How Our Readings Work

We think you should know exactly how the readings on this site are made. This page explains each feature in plain terms: what it is based on, how it is produced and where its limits are.

Daily horoscopes

Our daily horoscopes are sun-sign readings. Your sun sign is the zodiac sign the Sun appeared to be in on your birthday, and we use the conventional date ranges (Aries from March 21 to April 19, and so on). If your birthday falls right on the boundary between two signs, the conventional range may not match the exact moment the Sun changed signs in your birth year; our journal article "What Your Sun Sign Is, and What It Isn't" explains why.

Each day's reading for a sign is shared by everyone of that sign. It is not an individual birth chart, and it does not take your birth time, birthplace or personal circumstances into account. We never present a horoscope as if it had been written uniquely for you.

Our evergreen library, for now

Until our daily editions launch, each sign shows a reflection from our evergreen library: a collection of readings written to be useful on any day. These are clearly labelled as library reflections, not as readings for a particular date.

How daily editions will be made

When daily editions launch, they will be AI-assisted drafts. Each day, a shared brief sets the themes, and a draft is generated for each sign from that brief. Every draft then goes through validation checks against our style and honesty rules, and through editorial review, before it is published.

Free and premium versions of a sign's daily reading are written from the same daily interpretation. Premium never offers a different outlook or a "better" day.

Tarot

Our deck has 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, in four suits of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles.

How cards are drawn. Draws are made on our server using a cryptographically secure random number generator. Nobody, including us, chooses which card you get.
Stored before revealed. The result is saved before it is shown to you, so refreshing the page or coming back later shows the same draw.
Upright by default. Cards are drawn upright. Reversed cards appear only if our editors choose to enable them.
One free daily card. Each person gets one free daily card per day. If you are signed in, "day" means your local date in the timezone saved in your account. If you are a guest, we keep track on a best-effort basis using a first-party token stored in your browser; clearing your cookies or switching browsers means we can't recognize an earlier draw.
Three-card spreads. A spread draws three distinct cards, without replacement, so the same card can't appear twice. The positions are always What to notice, What to release and What to practice.

We never pick "scarier" cards to encourage purchases. The cards you see are the cards the random draw produced.

Numerology: life path number

We calculate a life path number using one common convention:

Reduce the month, the day and the year of birth separately to a single digit, by adding their digits together. If a part reduces to 11, 22 or 33, keep that number as it is.
Add the three results together.
Reduce the total to a single digit, unless it is 11, 22 or 33.

A worked example, for 29 July 1990:

Month: July is 7.
Day: 29 becomes 2 + 9 = 11. This is kept as 11.
Year: 1990 becomes 1 + 9 + 9 + 0 = 19, then 1 + 9 = 10, then 1 + 0 = 1.
Total: 7 + 11 + 1 = 19, then 1 + 9 = 10, then 1 + 0 = 1.

The life path number is 1.

Numerology traditions differ, and other methods can give a different number for the same date. We apply this one consistently. We don't store your birth date unless you choose to save it to your account.

Compatibility

Our compatibility pages are editorial interpretations based on traditional relationships between signs, such as their elements (fire, earth, air and water) and modalities (cardinal, fixed and mutable). We don't give percentages, scores or ratings. A compatibility page describes how two signs are traditionally said to interact; it is not a prediction about any real relationship, and it can't tell you anything about a particular person.

Moon phase

The moon phase we show is calculated with standard astronomical algorithms, after Jean Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms, and checked against phase data published by the U.S. Naval Observatory. That part is astronomy.

Any moon rituals or reflections we suggest are a matter of tradition and personal practice, not science. We keep them clearly separate from the astronomical information.

Where AI assistance is used

We use AI tools to help draft some of our content, including the daily editions described above, always within rules our editors set. If you submit a question with a tarot reading, the text of your question and the cards you drew are sent to an AI provider to help write the interpretation. The cards themselves are always drawn by our own server, never chosen by an AI model.

Unless a page clearly says otherwise, no human psychic or astrologer personally prepares your readings.

What our readings are for

Horoscopes, tarot, numerology and moon notes on this site are offered for reflection and entertainment. They are not predictions, and they are not medical, legal, financial or psychological advice. Astrology and tarot have not been shown scientifically to predict events or describe personality, and we don't claim otherwise.

What we do aim for is a useful prompt: a question worth asking yourself, or one small, practical thing to try today. If a reading helps with that, it has done its job.

Questions about any of this are welcome. You can reach us through our support page.