Western esoteric
Tarot 塔罗
78 cards · three positions
Seventy-eight cards, drawn three at a time without replacement — past, present, future, each upright or reversed. The future position is read as tendency, never as forecast.
The structure of this instrument
Seventy-eight cards, three positions
The deck is twenty-two major arcana — the large, named turns — and four suits of fourteen: wands for drive, cups for feeling, swords for thought, pentacles for the material. A three-card spread draws past, present and future, without replacement: no card can appear twice, because a deck is a deck.
Each card is drawn upright or reversed, and the two are different readings of the same figure rather than 'good' and 'bad' versions of it. The reversal usually names the same force out of proportion — too much, too little, or turned inward.
Why the future position is not a forecast
The third position is read as tendency: where this configuration leans if nothing changes. That is a claim about the present, phrased as a direction. It is not a claim about what will happen, and no reading here will make one.
This is the same rule the other three instruments follow. Tarot only needs it said louder, because it is the tradition where being asked to predict is the default expectation.
The same sealed draw as everything else
The deck is not shuffled by a random number generator you have to trust. The server commits to a sealed seed before the first card, your own interaction mixes into every draw, and afterwards the seed is published so the whole spread can be recomputed in your browser.