Tarot Birth Cards

Those are your birth cards. They are the tarot's version of the Life Path, and I read them in every full portrait I write. Where the Life Path tells me the road you are walking, the birth card tells me the character who is walking it.

What a birth card is

The Major Arcana are the twenty two big cards of the deck, The Fool through to The World. In a spread each one is a moment, a card that has turned up today and will be gone tomorrow. As a birth card the same card is a lifetime. It is the archetype you are living out, the story you keep finding yourself inside, the lesson you came here to learn more than once.

Strength as a birth card is a whole life of learning to be gentle with your own wild side. The Hermit as a birth card is a life that keeps needing the lantern and the quiet hill. Death as a birth card, and I say this to every client who gets it, is a life of endings that make room, and the people who carry it are some of the most alive I have met.

I treat the birth card as a mirror you can hold up at any age and still see something new in.

How I count

I write the date as eight digits, day then month then year, and add every digit. Someone born on 14 March 1987 writes 14 03 1987 and adds 1 + 4 + 0 + 3 + 1 + 9 + 8 + 7 to get 33, which is over 22, so she adds again and 3 + 3 gives 6, The Lovers. If the number you land on has two digits, you add them once more for a second card, and if that is still two digits you add again for a third. A single digit straight away means one card.

That is the whole method. The How to Find Your Birth Cards page walks through it slowly with more examples, including the ones that give two and three cards.

This is the one place in my work where I add the whole date as a single string of digits. The Life Path in numerology is reduced part by part, day, month and year separately, so that a Master Number is not lost on the way through. The two systems count differently on purpose and they tell you different things, which is exactly why I read both.

The cards that share a number

Because every two digit card reduces to a single digit, the Majors fall into nine families, and your cards always come from the same family, reading downward from the number you landed on.

The Magician sits with the Wheel of Fortune and The Sun. The High Priestess sits with Justice and Judgement. The Empress sits with The Hanged Man and The World. The Emperor sits with Death and The Fool, because 22 counts as The Fool. The Hierophant sits with Temperance. The Lovers sit with The Devil. The Chariot sits with The Tower. Strength sits with The Star. The Hermit sits with The Moon.

So a person who lands on 15 has The Devil and The Lovers, and reads them as one story about desire and choice. A person who lands on 6 has The Lovers alone. Both are in the same family. One of them has the harder card on the table as well.

How this section is laid out

How to Find Your Birth Cards gives you the arithmetic, every step shown, with worked examples for one card, two cards, three cards and the case where the total lands exactly on 22.

The Birth Cards is the index. It lists the twenty two cards in deck order with a line on each, and from there each card has its own page as a birth card: your life's archetype, who you are, the shadow, love and work, what you are here to learn, the cards that share your number, and how the card sits across the tarot, numerology and astrology pages on this site.

Each birth card page is written about a life, the card as an archetype you live rather than a card that turns up in a spread. If you want the card's meaning in a reading, The 78 Cards section has a page for every card and I link to it from each birth card page.

Where to start

Do the sum. It takes a minute and you cannot get it wrong if you add carefully. Then read the page for your card and notice what fits and what does not. If you have two or three cards, read the first one as the life and the others as the deeper layers underneath it.

Then go and find your Life Path on the numerology pages and sit the two side by side. In my experience that is where the real conversation starts. One number describes the road and one card describes the traveller, and when you have both you begin to see the shape of the whole thing.

You will be your own teacher. All I will do is help you remember what you already know.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

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