Card Library

Explore the world's card decks

Six centuries of cartomancy, gathered in one library. From the 78-card Tarot to the 36-card Lenormand, from Bavarian Kipper to Japanese Hanafuda, study each deck's history and symbolism and read every card, fully translated into 52 languages.

8: deck traditions
52: languages
600+: years of history

Browse by tradition

Every family of divinatory cards has its own structure and way of reading. Start with the one that speaks to you.

🔮

Tarot

78 cards

22 Major and 56 Minor Arcana. Born as a Renaissance trump game in 1440s Italy and reinvented in 1909 as the fully illustrated Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the model for thousands of decks since.

3 decks

🌟

Oracle decks

varies

Free-form themed decks with no fixed structure. Each oracle sets its own card count, artwork and guidebook, from moons and animals to angels and affirmations, and is read intuitively rather than by rule.

Coming soon

🗝️

Petit Lenormand

36 cards

A 36-card oracle of plain symbols, the Rider, the Ship, the Fox, read like words in a sentence. It grew from a 1799 German parlor game, the Game of Hope.

Coming soon

🎯

Kipper

36 cards

A literal, situational 36-card system from 1870s Bavaria. The figures depict real people and events, and the direction they face steers the whole reading.

Coming soon

🌙

Sibilla

52 cards

Parlor oracles named for the Sibyls of antiquity, tied to the standard 52-card deck. Read across nineteenth-century salons in Italy, France and Austria.

Coming soon

🏛️

Grand Jeu

54 cards

The dense astro-mythological deck of Mlle Lenormand: 54 cards steeped in Greek and Roman myth, alchemy, flowers and the zodiac, built for precise fortune-telling.

Coming soon

🌸

Hanafuda

48 cards

Japanese flower cards: 48 cards in twelve suits, one for each month of the year, each a seasonal plant. Made to slip past Edo-era bans on Western cards.

Coming soon

♠️

Regional playing cards

40 cards

Latin-suited Spanish and Italian decks of coins, cups, swords and clubs. Everyday gaming packs that doubled as tools of divination across the Hispanic world.

Coming soon

Browse by purpose

People come to the cards with a question. Find the decks best suited to what you actually want to work on.

💞

Love & relationships

Decks tuned to romance, compatibility and intimacy, drawing on the emotional water of the Cups. For questions about soulmates, dating, commitment and repairing a bond.

Coming soon

💼

Career & money

Grounded, practical decks for work, finances and business strategy, rooted in the earthy Pentacles and the ambition of the Wands. For job moves, promotions and planning ahead.

Coming soon

🔭

Forecasting & timing

Predictive systems built to answer 'when' and 'what next', from year-ahead spreads to yes-or-no draws. The Lenormand and Kipper are prized here for their concrete, literal answers.

Coming soon

🌗

Shadow work & psychology

Jungian decks for meeting the parts of yourself you tend to hide. Confrontational imagery and honest prompts for trauma, patterns and integration, without spiritual bypassing.

Coming soon

🌿

Self-care & healing

Gentle, affirming decks for mindfulness, inner-child work and daily emotional upkeep. Soft artwork and unambiguous guidance to steady an anxious or burnt-out mind.

Coming soon

✨

Spiritual growth

Decks for intuition, meditation and a felt sense of connection, from angels and moons to the elements. For readers who use the cards as a contemplative practice.

Coming soon

🌱

Beginners & learning

Fully illustrated, easy-to-read decks that let you interpret every card on sight. The Rider-Waite-Smith model and its clear descendants are the classic place to start.

3 decks

🎬

Pop culture & fandom

The 78 archetypes retold through beloved films, shows, games and comics. Working decks that double as collector's pieces and gifts, with almost no learning curve.

Coming soon

🧭

Therapy & coaching tools

Metaphorical associative cards with no fixed meanings, used by therapists and coaches as a blank canvas for projection. For self-inquiry and conflict work rather than prediction.

Coming soon

🕯️

Esoteric & dark arts

Dense occult decks for advanced practice, layered with astrology, Kabbalah and alchemy. The Thoth and left-hand-path decks for ceremonial magic and deep study.

Coming soon

Featured decks

Hand-picked starting points, whether you are new to the cards or building a collection.

Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot

The deck that defined modern tarot.

1909 UK 78 cards

The Tarot of New York City

Seventy-eight arcana rewired for the five boroughs.

2026 USA 78 cards

The Tarot of Beijing

Seventy-eight arcana redrawn in the hutongs of old Beijing.

2026 China 78 cards

City tarot decks

The classic arcana reimagined through the life of a single city.

