Tarot Birth and Year Cards

How it works

The sum. Add the month, the day and the four-digit year of birth as whole numbers. While the total is above 22, replace it by the sum of its digits. The number you reach, from 1 to 22, is the Personality card; the sum of its own digits is the Soul card, and a one-digit number is both at once. That is Mary K. Greer's method, first published in Tarot for Your Self in 1984 with credit to the classes of Angeles Arrien, and restated in her later books.

Take the person in Figure 1, born on 19 January 1989: 1 + 19 + 1989 = 2009, whose digits add up to 11, and 1 + 1 = 2. Trump XI is Justice, their Personality card, and trump II the High Priestess, their Soul card. A date that reaches 19 runs on to 10 and to 1, the one three-card chain; Greer reads the middle card, the Wheel of Fortune, as a Teacher card.

The Hidden Factor. Greer groups the trumps that share a digit root into nine constellations: 1, 10 and 19; 2, 11 and 20; and so on. A person's Hidden Factor is any card of their own constellation that their sum does not reach. For the person in Figure 1 that is Judgement, XX. Some dates have two (a single 4 leaves Death and the Fool unreached) and some have none, Greer's chains from 14-5 to 18-9. Over every day from 1900 to 2030, 74.7 percent of dates have one Hidden Factor card, 4.6 percent two and 20.8 percent none. Greer reads the card as a shadow in youth that becomes a teacher later; that is her interpretation, and we give it as hers.

The Fool and 22. The Fool is printed 0. In Greer's arithmetic a total of 22 is the Fool, as Personality card, with the Emperor as Soul card; her first edition of 1984 gave the two roles the other way round, and other calculators turn 22 into 4 and give Death and the Emperor instead. A sum of 22 happens only for births up to 1991, on 5.3 percent of the days from 1900 to 2030, and for no one born from 1992 until 2256.

The year card. The same sum with the calendar year in place of the birth year gives the card of that year, January to December: for the person in Figure 1, 1 + 19 + 2026 = 2046, which reduces to 12, the Hanged Man. The chart shows the three years either side and stars any year whose card is also one of the person's own, as Greer and her readers do; starring the Moon and Rising cards too is our own addition. The year card is a theme for the year, never a timing for anything.

Four cards from the natal chart. The Golden Dawn gave each sign of the zodiac a trump: Aries the Emperor, Taurus the Hierophant, Gemini the Lovers, Cancer the Chariot, Leo Strength, Virgo the Hermit, Libra Justice, Scorpio Death, Sagittarius Temperance, Capricorn the Devil, Aquarius the Star and Pisces the Moon. We apply that table to the tropical positions of your Sun, your Moon and your rising degree, computed from an ephemeris. The Sun decan card is one of the numbered suit cards: Book T gives each ten degrees of the zodiac a card from 2 to 10 in the suit of the sign's element, a planet in the old Chaldean order and a title. The person in Figure 1 has the Sun at 29° 55′ of Capricorn: the Devil, and in the third decan the Four of Pentacles, the Sun's decan, which Book T calls the Lord of Earthly Power. Their Moon in Cancer gives the Chariot and their Leo rising gives Strength.

Without a birth time the Sun is taken at noon in the place of birth, and a card is marked certain only when it is the same at every moment the birth could fall in; near the edge of a sign the chart says which input is missing. The Moon card needs a birth time, and the Rising card a time and a place; without them we show nothing in their place.

Numbering and art. Strength is VIII and Justice XI, as printed in Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 deck; other decks swap them. The pictures are faithful scans of the 1910 printing of her designs, served from our own files with a record of where each came from.

Why other calculators differ. Most web calculators add the month, the day, the century and the last two digits of the year instead of the whole year, and some add every digit. Greer's sum and the four-number sum name a different first card on 66.7 percent of the days from 1900 to 2030, and the four methods in use disagree on 52 to 67 percent of dates. Our chart names the other method's cards for your date: it is not wrong, it is another convention.

