Card Reading Day

What the day is

Card Reading Day is observed on February 21. The name is genuinely ambiguous: it covers reading the cards people send you, and reading cards in the fortune-telling sense. Both are worth a look.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, and greetings card companies have never objected to it.

Taking the divinatory sense first: tarot cards were not created for it. The deck emerged in fifteenth-century Italy as equipment for a trick-taking card game, still played in parts of Europe, and the extra suit now called the major arcana was simply a permanent trump suit. Its use for divination began some three centuries later, in eighteenth-century France, and the elaborate ancient Egyptian origin story attached to it was invented at the same time.

Why readings feel accurate is well studied. The Barnum or Forer effect describes the readiness with which people accept vague, broadly flattering statements as specific to themselves. In the original demonstration, students were each handed an identical personality profile assembled from a newsstand astrology column and asked to rate how well it described them; the average rating was over four out of five. A reading works the same way, with the added advantage that the sitter supplies context and remembers the hits.

None of which means a reading is worthless, and the honest account of what it does is more interesting. It provides a structured prompt to talk about something you were already turning over, and an excuse to say it out loud. Many people describe it that way themselves.

The other sense of the day is simpler. A card you were sent and have not properly read is sitting somewhere.

How to take part

• Read the cards on the mantelpiece properly, and answer one.
• Look up the Forer effect, then read a horoscope and watch it work.
• Learn the tarot's actual history as a card game.
• Treat any reading as a prompt for reflection rather than information about the future.
• Be wary of anyone charging serious money to tell you what happens next.