Tarot Cards for Yes or No: History, Card Meanings and How It Works
A yes or no tarot reading is the simplest kind of tarot spread: you ask one question, draw one card, and read it as yes, no or maybe. It is quick and easy to learn, and it has nothing to do with ancient Egypt. Tarot's real history is stranger than the myths, and knowing it makes the cards more interesting, not less.
Tarot began as a card game
Tarot cards first appear in northern Italy in the 15th century. The earliest records come from the courts of Milan and Ferrara in the 1440s, where the cards were known as trionfi, or "triumphs." Later they were called tarocchi. A tarot deck was an ordinary Italian deck of four suits (cups, coins, swords and batons) with an extra set of picture cards added as trumps.
The oldest surviving decks are luxury hand-painted cards made for the Visconti and Sforza families who ruled Milan. Yale University Library's Beinecke Library holds one of them, a Visconti deck dating from about 1440 to 1445, of which 67 cards survive, decorated with gold and silver.
These cards were made for play. Tarocchi was a trick-taking game, a bit like whist or bridge, in which the picture cards beat the ordinary suits. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the game spread across Europe in the 16th century, and mass production in places such as Marseille helped standardise the familiar 78-card deck. Tarot games are still played today, especially in France and central Europe.
How tarot became mystical
For roughly three centuries nobody treated tarot as a tool for fortune telling. As Yale's librarians put it, the cards began to be used for fortune telling only in the 18th century.
The turning point came in 1781, when the French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed in his work Le Monde primitif that tarot preserved secret wisdom from ancient Egypt. There was no evidence for this, and later Egyptologists found nothing to support his reading of the word "tarot." The idea caught on anyway. A few years later the Parisian occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette, writing as Etteilla, assigned divinatory meanings to the cards and produced the first tarot deck designed specifically for divination, around 1789.
Later occultists, most influentially the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn founded in Britain in 1888, linked the cards to astrology and Hebrew letters. In 1909 Arthur Edward Waite and the artist Pamela Colman Smith published the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which gave every card, including the numbered suit cards, an illustrated scene. Most modern readers still use that deck or one based on it.
The deck in brief
- A full tarot deck has 78 cards.
- 22 are the Major Arcana, the picture trumps such as The Fool, The Lovers, Death and The World.
- 56 are the Minor Arcana, four suits of 14 cards: ten numbered cards and four court cards.
- In readings, a card can come out upright or reversed (upside down), and many readers give the two positions different meanings.
How a yes or no reading works
- Phrase a clear question that can be answered yes or no. "Should I sign up for the course this term?" works better than "What should I do with my life?"
- Shuffle the deck while you think about the question.
- Draw one card and note whether it is upright or reversed.
- Read the card as yes, no or maybe, and look at the card's theme for the reason behind the answer.
Many readers use only the 22 Major Arcana for yes or no questions, because their themes are broad and easy to read at a glance. There is no single official list of yes and no cards, and readers often disagree, but a common set of readings looks like this:
- Yes: The Sun, The Star, The World, The Lovers, The Chariot, The Magician, The Empress and Wheel of Fortune.
- No: The Tower, The Devil, Death and The Moon.
- Maybe: The High Priestess, The Hermit, Justice and The Hanged Man.
A reversed card usually weakens the answer. An upright yes card may become a maybe or a no when reversed, and some no cards soften into a maybe. The Sun is often treated as an exception: even reversed it reads as yes, just a slower one.
Our yes or no tarot tool follows these readings. It uses the 22 Major Arcana: you pick a card from a random spread, and it shows whether the card came out upright or reversed, with a short meaning.
Entertainment, not prediction
A tarot card is drawn at random, and there is no scientific evidence that tarot can predict events or reveal hidden facts. The historian Michael Dummett, who wrote the standard scholarly history of tarot, showed that the occult story of the cards' origins was invented in the 18th and 19th centuries.
That does not make a reading useless. Many people use a single card the way others flip a coin: not to learn the future but to notice how they feel about the answer. If The Tower comes up and you feel relieved, that tells you something about what you actually wanted. Treat the card as a prompt for reflection and a bit of fun, and make real decisions with real information.
A few habits make a one-card draw more useful. Write the question down before you draw, so you cannot quietly change it afterwards. Draw once and accept the card; redrawing until you get the answer you hoped for tells you what you wanted all along, which is useful information in itself. And keep the questions about your own choices rather than other people's private lives or serious health, money or legal matters, where a random card is no substitute for real advice.
If you enjoy simple yes or no prompts, our list of yes or no questions has plenty of questions to try, from light to thoughtful.
Sources
- In the cards: Library partners work together to solve mysteries of rare tarot deck. Yale University Library (2023). library.yale.edu
- Wizevich, E. (2025). Discover the Renaissance Origins and Mystical Evolution of Tarot Cards. Smithsonian Magazine. smithsonianmag.com
- Tarot. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
- Tarot card reading. Wikipedia (history of cartomancy, Court de Gébelin, Etteilla, Golden Dawn, Rider-Waite-Smith). en.wikipedia.org
- Dummett, M. (1980). The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City. London: Duckworth.
FAQ
Can tarot cards really answer yes or no questions?
Tarot cannot predict the future, and there is no scientific evidence that it does. A yes or no reading is a random draw that some people find useful as a prompt for thinking a decision through, or simply as entertainment.
Which tarot cards mean yes?
Readers do not all agree, but common yes cards include The Sun, The Star, The World, The Lovers, The Chariot, The Magician, The Empress and Wheel of Fortune when upright. The Tower, The Devil, Death and The Moon are often read as no.
Where did tarot cards come from?
Tarot began in northern Italy in the 15th century as a deck for playing a trick-taking card game. The oldest surviving decks were painted for the Visconti and Sforza rulers of Milan.
When did people start using tarot for fortune telling?
Only in the late 18th century. In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the cards hid ancient Egyptian wisdom, a theory historians reject, and soon after Etteilla published a deck designed for divination.