The arithmetic and the tables were checked on 3,288 dates and 1,407 year cards against an independent program written from the sources, and the Sun's position against a separate ephemeris to within a thousandth of a degree. That shows the method is applied as its authors state it.

Origins and history

The cards are from the 1440s; reading them is from the 1750s; their letters and signs are from 1781 to 1888; birth cards are from the 1970s and 1980s.

For three centuries the trumps were a game. They were called trionfi, triumphs, after the allegorical floats of Renaissance processions, and they outranked the four suits in a trick-taking game played at the courts of Milan, Ferrara, Florence and Bologna. Their order, their number and even their subjects varied from city to city.

The occult tarot begins in Paris in 1781, when Court de Gébelin declared the cards to be an Egyptian book and his collaborator gave each trump a Hebrew letter. Etteilla turned the idea into a trade; Lévi rebuilt it on the Kabbalah as he understood it; the Golden Dawn rebuilt it again, and its tables, printed by Crowley and drawn into Smith's deck, are the ones most English-language readers know. Birth cards are the latest layer: a twentieth-century arithmetic, laid over those nineteenth-century attributions, of a fifteenth-century game.

The 22 cards

Each trump has its own page: its picture in 1909, the Golden Dawn's letter, sign and title, its place in Greer's constellations and how often it falls to a birth date, how the decks and schools differ over it, and the claims made about it.

Variants and what we leave out

Several sums and several sets of correspondences circulate as birth cards. We describe them so you can recognise them, and say what we do instead.

• The four-number sum. The Tarot School, Labyrinthos and most web calculators add the month, the day, the century and the year's last two digits, and never reach the Fool. A different first card from Greer's on 66.7 percent of dates; our chart names its result.
• Every digit added. Some calculators and some year-card pages add the digits one by one; that differs from Greer's sum for the first card on 51.7 percent of dates. Not offered.
• No Fool. The Tarot School holds that no sum can reach a card numbered 0, and some writers reduce 22 to 4. We keep Greer's rule that 22 is the Fool, and say that others differ.
• Three equal cards for 19. Most calculators treat the Sun, the Wheel and the Magician as three birth cards; Greer reads the Wheel as a Teacher card. Ours is Greer's.
• The year's start. Arrien runs the year card from birthday to birthday; Greer describes both that cycle and the calendar year, and suggests a rule by the half of the year one is born in. We compute the calendar year and say so.
• Strength XI and Justice VIII. The Marseille and Thoth decks keep the older numbering, under which 11-2 becomes Strength with the High Priestess and 17-8 the Star with Justice. Greer accepts either if it is stated; we state the 1909 numbering.
• Court cards and ruling planets. Greer, Book T and later writers give the court cards to signs in three different schemes, and some add a card for the ruler of the Sun's sign. Left out until one scheme can be named and defended.
• Greer's other personal cards and Arrien's name cards. Cards from the letters of the name and further minor cards add cards without adding meaning, and the letter values are unverified. Left out.
• Triplicity rulers for the decans. Modern astrology modules give the decans other planets; the card is the same, the planet differs. We show Book T's planet and label it.
• Decans counted from a star. Book T says the decans begin from the Lion's Heart, Regulus; some read that as a sidereal zodiac. Every implementation checked, and ours, uses the tropical signs, and Regulus was never at the start of Leo in the tropical zodiac.
• The Thoth deck. Crowley renamed several trumps and exchanged the letters of the Emperor and the Star, but kept their signs, so its sign cards are the same as ours. Its art is in copyright and is never shown.
• The French school. Lévi and Papus put the Magician on the first letter and the Fool next to last. We follow the Golden Dawn and note the French letters where it matters.
• The outer planets. Uranus for the Fool, Neptune for the Hanged Man and Pluto for Judgement are a twentieth-century addition; Book T gives those three trumps the elements. Shown as a labelled note only.
• Drawn readings. Daily cards and spreads are a different practice, chance rather than calculation. Not part of this chart.

EsoTerrier is independent of Mary K. Greer, of the Tarot School, of U.S. Games Systems and of any present-day order using the name Golden Dawn; none has reviewed or endorsed these pages.

