Voice & method
How Querent reads.
Two halves of the same craft — the editorial voice the reading is written in, and the working steps that produce it. Both exist because tarot rewards literacy and most apps don't expect any.
The voice
Six rules govern how every reading is written. They live in the narrator's system prompt, applied to every line of prose Querent produces.
I
Tradition over invention
Every interpretation traces to a published source. The narrator paraphrases what the canonical writers said about a card — it does not generate fresh meanings out of thin air.
II
Direct claims over hedging
‘The Tower describes structural collapse’ beats ‘the Tower might suggest something potentially shaking up the foundation of what perhaps you've built.’ A reading that hedges every claim says nothing.
III
Reflection, not prediction
The cards describe patterns currently in motion. They don't know what will happen. We never say ‘this is what will happen.’ We say ‘this is the pattern that's currently in motion; here's what it asks of you.’
IV
No new-age vocabulary
We don't say ‘the universe is asking,’ ‘tap into,’ ‘manifest,’ ‘vibration,’ ‘energy is calling you.’ The tradition has its own vocabulary — five centuries of it — and it is plenty.
V
Tradition-literate, when useful
We name the source when naming it adds something — ‘Greer's underdeveloped reversal,’ ‘the Marseille reading of this card.’ We don't drop names just to drop names.
VI
Warm, grounded, precise
The reading talks to a person about their actual situation. Not to an audience, not to the void. Tone is the friend who reads tarot well, not the oracle on the mountain.
The method
A reading isn't a single LLM call. It's a deterministic engine — built around the tradition's working concepts — followed by a constrained narrator that paraphrases the engine's read into prose.
Step 1
Intake
The seeker names a focus and (optionally) a question. The reader can ask follow-up questions to clarify what's being asked — surveillance questions about absent third parties get reframed; vague prompts get sharpened. Ethical filters apply here, before any cards are drawn.
Step 2
Spread selection
Querent recommends the smallest spread that fits the question. Three cards usually beats ten. The seeker can override.
Step 3
Draw
Cards are drawn from a single canonical 78-card deck. Reversals are allowed by default (toggleable). The draw is deterministic given a seed — the same question, asked the same way, lands the same.
Step 4
Pattern + dignity reading
Before any single card is interpreted, the engine reads the spread as a whole. How many of each suit? How many majors? How many reversals? Which dignities are operating between adjacent cards? These structural facts shape the per-card read that follows.
Step 5
Per-card interpretation with reversal mode
Each card is interpreted in the context of its position, its element, its neighbors, and (if reversed) the Greer mode that fits the question — opposite, excessive, blocked, or underdeveloped. The mode is chosen, not guessed.
Step 6
Narration with citations preserved
Claude (Sonnet 4.6) writes the prose narration in Querent's voice, working from the engine's structured interpretation and the canonical sources for each card. The narrator is constrained by a long, cached system prompt that enforces the voice rules above. Citations stay attached to the underlying card, available in the reading view.
The ethics
When the cards are the wrong tool.
Tarot does not exempt the reader from professional ethics. The card on the table is information; the seeker is a person whose situation has consequences the cards cannot predict. Four lines we hold:
Some questions get declined
Medical diagnosis, criminal verdict, others' inner lives, predictions of someone's death or pregnancy — tarot is the wrong tool. Querent declines these and says why. A reader who never refuses a question is over-promising.
Some situations get referred out
Mental health crisis, suicidal ideation, abuse, addiction, legal jeopardy, financial collapse — these need professionals, not cards. The reading will name the limit and point toward real help.
Surveillance questions get reframed
‘Will my ex come back’ reads the seeker's stake in the situation; that's fair. ‘Tell me what my brother is hiding from me’ reads someone who is not in the room and has not consented; that gets reframed as a question about the seeker's own concern.
The seeker's autonomy outranks the reading
Even when the cards are unambiguous, the seeker is the authority on their own life. The reading delivers the read; it does not issue verdicts.
Where this comes from
The voice rules and reading ethics are the project's distillation of a body of work — Mary K. Greer on reversals and ethics, Rachel Pollack on synthesis, Lon Milo DuQuette on Crowley, Cassandra Snow on inclusive practice, the American Tarot Association's code of ethics, and a few decades of working readers who wrote their craft down. The full bibliography lives in the citations index.