How a tarot draw works
The deck, the shuffle, and what we left out on purpose.
A tarot deck is seventy-eight cards. Twenty-two of them are the Major Arcana, the big archetypes from The Fool to The World, and the other fifty-six are the Minor Arcana in four suits. You shuffle, you lay cards into positions that each have a name, and you read the picture in front of you as a mirror of where you are standing. Nothing in a spread is an answer. The cards give you images and the images give you something to think against — that is the whole mechanism, and it is older and plainer than the mystique around it.
Tarot began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game — tarocchi, played with trumps, with no fortune-telling attached. It became a divination deck in eighteenth-century France, when Court de Gébelin claimed in 1781 that the cards carried ancient Egyptian wisdom and Etteilla built the first working practice around that claim. The Egyptian origin story has no historical basis; it was an invention of its own century. The deck most readings lean on today is the Rider–Waite–Smith of 1909, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, and its conventions are the ones Bokki follows. We would rather tell you this than sell you the older, better story.
Bokki deals from the twenty-two Major Arcana only, and says so instead of implying a full deck. The shuffle is a seeded Fisher–Yates over those twenty-two: the seed is hashed with FNV-1a, and orientation is a second, separate hash draw in which about thirty percent of cards land reversed. The same seed always gives the same cards. That is a deliberate design, not a shortcut — your card of the day should still be your card of the day when you open the app again at dinner, and asking for a reshuffle changes the seed and gives you a genuinely new spread. Two spreads exist: one card for the day, and a three-card past, present and future. Each position carries a plain-language line saying what that slot answers, so a first-timer can read the spread without already knowing tarot.
In the Rider–Waite–Smith convention a reversed card is energy turned inward — blocked, held back, resisting — and not misfortune. Bokki keeps that framing everywhere, including on the two cards that frighten people most and should not: Death is an ending that makes room, and The Tower is what falls away because it was not holding you up. The future slot is written as a tendency, never as a fixed outcome. And no card ever carries a number attached to you or to anyone else.
Card names are translated into all thirteen of Bokki's languages, and a few of those choices were made carefully rather than literally, because this is a divination app and some words call up the wrong thing first. The Thai name for The Hanged Man avoids the phrase for hanging by the neck — the card shows a man suspended by one ankle, and we will not put that word on a screen meant to comfort. In Arabic and Persian the ordinary word for tower also reads as a zodiac sign, and our screens show zodiac signs right beside it, so we use the collapsing-tower wording that the card's own picture already shows. Small decisions, but a reading that speaks one language per screen is the difference between a translation and a mess.
The fifty-six Minor Arcana. No wands, cups, swords or pentacles, and no court cards — that is more than two-thirds of a real deck, and pretending otherwise would be the easiest lie in this app. Large spreads: there is no Celtic Cross and no ten-card layout, just the two above. Physical randomness: the draw is computed from a seed, so it is not a hardware shuffle and it is certainly not a deck cut under your own hands. If that matters to you — and for many readers it genuinely does — shuffle a real deck and use Bokki for the vocabulary. And the occult correspondences: nineteenth-century writers mapped the twenty-two Majors onto the Hebrew alphabet, the planets and the Tree of Life, and since we do not compute those attributions we do not quote them either.