Myths and disputed claims

What is said about the tarot and about birth cards, who says it, and what the record shows. The label is ours.

• The tarot came out of Egypt: its trumps are the pages of an Egyptian Book of Thoth saved by priests.

  false

  Who says it: Court de Gébelin (1781), Etteilla, Papus, and many books and sites since.

  What the record shows: The cards are recorded in northern Italy from 1440 as a game. Court de Gébelin wrote 41 years before hieroglyphs were read and gave no evidence; Waite called the idea a reverie.

• The Romani carried the tarot into Europe from the East.

  false

  Who says it: Vaillant (1857), then Papus (1889) and the many decks sold as gypsy tarot.

  What the record shows: The tarot is Italian and older than the story. Vaillant offered no evidence, and no Romani card reading is recorded before the twentieth century.

• Readers have leaned on the 22 archetypes for centuries.

  disputed

  Who says it: Our own old page and most popular sites.

  What the record shows: The cards are from the 1440s, but reading them for meaning is recorded only from about 1750 and in print from 1781. Archetype in this sense is Jung's twentieth-century word.

• The tarot was designed to encode the 22 Hebrew letters and the Kabbalah.

  false

  Who says it: De Mellet (1781), Lévi (1856), the Golden Dawn and the esoteric tradition since.

  What the record shows: The letters were first paired with the trumps in 1781, then reordered by Lévi and again by the Golden Dawn; fifteenth-century packs had other orders and numbers of trumps. As a later tradition it is real, and our sign cards rest on it.

• The Golden Dawn's tarot teaching descends from an old German order and an ancient secret tradition.

  false

  Who says it: W. Wynn Westcott and the order's founding story.

  What the record shows: The historian Ellic Howe showed the German letters to be Westcott's invention; the cipher manuscripts are on paper watermarked 1809.

• Birth cards are an ancient method handed down from Pythagoras.

  false

  Who says it: Our own old page and some birth-card sites.

  What the record shows: Arrien taught the sum in the 1970s and Greer published it in 1984. Pythagoras left no writings and no arithmetic of dates.

• The Tarot School invented the birth-card formula.

  disputed

  Who says it: A 2012 book on birth cards; the school's pages present the method without naming Greer.

  What the record shows: Greer published the method in 1984 and the school was founded in 1995. Its four-number sum may be its own variant; the idea of birth cards is older.

• Birth cards are found by adding the month, the day, the century and the last two digits of the year.

  disputed

  Who says it: The Tarot School and most web calculators.

  What the record shows: A different sum. It names a different first card from Greer's on two dates in three between 1900 and 2030; the Soul card never differs. Neither is wrong; ours is the published original, and the chart shows the other result.

• The Hidden Factor shows what a person hides: a shadow in youth and a teacher later.

  unverified

  Who says it: Greer (1987, 2021) and writers who follow her.

  What the record shows: Greer's interpretation of her own construct; no study tests it. We present the card as the one your sum does not reach, and her reading of it as hers.

• Jung endorsed the tarot as a psychological tool.

  disputed

  Who says it: Many sites on Jung and tarot, and our own old page.

  What the record shows: Jung allowed the tarot one hedged sentence in print and spoke of it for a few minutes in a seminar of 1 March 1933, as an intuitive method like the I Ching. He never wrote on it at length.

• The Fool's Journey, the trumps as one story of growth, is their original meaning.

  unverified

  Who says it: Our own old page and many beginners' books.

  What the record shows: The term and the reading are Eden Gray's (1970) and the Jungian version Sallie Nichols's (1980): a useful modern lens. The fifteenth-century trumps were a ladder of allegories for a game.

• The birth-card arithmetic leaves no room for doubt and gives a fixed picture of the self.

  false

  Who says it: Our own old page.

  What the record shows: The four methods in use give different first cards on 52 to 67 percent of dates. The arithmetic is exact, but the choice of sum, the rule for 22 and the Hidden Factor are conventions, and nothing links the cards to personality.

