Tarot birth card calculator: your personality and soul cards

The short answer: born on 14 July 1985? Then 7 + 14 + 1985 = 2006, and 2 + 0 + 0 + 6 = 8, so your birth card is Strength, which serves as both your personality and your soul card. Born on 3 March 1986? Then 3 + 3 + 1986 = 1992, 1 + 9 + 9 + 2 = 21, and 2 + 1 = 3: The World and The Empress. The calculator below does this for any date and shows the working.

What tarot birth cards are

Birth cards are the cards of the Major Arcana that your birth date points to. They are not a prediction. Think of them as two lenses that stay the same all your life: one for how you tend to show up in the world, one for the deeper question you keep coming back to. Many readers use them as a starting point for study, a way into the 22 cards that is personal from the first day.

In Mary K. Greer's terms, the first number of 22 or less is the personality card. If it has two digits, adding them gives a single digit from 1 to 9: the soul card. When the sum lands straight on a single digit, the same card is both. Every result links to my full page on that card, where you can read the upright and reversed meanings and look closely at the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith drawing.

The sum, step by step

The method uses the whole date and the whole year, with nothing dropped. Here it is with a date that gives two cards, 12 November 1990.

1. Write the date as numbers: month 11, day 12, year 1990.
2. Add them: 11 + 12 + 1990 = 2013.
3. Add the digits of the total: 2 + 0 + 1 + 3 = 6.
4. Six is already 22 or less and a single digit, so it is both cards: The Lovers.

And one that gives a pair, 10 October 2009: 10 + 10 + 2009 = 2029, then 2 + 0 + 2 + 9 = 13, Death, and 1 + 3 = 4, The Emperor. Most people born in the 20th century get a total between 1,900 and 2,050, and the digits of those totals add up to anything from 2 to 28. When the first reduction is still above 22, as with 1999 giving 28, you add once more: 2 + 8 = 10, and then 1 + 0 = 1, so Wheel of Fortune and The Magician.

The order of addition does not matter for the final numbers, as long as you keep the full year. Adding month, day and year first and then reducing is simply the easiest to check by hand. Leap day works like any other date: 29 February 2000 gives 2 + 29 + 2000 = 2031, and 2 + 0 + 3 + 1 = 6.

The nine card families

Because every soul card is a number from 1 to 9, the 22 cards fall into nine families. Each family is the soul card and the larger cards that reduce to it. Greer calls them constellations. Seeing your whole family is useful, because the other members show the same theme in a different key.

The family of 1 is the only one with three members, and the only way to get three birth cards is a total of 19: The Sun, Wheel of Fortune and The Magician. Greer describes the Wheel in the middle as a hidden or connecting card. The calculator labels it the card between them.

A note on numbering: this site follows the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, where Strength is 8 and Justice is 11. In older Marseille-style decks the two are swapped, so if you use one of those decks, read 8 and 11 accordingly.

Why 22 is The Fool

The Fool carries the number 0 in most decks, which raises a question: can it ever be a birth card? The convention I follow, which is Greer's, says yes. The Major Arcana has 22 cards, and after The World at 21 the journey starts again with The Fool, so a total of 22 is read as The Fool. Its soul card is then 2 + 2 = 4, The Emperor. You get 22 when the digits of your total add up to it, for example 3 + 1 + 1989 = 1993, and 1 + 9 + 9 + 3 = 22.

Not everyone agrees. Some readers never assign The Fool and stop at The World, and some count 22 as the Emperor family without naming The Fool at all. Your soul card is The Emperor in every version; only the name of the personality card changes. I mention it so you are not surprised if another source shows only one card.

Your year card

The same sum with the current year in place of your birth year gives your year card. For someone born on 14 July, 2026 gives 7 + 14 + 2026 = 2047, and 2 + 0 + 4 + 7 = 13: Death, an invitation to let something finish so something else can start. For the year card you keep that number of 22 or less and stop: there is no second step to a single digit. Greer follows the year card from one birthday to the next (she also watches it from 1 January), so the calculator starts at the card year you are in now and lets you look ahead.

Year cards are lighter than birth cards. They name a theme for twelve months, nothing more, and the same card comes back in other years. Compare it with your birth cards: a year card from your own family often feels like a year of going deeper into familiar ground.

Where the method comes from

The idea of personal tarot numbers is recent, but the arithmetic is old. Reducing a number by adding its digits is a basic move of numerology, and occultists from the 19th century onwards linked the trumps to numbers, letters and planets. You can read the background in my history of tarot and my page on numbers and elements.

The birth card method as most people use it today was shaped by the anthropologist and teacher Angeles Arrien and set out in detail by Mary K. Greer, first in Tarot for Your Self (1984) and then in a whole book on the subject, Who Are You in the Tarot? (2011). The Tarot School in New York teaches a variant that adds the month, the day, 19 and the last two digits of the year separately. It often gives the same soul card but a different personality card, so it is worth knowing which method a reading used. This calculator follows Greer.

Working with your birth cards

Take the cards out of your deck and lay them side by side. Look first at the pictures, not the meanings: who is in them, where are they looking, what do they hold? Then read my pages on each card and write down one line from each that feels true and one that does not. The second line is often more interesting than the first.

If you are new to tarot, birth cards make a good first study, because you have a reason to care about two cards before you know any of them. The tarot hub walks through the whole deck, and the card meanings index lists all 78 cards. When you want a reading for a question rather than a theme, the free tarot reading is a better tool.

And keep it light. A birth card is a mirror you can pick up and put down. It does not decide who you are, and two people with the same card can live completely different lives.