What Memento Arcana is

The honest version

A tarot deck is seventy-eight images with five centuries of accumulated meaning behind them. A reading lays some of them out and asks you to interpret them against a question. That is the mechanism, and it is genuinely useful, not because the cards know anything, but because a card you did not choose is an interpretation you would not have generated, and fitting it to your circumstances is real work.

We are not going to tell you the cards predict the future. We are not going to tell you what someone else is privately thinking. Those claims sell well and they are not ones we are willing to make.

How the readings actually work

• The deck is shuffled on the server. Fisher-Yates over all 78 cards using a cryptographic random source, with an independent coin flip for each reversal. The browser never draws its own cards, because a browser that draws its own cards can redraw until it likes the answer.
• Nothing is weighted. The Tower is exactly as likely as The Sun. We do not tilt the deck toward pleasant cards to improve how the site feels.
• The daily card is the one exception. It is drawn deterministically from the date, so every visitor genuinely sees the same card and it survives a server restart.
• Interpretations are composed from the card content and positions. No AI is involved anywhere on the site. Every reading is composed from written card meanings plus the relationships in the draw itself, so it works with every third-party service down.

What we will not do

The reading engine is explicitly built to decline medical diagnoses, predictions of death, pregnancy claims and legal advice, and to point you toward an actual professional instead. That is a designed limit, not a gap. If a reading here ever surfaces something genuinely heavy, the right next step is a person, not another spread.

For reflection and entertainment. Not medical, legal, or financial advice.

What stays free

All 78 card meanings, every spread guide, the entire Learn Tarot course and the daily card, permanently. A tarot site that charges for the meaning of The Tower is not one worth running. Premium covers unlimited readings, the advanced spreads and journal analytics: the parts that cost us something to provide.