• Waite swapped Strength and Justice.

  disputed

  Who says it: Many deck guides.

  What the record shows: The Golden Dawn moved them, so that Leo comes before Libra in its letter order; Waite's 1909 deck was the first published deck to print the swap.

• The 78 cards were planned on Pythagorean number theory, since 78 is a triangular number.

  false

  Who says it: Our own old page.

  What the record shows: The sum is true and the inference is not: 78 is 56 suit cards and 22 trumps, and early packs varied, up to 97 cards in the Florentine Minchiate.

• Tarot cards reveal character or predict events.

  unverified

  Who says it: Much of the tradition and most tarot sites.

  What the record shows: The few controlled tests found nothing beyond chance, and the Barnum effect explains why readings feel accurate.

• The year card tells you when to make big decisions.

  false

  Who says it: Our own engine documentation, before October 2026.

  What the record shows: Advice we never give. The year card is a theme for the calendar year.

Stories and lore

These are told as their tellers told them. Some are history, some are legend, and each is labelled.

The game of triumphs. In 1440 a Florentine notary paid four and a half ducats for a gilded pack painted with the arms of Sigismondo Malatesta. The painted Milanese cards carry the Visconti and Sforza emblems, and some see the dukes' own faces in them; one of the finest sets has lost its Devil and its Tower, and no one knows whether they were ever painted.

Court de Gébelin at the card table. The Protestant pastor and antiquary wrote that the first time he saw tarot played, in a Paris salon, he knew at once that it was an Egyptian book of wisdom, saved from the burning of the temples and carried through Rome to France. Waite, a century later, called it the scholar's own reverie, and the historian Michael Dummett saw in the occult history that grew from it a piece of propaganda more successful than its authors could have hoped. Told as legend.

Etteilla's trade. A Paris seller of seeds and prints, who spelt his surname backwards to make his name, turned the Egyptian story into a business: fixed meanings for every card, spreads, a society of interpreters, and a pack of his own design, which makes him the first professional tarot reader we know of.

The Bohemians. Jean-Alexandre Vaillant, who had lived among the Romani, reasoned that a people then wrongly thought to be Egyptian must have carried the Egyptian book, and Papus made the tarot "of the Bohemians" the key to all occult science. No Romani card reading is recorded before the twentieth century. Told as legend.

The cipher in the bookshop. The Golden Dawn's founding story has a bundle of coded pages passing from a dead Freemason's papers to a clergyman and then to Westcott, who decoded them in 1887 and found the tarot attributions inside, and a German adept who licensed the new order by letter. The letters were forged and the paper is watermarked 1809. Told as the order's own legend.

Pixie's six months. Pamela Colman Smith, called Pixie, a stage designer and illustrator in the circles of Yeats and Ellen Terry, drew the 78 cards between April and October 1909 and wrote to Alfred Stieglitz in November that she had "just finished a big job for very little cash!" She died in Cornwall in 1951, little known; the deck she drew became the most reproduced tarot in the world. She is thought to have seen the British Museum's new photographs of the 1491 Sola Busca, which would explain two of her pictures, but that is not documented.

Jung's seminar. On 1 March 1933 Jung told his Zurich seminar that the tarot's pictures carried archetypal ideas and might be used, like the I Ching, as an intuitive method. In print he allowed the cards a single cautious sentence. Everything larger said about Jung and the tarot came later.

The Thoth cards nobody saw. Frieda Harris painted for five years to Crowley's instructions; the book appeared in 200 copies in 1944; Crowley died in 1947 and Harris in 1962, and the deck was printed only in the late 1960s.

Arrien's classroom. Greer tells that she learnt the birth-date sum from the anthropologist Angeles Arrien in 1977 and, when Arrien's own book was slow to appear, asked and was given permission to publish it. Arrien was speaking on the tarot in public by 1972 and teaching it in the San Francisco Bay Area by 1975; her own book came out in 1987. The whole history of the method is one generation long.

The wheel's letters. Smith's Wheel of Fortune carries the letters T A R O, which read round the rim as ROTA, TORA or TARO. The device is Lévi's and Papus's: a symbol, not the origin of the word.

