Although reported to have ancient roots, tarot, a deck of 78 cards, originated in France in the 1800s. There are as many different ways to choose and spread the cards as there are readers-- from drawing a single card, to three cards, to the standard ten-card Celtic Cross, to huge spreads that use the whole deck.
If we shuffle the deck well and draw just one card, the answer is obviously 78.
But let's think about the standard Celtic Cross ten-card spread. We can calculate how many different spreads we can get by taking how many options we have with just one card (78), times the cards left over for the second card (77), times the cards left over for the third card (76), and so forth for ten cards:
78 * 77 * 76 * 75 * 74 * 73 * 72 * 71 * 70 * 69
The result is 4.56 times 10^18 or nineteen digits, so there are four and a half quintillion different possible Celtic Cross spreads!
If you could have shuffled a deck and laid out a new Celtic Cross spread for every second from the moment of the Big Bang until now, you would have seen only a tenth of the possible spreads so far in the lifetime of the known universe!
The basic idea is that the cards are randomly dealt and appear in a totally random order. However, the action of interpreting them is still useful. Most people tend to analyze situations in a very logical fashion, based on a set of unconscious assumptions and on a very limited set of expectations, and therefore tend to only come to a very standard set of conclusions, which may limit their understanding of the situations they find themselves in. However, the effort required to fit the random cards into a meaningful pattern forces a reader to think outside of their normal limited mindset, and can lead to fresh ideas, insights, and may force their intuition to begin solving problems in new and interesting ways. Thus, although there is nothing inherently meaningful about the layout of the Tarot cards, the effort of trying to find meaning helps us gain better and more original insight into our problems. Using randomly chosen cards with key words written on them to solve problems has, in fact, become a standard management training exercise.
Click on the orb at the top of the page. Your reading, as well a brief explanation of each card will follow. It's up to you to interpret your results as you see fit.