I have found the tarot to be useful, even if you don’t believe that it has occult powers. Previously, I recommended the Resonator Voyant Tarot for your online casting needs. I really enjoy the interpretations it gives.
But, because it is primarily meant as an image generator, it’s also slow. I’ve longed for a way to get a quick celtic cross reading on my computer without having to fire up a browser. Ideally on the command line.
Except all the ones I found… well, they didn’t have exactly what I wanted. And they were all in languages I don’t know — node, java, etc. — so modifying them would be a bear.
So after a couple of years wanting something like this, I made bash-the-tarot myself. It’s written in BASH with some help from jq, jp2a, and fzf.
If you can’t see the embed above, you can see what it looks like at https://imgur.com/a/DkveyJC,
The program (the fancy version at least) will take any optional input you enter to incorporate as part of the randomness of the card drawing. It will draw the cards (the second delay is on purpose to add additional randomness), walk you through each card of a traditional 10-card celtic cross with a brief interpretation and explanation of the significance of the position. After it’s done that, it’ll let you review the reading as you wish using fzf‘s previewing ability and optionally export the entire reading to your $HOME directory.
The data for the readings largely come from the Resonator Voyant Tarot, although they’ve been modified somewhat. The images are the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, though jp2a turns them into ASCII for us. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck is public domain in the US, but not currently in the EU.
You can download bash-the-tarot at Github, GitLab, or my personal git repository.
Featured image modified from one by ai subarasiki from Pixabay