Evidence and criticism

The history is settled. Dummett, Decker, Depaulis and Farley document the tarot as a fifteenth-century Italian game, used for fortune-telling from about 1750 and read as esoteric from 1781. The earliest records are the Florentine journal of 1440 and the Ferrara accounts of 1442.

The attributions are a tradition, not a discovery. The Hebrew letters were given to the trumps in one order in 1781, another in 1856 and a third by the Golden Dawn, and Crowley moved two more; each school has presented its order as the true one. Our sign and decan cards are the Golden Dawn's and say so.

Birth cards. No study tests whether birth cards describe anyone. The four sums in use disagree on more than half of all dates, which alone shows that the result is a convention. For tarot readings in general, Susan Blackmore (1983) found no reliable ability to pick one's own reading out of others, and Itai Ivtzan and Christopher French found that readings from chosen cards and from cards picked by a computer were rated alike, by believers and sceptics. The Barnum effect, the readiness to accept a general description as one's own, explains why readings feel accurate.

The tradition disagrees with itself. The Tarot School and Greer differ on the sum and on the Fool, Greer and Arrien on when the year begins, the French and English schools on where the Fool belongs, the Golden Dawn and Crowley on two letters, and astrologers on the decan rulers. These are set out under Variants.

Our own record. Until October 2026 our public page called the method Pythagorean and centuries old and its result a permanent picture of the self; ten of our one-line card meanings followed the order of a modern keyword list too closely; our engine notes described another method; and a Moon card could be computed from the wrong moment. All of that has been replaced or fixed.

What the checking does show. That the arithmetic is Greer's as she states it, that the tables are Book T's, and that the astronomy agrees with an independent ephemeris. That is the only kind of correctness this system has.

Art and names. Smith's designs of 1909 are in the public domain in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, and faithful scans add no new right. Later recoloured editions belong to their publisher, and several names under which the deck is sold are registered trade marks; we use none of them, and credit the art to Pamela Colman Smith, 1909. Waite's book, Book T and the older French texts are public domain and quoted briefly with credit; Greer's, Arrien's and the scholars' books are in copyright and cited for facts only.

Terms

Birth cards

Greer's term for the trumps a birth date reaches by her sum: the Personality card and the Soul card, which may be one card.

Personality card

The first card of the chain: month + day + four-digit year, reduced while above 22 by adding its digits. A number from 1 to 22.

Soul card

The digit sum of the Personality card's number (11 gives 2). When the Personality number has one digit, the same card is both.

Hidden Factor

Greer's term for the card or cards of a person's constellation that their own sum does not reach; she also calls it the Teacher card. Some dates have none and some two.

Constellation

Greer's name for the trumps that share a digit root: 1, 10 and 19; 2, 11 and 20; and so on to 9 and 18. Laid out in rows of nine, each column is one constellation.

Year card

The same sum with the calendar year in place of the birth year, read as the theme of that year from January to December.

0 · counted as 22

The Fool is printed 0; in Greer's arithmetic a total of 22 is the Fool. Our chart writes it this way.

Sun-sign, Moon and Rising cards

Our plain names for the trump of the zodiac sign that holds the Sun, the Moon or the rising degree, by the Golden Dawn's table: Aries is the Emperor, Taurus the Hierophant, and so on.

Decan and Sun decan card

A decan is a third of a sign, ten degrees. Book T gives each of the 36 a numbered suit card from 2 to 10, a planet in the Chaldean order and a title such as Lord of Dominion.

Book T

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's tarot paper, written by S. L. MacGregor Mathers in the late 1880s or early 1890s and first printed in 1912: the source of the letters, signs and decans used here.

Trumps and Major Arcana

The 22 picture cards were the trumps (trionfi) of the game. Major and Minor Arcana are Paul Christian's terms of 1863, now standard.

Pips and courts

The numbered suit cards and the four court ranks. Book T calls the courts Princess, Prince, Queen and King; the 1909 deck Page, Knight, Queen and King.