About Castarot
A tarot site in three languages. Several readers, one Rider–Waite deck of 78 cards, and each reader separately remembers what you have drawn with them. What follows is how it works and what it keeps — including the part it cannot do.
How it works
How the cards are drawn
Drawn at random from all 78, each with roughly a four-in-ten chance of landing reversed. The draw is fixed before anything is written — the reader receives the result rather than picking cards to fit a story.
Who writes the reading
A language model, under a set of constraints written per reader. Most of them are prohibitions: no dates, no predicting what someone else will do, no softening a real cost, no lists of exactly three. Each reader also has their own list of refusals, printed on their own page.
What the memory actually is
Only cards that have come up more than once with the same reader are kept. When one returns, the reader names where it sat last time and which way up it was. It remembers cards, not what you said. A different reader is a different memory.
What is kept, and for how long
- A random id
- Kept in a cookie in your browser, used only to link your readings together. No name and no email, and nothing else that points back to you.
- The cards you drew
- The name, the position, the orientation. This is kept long-term — it is the memory itself; delete it and the feature is gone.
- Your question and the reading text
- Emptied after 180 days by a job that runs nightly. The row stays; the card record is untouched.
This is not decorative wording. The job is installed on the server and was tested against a record deliberately aged to 200 days: the question and the reading text were emptied, and the card record survived.
What it cannot do
- No live psychics. The readers are AI personas with different interpretive lenses, not different people. Nobody is typing on the other end, and nothing is billed by the minute.
- No accuracy is claimed. What tarot does here is hold your question still long enough to look at it.
- Not advice. Readings are not medical, legal, financial or safety guidance. For those, go to someone qualified.
Where the card art comes from
The 78 illustrations are the 1909 Rider–Waite deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951). More than seventy years after her death it is in the public domain in the US, the EU and Japan — the licence tag on every single file was checked on Wikimedia Commons. The original scans have had their outer border and title band trimmed, and one pass of tone laid over them so they sit with the frame. The frame, the banner and the card back were made here. The reader portraits are public-domain paintings — several decorative panels by Mucha (1860–1939), plus Copernicus by Matejko (1873), The Alchymist by Wright (1771) and The Crystal Ball by Waterhouse (1902). Their licence tags were checked one by one on Wikimedia Commons too, then cropped and toned to match.
Who made it
Built by one person, not a company. The card frame, the reader characters as written, and the copy in all three languages were made here, and no language was translated into the other two — the three were written separately.