Your birth card, and what it says

A tarot birth card is the one piece of arithmetic in the deck that almost everybody enjoys, partly because it takes a minute and partly because the answer does not change. Whatever else is going on this year, the card that comes out of your date of birth is the same one it was when you were nine.

The idea is straightforward. Add up the numbers in your date of birth, reduce the total until it lands on one of the twenty two cards of the major arcana, and read that card as a lifelong theme rather than as a forecast.

How to work it out on paper

Take the day, the month and the full year, and add them together as ordinary numbers. Somebody born on the fourteenth of March in 1991 adds fourteen and three and 1991, which comes to 2008.

Then add the digits of that total: two plus zero plus zero plus eight is ten. Ten is inside the range of the major arcana, so the card is number ten, the Wheel of Fortune.

Most people also get a second card, because ten reduces once more, to one, which is the Magician. Read as a pair, that is a person whose life keeps handing them turns they did not arrange, and whose way through is making something out of whatever landed on the table.

The birth card calculator does all of this in a second and shows the arithmetic, which is worth looking at once so you know it is nothing more mysterious than addition.

Why the methods disagree

You will find slightly different systems, and that is worth knowing before somebody tells you your card is wrong.

Some reduce every total to a number between one and nine, which loses the interesting range. Some stop at twenty two and call twenty two the Fool. Others cut the year in half before adding. The one we use, and the one most modern writers use, is the plain sum reduced to twenty one or below, with the pair kept when there is one.

None of them is the true version. They are conventions, in the way that reading the cards from left to right is a convention, and the useful move is to pick one and stop shopping.

What it can honestly tell you

It gives you one card to know properly. Almost everyone learning tarot reads about seventy eight cards at a shallow depth, and a birth card is an invitation to go deep on one of them for years: what it looks like when it is going well, what it looks like when it is going badly, which of your habits it describes rather too accurately.

It also gives you a way of noticing a theme. People with the Hermit tend to recognize something in the pattern of going quiet and coming back with the thing nobody else saw. People with the Emperor usually have a long history of being handed the structure to hold, whether or not they asked for it.

That recognition is the whole benefit, and it is not nothing, because a pattern you can name is one you can decide about.

What it does not get to decide

Your birth card is not a personality test, and it does not decide anything for you. It cannot tell you what work suits you, who to marry, or what this decade holds, and a card assigned by arithmetic to everyone born on the same day is not going to be the last word on any of that.

There is also a shadow to every one of them, and I would rather you had it from me than from a badly written list. The Star card can look like hope and can also look like waiting beautifully while nothing changes. The Chariot can be nerve and can be running. Read your own card for both, and be interested rather than flattered.

If you do not like the card you get

It happens, and it is nearly always the Devil, the Tower or Death, three cards that read far worse on a list than they do in an actual life.

The Devil is the card of the thing you keep going back to with your eyes open, which is uncomfortable to recognize and is not the same as being cursed. Death belongs to people who have already finished something and lived through the after, and they tend to be the ones who have changed shape more than once. The Tower goes to people who have had at least one year in which something they had built came down, and who are nevertheless still here, which is a rather different sentence from the one the picture seems to be making.

Sit with your card for two weeks before deciding it is bad news. Almost everybody who disliked theirs at first ends up quietly attached to it, mostly because it turns out to describe something they have already come through.

The year card, briefly

The related trick is the year card, where you swap your birth year for the current one and see which card the coming year adds up to for you. It is a way of choosing a theme rather than receiving a prophecy, and the difference between those two is the whole of our position on it.

If you want the longer version of that, the year ahead reading is set up for it, and there is a piece coming on what 2027 adds up to for anybody who likes to think about January in November.

Work yours out tonight, and then leave it alone for a while. A birth card is more useful met once a year than consulted every Tuesday.