About
About Tarot Tablet
Tarot Tablet is a reading table and a reference for the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot, made and written by one person. This page says who, and how the meanings on the card pages are written.
- Made by
- Saba M Abbasi
- Deck
- Rider–Waite–Smith, 1909
- Languages
- English and Arabic
- Ads
- None
Who writes it
The site is made and written by Saba M Abbasi. Every word on the card pages, the hubs, the spreads and the guides is written by hand, in English first and then in Arabic, with the deck open beside the keyboard; the table itself is one person's code, built so that a reading on a screen behaves like one on a table: cards where you put them, reversed if you drew them reversed, crossed if you crossed them.
Nothing here is generated to fill a page. Where the site does not have something to say about a card, it says less.
The deck
All 78 meanings are for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite and published by William Rider & Son. The images on the site are scans of that first edition, in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The correspondences shown beside each card (element, astrology) follow the Golden Dawn attributions Waite worked from.
Most modern decks follow Smith's pictures closely enough that the meanings carry over; where a deck changes a scene, trust the deck in your hands.
How the meanings are written
Each card has what is painted on it, an upright and a reversed reading, one line each for love, work and advice, a yes-or-no leaning with the reason, and answers to the questions people most often ask of it: as a person, as feelings, as timing. The readings start from Waite's own Pictorial Key and the common modern consensus, and then say what the card has meant in practice, in plain language, without hedging every sentence.
Reversed cards are read as the card's energy blocked, inward, delayed or overdone rather than as a flat opposite; the guide on reversed cards explains why. Nothing on the site is a prediction, a diagnosis or advice to act on without your own judgement.
The table
The table is free and stays free. There are no ads and no account; a reading is saved in your browser and in the link you copy, nowhere else, unless you share it: a shared link or picture keeps that reading on the site's own server so the link keeps working.
What the site measures, it measures itself: which pages are read, what is searched for on the table, which spreads are dealt and which cards come up, under a random id your browser keeps and that is tied to nothing else; the address you connect from is never stored. Google Analytics counts visits alongside. Nothing is sold or handed on. The card of the day goes only to an address whose owner confirmed it, and every email has a link to leave with one click; an order for a reading keeps the question and the address until the reading is sent.