Lab · Product · flagship
The Honest Oracle
A tarot and I Ching companion that shows its workings. The chance comes from a public randomness beacon and your own hands, and you can check it. You read the cards first. An AI joins only if you ask, at the level you choose, and it may disagree with you. Every source text it reads is on this page.
For reflection, not prediction. Tarot and the I Ching are treated here as living traditions: ways of looking at a question from another angle. Nothing here predicts the future or gives medical, legal or financial advice. The AI is a language model (Claude Haiku, made by Anthropic): software that predicts text, not a spirit and not a conscious being. How it works · What is stored.
Choose the oracle
Nothing is fetched and there is no login. What you paste stays in this browser; it leaves only if you ask the AI to join, and the server passes it to the model and keeps none of it. Take out other people’s names or private details first.
Azamar · read the algorithms that read youThe sky, the question, the gesture
Computed in your browser from the clock. At the draw, the moon and season are recomputed from the beacon round’s own timestamp, so they are part of the reproducible record. They frame the reading; they do not change the cards. Prock · anchor chance in ritual and natural cycles
Breathe in and press and hold (mouse, finger, or Space/Enter on the button). Move while you hold if you like. Let go on the out-breath, after at least three seconds.
The exact timing and movement of your hold become your share of the chance. Only after you let go is the next round of a public randomness beacon published; the two are mixed. Neither you nor this site could have chosen the result.
Prock · restore randomness Davies · show the chanceThe draw
Where the chance came from, and how to check it Davies
Your reading comes first
Before anyone else speaks, write what you see. What catches your eye first? What does each position say to you, in your own words? Tap a card to read Waite’s or Legge’s text, or ignore the books entirely. Prock · the user interprets first
Sealing fixes your words so nothing that follows can quietly rewrite them. At least a couple of sentences.
Does the AI join?
You set how far it takes part. Prock · a dial for AI participation Prock · friction, not flattery
Exactly what the AI will be given Hennekes · no hidden codex
The AI stays silent. Your reading stands on its own.
Exactly what was sent (system prompt, codex passages, your words)
Close the reading
If you want, record how the reading felt in your private Experience Ledger (eleven sliders, kept in this browser only). Your reading text is not copied into it.
Design rules, and where each one lives
Built to the published rules
Prock, Epstein and colleagues interviewed twelve tarot readers who use AI and set out design rules for AI divination tools. Davies, Azamar and Hennekes add three more. Each tag on this page names the rule the feature is there to keep.
You write and seal your own reading before the AI can be asked. The AI panel stays locked until you do.
“User-first interpretation protects intuition.” Step IV.Silent, Witness, Counsel or Challenger. Silent is a complete reading, not a failure state.
Step V.Every level is told not to flatter. Challenger is told to disagree with you and not to soften it at the end.
“Productive disagreement deepens reflection more than validation does.” See the system prompt in step V.Chance is not optimised away. Your held breath plus a public beacon make the draw; the moon and the wheel of the year frame it.
“True randomness is part of the meaning.” Step II.Divination is chance applied to a fixed codex, and AI hides both. Here the seed, the beacon round and the derivation are shown and can be re-run; the whole codex is below.
Step III and The codex.No mystique: the model is named, labelled as a language model, and you see its exact instructions and every passage it is given.
“Opacity is chosen, not inherent.”Feed mode lays your own posts out as a spread and reads them as the algorithm’s reading of you, after Ginevra Petrozzi’s To Be a Witch in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Step I, “Your feed”.Sources: Prock, Epstein et al. 2026, Interpretive Cultures · Davies 2024 · Azamar c. 2023 · Hennekes 2025 · summaries in Resources IV and the roadmap.
Nothing hidden
The codex
These are the only source texts the AI is given, and only the entries for your draw. Both are public domain. Browse them, search them, or download the JSON the page and the server both read.
Tarot · A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), 78 cards
Text: Project Gutenberg #43548. Images: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith deck (1909), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. tarot.json
I Ching · James Legge, The Yi King (1882), 64 hexagrams
Legge’s text only, without his notes or the appendices. Sacred Books of the East, vol. XVI, as transcribed at sacred-texts.com. The short English names are modern conventional glosses, not Legge’s. iching.json
Your feed · the positions
Plainly
What this is and isn’t
Is the AI an oracle, a spirit, or conscious?
No. It is Claude Haiku 4.5, a large language model made by Anthropic, run from this site’s server with no tools and no memory of you. It predicts text from the passages and words it is given. Every AI reply is labelled as AI-generated where it appears.
What is stored?
Your question, reading and pasted posts stay in your browser. If you ask the AI to join, they are sent once to the server, passed to the model, and discarded; the server keeps only counts (how many readings, which mode and level, whether it worked) and a salted hash of your IP address to enforce the daily limit. The Experience Ledger lives only in your browser’s storage.
How is the randomness verifiable?
The draw mixes a round from the drand quicknet beacon (run by the League of Entropy, a new value every 3 seconds) with a hash of your gesture. The round used is always one published after you let go. The page checks that the beacon’s randomness is the SHA-256 of its signature and links to the round so you can fetch it yourself. It does not check the BLS signature itself in your browser; drand’s own clients can. With the round number and your gesture hash, anyone can re-derive the same cards: the permalink does exactly that.
Does the draw predict anything?
No. The cards and hexagrams are a structured prompt for your own reflection, the way they have been used by many readers for a long time. Treat what comes up as a question to sit with, not a forecast. This is not advice of any kind, and not therapy.
Why is the AI sometimes unavailable?
It runs on a small shared allowance: a few AI readings per person per day and a daily cap for everyone. When it is used up, the AI rests, and your reading stands on its own.