About Entropic Tarot

Cryptographic honesty meets Western esoteric tradition

What Entropic Tarot Is

Entropic Tarot is a free tarot reading app built at the intersection of cryptographic engineering, Western esoteric tradition, and modern design. It uses real physical entropy harvested from your device's sensors — microphone, camera, and touch input — to create provably unique card shuffles every time you draw.

No two readings are ever alike, not because of a clever algorithm, but because each shuffle is seeded by genuine physical randomness from the real world around you.

The Philosophy

Most digital tarot apps rely on pseudo-random number generators like Math.random(), which produce deterministic sequences. Given the same seed, they will always produce the same output. That's not randomness — it's a parlor trick.

Entropic Tarot solves this by harvesting genuine physical randomness from your device's environment and feeding it through a rigorous cryptographic pipeline:

SHA-256 — compresses raw sensor data into a uniform entropy pool
HMAC-DRBG — a NIST-approved deterministic random bit generator seeded by that entropy
Fisher-Yates shuffle with rejection sampling — eliminates modulo bias for a mathematically perfect permutation

The result is a shuffle that is cryptographically honest — no one, not even the app itself, can predict or reproduce the outcome.

The Decks

Entropic Tarot includes six historic public-domain decks:

Smith-Waite (1909) — The iconic illustrated deck by Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite, the foundation of modern tarot reading
Tarot de Marseille: Conver (Nicolas Conver, Marseille, 1760) — The classic Tarot de Marseille pattern, printed by the Conver workshop from its 1760-dated woodblocks and hand-coloured by stencil
Tarot de Marseille: Besançon Variant (B.P. Grimaud, Paris, c. 1891) — A French woodcut-pattern tarot of the Marseille family, identical to the Tarot de Marseille except that Juno and Jupiter take the places of the Popess and the Pope
Grand Etteilla (B.P. Grimaud, Paris, c. 1890) — The fortune-teller's tarot of Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette), the first professional cartomancer, with his own numbering and a keyword printed on every card, upright and reversed
Doubleday Italian Tarot (c. 1880) — A hand-painted Italian tarot of the Piedmontese pattern, from a manuscript tarot notebook probably compiled by Abner Doubleday, Union general and Theosophist
Picard Tarot (Eudes Picard, Paris, 1909) — Black-and-white line plates from Picard's 1909 tarot manual: a Marseille-numbered deck redrawn for the French occult revival

The Knowledge

Every card in Entropic Tarot is annotated with deep esoteric correspondences drawn from the Western mystery tradition:

Qabalah & Tree of Life — Sephirotic paths and attributions for every card
Hebrew letter attributions — Traditional letter assignments for the Major Arcana
Astrological associations — Full zodiac correspondences with decan-level detail for the Minor Arcana
Golden Dawn elemental titles — The ceremonial titles assigned by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Real-time planetary positions — Live astronomical data woven into your reading context

AI Interpretation

Entropic Tarot offers optional AI-powered reading synthesis using Claude by Anthropic. When enabled, the AI considers your spread layout, card positions, reversals, and esoteric correspondences to generate a cohesive narrative interpretation.

The AI feature is entirely optional — the app works fully without it, and no reading data is ever stored or used for training.

Privacy Commitment

Entropic Tarot itself collects no personal data. All entropy harvesting and card processing happens entirely on your device. There are no accounts, no first-party analytics, and no first-party tracking cookies. The free tier shows display advertising on content pages (Features, Library, Roadmap, Saved Readings, Feedback), served by a third-party ad network under its own privacy policy; paid subscription tiers remove the ads. Your readings themselves are yours alone — never transmitted, never seen by us.

For full details, see our Privacy Policy.

Created By

Entropic Tarot is designed and built by Michael Wylde.

Get in touch through the contact form.

Open Source Heritage

All card imagery used in Entropic Tarot is in the public domain. The Smith-Waite (1909), Tarot de Marseille: Conver (1760), Tarot de Marseille: Besançon Variant (c. 1891), Grand Etteilla (c. 1890), Doubleday Italian Tarot (c. 1880) and Picard Tarot (1909) decks all date from before 1928, placing them firmly outside copyright protection. The Conver and Grand Etteilla card images come from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (gallica.bnf.fr), via Wikimedia Commons. The Besançon Variant, Doubleday and Picard card images come from Yale University's Beinecke Library (the Cary Collection of Playing Cards and the Doubleday tarot manuscript), released under Yale's Open Access policy. This artistic heritage belongs to everyone.