Tarot
The birth card
A birth date can be added up and reduced until it lands on one of the twenty-two trumps. Like the life path number, it is arithmetic on the digits of the date rather than anything worked out from the sky — and the arithmetic is shown.
The form needs JavaScript. The table further down gives every total and its card, so the answer is still one addition away: add the day, the month and the four-digit year, then keep adding the digits of the total until it is 22 or less.
How it is worked out
Add the day, the month and the whole four-digit year. Reduce the digits of the total until it is 22 or less: that is the personality card, with 22 read as The Fool, which is numbered zero. Keep reducing to a single digit and that is the soul card. Birth dates since 1920 split roughly evenly between one card and two, and about one in twenty gives three.
When the reduction to 22 or less already lands on a single digit, one card does both jobs. A date that lands on 19 gives three, because 19 reduces to 10 and 10 to 1: The Sun is the personality card, The Magician the soul card, and Greer calls the Wheel of Fortune between them the teacher card.
Taking 20 April 1969: 20 + 4 + 1969 = 1993, whose digits add to 22. There is no trump numbered 22 — they run from zero to twenty-one — so it is read as The Fool at zero, and 22 reduces again to 4, which is The Emperor.
Worked example
The Fool and The Emperor
For a birthday on 20 April 1969: trump 0 as the personality card and trump IV as the soul card.
Whose method this is
The method is Angeles Arrien's. Mary K. Greer learned it from her in 1977 and, by Greer's own account, asked Arrien's permission to write about it when Arrien's own book was slow in coming. It reached print first in Greer's Tarot for Your Self in 1984, and Arrien set out her own version in The Tarot Handbook in 1987, where the two cards are “life-time symbols”: a personality symbol and a soul symbol. Greer calls them the personality card and the soul card, and the two together birth cards — her 2011 revision of Tarot Constellations is Who Are You in the Tarot? Discover Your Birth and Year Cards.
A second method disagrees with this one. The Tarot School splits the year, adding month + day + 19 + the last two digits, and does not accept 22 as The Fool at all. It always gives the same soul card, because the two totals differ by a multiple of nine, but it gives a different personality card for a great many dates. Neither is more official than the other; this page uses Arrien's, as Greer sets it out.
Mary K. Greer, Tarot for Your Self, 1984 (2nd edition 2002), pp. 29–31; Mary K. Greer, Who Are You in the Tarot?, 2011; Mary K. Greer interviewed by Enrique Enriquez, September 2011; Angeles Arrien, The Tarot Handbook, 1987.
Why it stops at 22 and not at 9
Ordinary numerology reduces to a single digit. If the personality card did the same, every date in the world would land on one of the first ten trumps and the other twelve would never come up at all — so the first reduction stops at 22, and only the soul card goes the rest of the way. The soul card is the part that behaves like a life path number, and the personality card is the part that does not.
This is a twentieth-century practice and not part of the historical deck. Waite's 1911 book does not mention it, and Smith did not draw the cards with it in mind.
Every total and its card
| Total | Number | Card |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | 0 | The Fool |
| 1 | I | The Magician |
| 2 | II | The High Priestess |
| 3 | III | The Empress |
| 4 | IV | The Emperor |
| 5 | V | The Hierophant |
| 6 | VI | The Lovers |
| 7 | VII | The Chariot |
| 8 | VIII | Strength |
| 9 | IX | The Hermit |
| 10 | X | Wheel of Fortune |
| 11 | XI | Justice |
| 12 | XII | The Hanged Man |
| 13 | XIII | Death |
| 14 | XIV | Temperance |
| 15 | XV | The Devil |
| 16 | XVI | The Tower |
| 17 | XVII | The Star |
| 18 | XVIII | The Moon |
| 19 | XIX | The Sun |
| 20 | XX | Judgement |
| 21 | XXI | The World |
The numbering is Waite's, which puts Strength at 8 and Justice at 11; a Marseille deck numbers those two the other way round, so there a total of 8 is Justice and 11 is Strength. A total of 22 is read as The Fool because the trumps are numbered from zero, so there is no card numbered 22.