarot has always grown this way, one person at a time noticing a structure already in the cards and naming it. The Golden Dawn found the order and the elements. Waite and Smith fixed the images in 1909. The timing was the next layer waiting to be noticed.