The Tarot of New York City

Seventy-eight arcana rewired for the five boroughs.

2026 USA 78 cards

The Tarot of Beijing

Seventy-eight arcana redrawn in the hutongs of old Beijing.

2026 China 78 cards

One tradition, many decks

Cartomancy is the art of reading cards for insight, and it is far wider than the Tarot alone. The same impulse runs through the 78-card Tarot, the 36-card Lenormand and Kipper, the playing-card Sibilla, the Japanese Hanafuda and the Latin-suited decks of Spain and Italy. Nearly all of them began as games or amusements, were reimagined as oracles, and are now used just as often for reflection and self-understanding.

Where the cards came from

Paper playing cards appear in ninth-century China and travel west through the Islamic world. By the fourteenth century the Mamluk deck of Egypt had fixed the four-suit structure, swords, polo sticks, cups and coins, that reached Europe through ports like Venice. In the 1440s the nobility of northern Italy added a fifth suit of illustrated trumps and a single Fool, and the game of tarocchi was born. For three centuries the Tarot was simply a card game; French Tarot is still one of the most played games in France.

The occult turn

The shift to divination came suddenly in the late eighteenth century. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the Tarot preserved the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt, and the Parisian Etteilla soon coined the word cartomancy and produced the first deck built for fortune-telling. The modern visual language arrived in 1909, when Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. By giving every one of the 56 Minor Arcana a full pictorial scene, Smith let anyone read the cards on sight, and more than 100 million copies later that framework is still the global standard.

Beyond the Tarot: the oracle systems

The nineteenth century produced tighter, more pragmatic systems. The Petit Lenormand reads its 36 plain symbols like syntax, combining cards into precise statements rather than open metaphors, and it grew from a 1799 board game, the Game of Hope. The Bavarian Kipper deck is blunter still: its cards show specific people and events, and the direction each figure faces decides past from future. The Sibilla decks, named for the prophetesses of antiquity, map onto ordinary playing cards, while the elaborate 54-card Grand Jeu weaves in myth, alchemy and the zodiac to pin events to exact timeframes.

Decks around the world

Cartomancy also lives inside regional playing cards. Spanish and Italian packs keep three court cards and drop the Queen entirely, and they served for both gambling and divination across the Hispanic world. In Japan, Hanafuda replaced numbers with twelve flowering months to evade a ban on foreign cards. Russian fortune-telling decks split each symbol across the edges of 25 square cards that the reader rotates to complete. Each system carries the culture and the constraints of the place that made it.

Why the cards work

You do not have to believe in prediction for a reading to feel meaningful. Psychologists point to the Barnum effect, our readiness to accept broad statements as personal, and to confirmation bias, which fixes the hits in memory and lets the misses fade. Carl Jung saw more in the cards: a gallery of archetypes and a map of individuation, and a projective surface, like an inkblot, onto which we cast our own inner state. Today the decks are used for journaling, mindfulness and shadow work as much as for foretelling anything.

How to use this library

Browse by tradition, browse by purpose, or search by name, origin or style. If you have come with a question rather than a deck in mind, the purpose shelves point you to the right cards: the best decks for love and relationships, for career and money, or for forecasting the year ahead. Open any deck to read its history, its symbolism and a card-by-card guide, all available in the 52 languages of the Tarot Academy ecosystem.

Frequently asked questions

: The library spans the whole cartomantic tradition: the 78-card Tarot, the 36-card Petit Lenormand and Kipper, the playing-card Sibilla, the 54-card Grand Jeu, Japanese Hanafuda and regional Spanish and Italian playing cards.
: The Tarot has 78 cards read as open, metaphoric images, so a single card can mean many things. The Lenormand has 36 plain symbols read like a sentence, where cards combine into specific, concrete statements. Tarot leans intuitive; Lenormand leans linguistic.
: Paper cards began in ninth-century China and reached Europe through the Mamluk deck of Egypt, which set the four-suit structure. Northern Italian nobles added a fifth suit of illustrated trumps in the 1440s, and that expanded deck became the Tarot.
: No. Many readers use the cards as a tool for reflection, journaling and mindfulness rather than prediction. Psychology explains much of their pull through the Barnum effect and confirmation bias, and through Jung's ideas of archetypes and projection.
: Yes. Every deck, its history and its card meanings are translated into all 52 languages supported by Tarot Academy, so you can read the cards in the language you know best.
: Alongside the traditions, the library is sorted by purpose. Decks led by the Cups suit questions of love and relationships, those led by Pentacles and Wands suit career and money, and the plain-spoken Lenormand and Kipper are the usual choice for forecasting and timing. Each purpose gathers the decks that fit it best.

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