Tarot Birth Card Calculator: Find Your Personality and Soul Cards
A tarot birth card calculator adds up your date of birth and reduces the total to one of the 22 major arcana. The best-known method comes from Mary K. Greer, an American tarot author, and it gives everyone two cards: a personality card and a soul card. The calculator below finds both. After it, you'll see how to get the same answer by hand and what each card family means.
One thing first: this is numerology, not astrology. Your zodiac sign plays no part in it. Signs have their own tarot cards, covered at the end of this article.
Enter a date to see your cards. Nothing is sent anywhere: the sum is done in your browser.
How the tarot birth card calculator works
Take the date April 13, 1975.
- Add the day, month and year as numbers: 13 + 4 + 1975 = 1992.
- Add the digits of the total: 1 + 9 + 9 + 2 = 21. If the result is above 22, add the digits again.
- That's your personality card. 21 is The World. A total of 22 means The Fool: it's numbered zero in the deck, but takes the 22nd place in the count.
- Keep adding digits until one is left: 2 + 1 = 3. That's your soul card, The Empress.
If step 2 already gives a number from 1 to 9, your personality and soul cards are the same card, because there's nothing left to reduce.
The numbers follow the 1909 Waite deck, where Strength is 8 and Justice is 11. Older decks swap those two, which is why people whose total is 8 or 11 get different answers on different sites.
Personality card vs soul card
The personality card describes how you act and what others see: how you tackle a task, your first reaction, the role you usually take in a group.
The soul card goes deeper. In Greer's reading, it's the theme you return to all your life: what gives you strength, and the lesson that keeps coming back in new settings.
There are only nine soul cards, 1 to 9. Each one gathers a "family" of personality cards whose digits add up to the same number:
| Soul card | Personality cards in the family | Shared theme |
|---|---|---|
| 1 The Magician | Wheel of Fortune (10), The Sun (19) | starting things yourself, turning an idea into action |
| 2 The High Priestess | Justice (11), Judgement (20) | listening to yourself, weighing up, deciding |
| 3 The Empress | The Hanged Man (12), The World (21) | creating and bringing things to completion |
| 4 The Emperor | Death (13), The Fool (22) | building order and renewing it in time |
| 5 The Hierophant | Temperance (14) | learning, teaching, finding your own measure |
| 6 The Lovers | The Devil (15) | choosing, and owning your attachments |
| 7 The Chariot | The Tower (16) | moving forward and rebuilding what's in the way |
| 8 Strength | The Star (17) | gentle strength and hope |
| 9 The Hermit | The Moon (18) | looking for meaning and finding a way through uncertainty |
Heavy names in this table describe strengths too. Death as a personality card describes someone who can close what has run its course and start fresh. The Tower describes the person who's first to notice a plan resting on a shaky assumption.
Your zodiac sign has a different card
Each sign has its own major arcanum in the Golden Dawn system the Waite deck is built on. Aries goes with The Emperor, Virgo with The Hermit, Pisces with The Moon. That card comes from the Sun's position on your birthday. The full table for all 12 signs, the planets and the decans is in tarot cards and zodiac signs.
Your Sun sign is only one point in your birth chart. To see where your Moon and Ascendant fall, open the free birth chart: it needs your date, time and place of birth.
What to do with your birth cards
- Read the meaning. Open the pages for your personality and soul cards. Write down one line that sounds like you and one that doesn't.
- Notice when the card turns up. If your personality card appears in a daily pull, reread the question you asked that day. Here's how to do a daily tarot pull if you want to start one.
- Don't treat it as a forecast. A birth card describes themes and strengths. It doesn't say what will happen to you or when.