About

The deck

Sower Tarot is a deck that is still being found. It is named after its central card, The Sower: casting what you have across ground you cannot control, trusting that some of it will take. The deck grows the same way. Each new card starts from a seed that comes from outside: something from the day, a random page of a book, a sentence someone else said. Several candidate cards sprout from it, and a new card has to differ in meaning from every card already in the deck. Most candidates do not take; one is kept, or none. There is no final size: there is always further to go.

The cards borrow the look of the old Rider-Waite deck, but not its meanings. No card has a fixed meaning, upright or reversed. Meaning forms through use: each morning one card is drawn and read fresh for that day, and a second, hidden card, the lens card, sets the angle it is read from. The same card can say something different on another day.

The deck is for anyone who wants a card and a question to carry through the day; no knowledge of tarot is needed. It does not tell fortunes and does not give advice: a reading is a question to consider, not an answer. Read together, the readings are also a record of a search, of where the deck has looked so far.

How the daily draw works

The card is drawn every morning at seven (Amsterdam time).

Nobody picks the card. It comes from drand, a public source of random numbers run by the League of Entropy, a group of independent organisations such as universities and internet companies. Every thirty seconds they publish a new number, counted by round. Each organisation holds one piece of a shared secret key, and a round's number can only be worked out when enough of them combine their pieces. So no single organisation, and nobody outside, can know a number before it is published or change it afterwards, and anyone can check that a published number is genuine.

The draw uses the number published at seven. The cards are lined up in alphabetical order, and the number is divided by the number of cards: what is left over points to the card. The rest of the number, divided the same way, picks the lens card from the remaining cards and decides whether the card is upright or reversed. Each reading shows the round its card came from.

Because every round's number follows from that shared key, the numbers for all mornings to come are already fixed. Nobody can know them until they are published, the deck's maker included. So for a given deck, every future morning's card is already settled but unknown. Only the deck changing keeps the sequence open: when a card enters or leaves, the alphabetical line-up shifts and every later morning falls differently, and when that will happen cannot be foreseen.

Anyone can check a draw with draw_check.py, a small Python program in the site's public repository on GitHub, which recomputes any day's card from its round and the deck as it stood that morning.

How the cards are made

Every picture in this deck is AI-generated. The cards are rendered on a home computer with FLUX.1 [dev], an open image model, and a small add-on model trained for this deck that gives it its woodcut look: heavy ink outlines, hatching and flat colour.

Each card starts as a written scene, usually one figure, one object and one gesture. It is rendered many times, each time from a different random starting point, and the maker picks one. Small faults, such as a stray ornament at the edge, are repaired with an AI image editor (Qwen Image). The border, the title banner and the lettering are not drawn by the model: a script adds them, so every card has the same frame.

The moving pictures move only where something should move. For 32 of the 37 cards a script draws the motion (ripples, gliding birds, flickering candles, glowing light) over the card's own pixels, so the ink lines stay exactly as they were. For the other 5, where the motion is hard to draw (fire, pouring water, breaking waves), an AI video model (Wan 2.2) animates a masked part of the card. The maker watched and chose every clip.

Check a card

Every original card image and clip on this site is listed in checksums.txt with its SHA-256 checksum: a 64-character fingerprint of the file's exact bytes. The same list is in the repository, whose history shows when each file changed. To check a file you downloaded, compute its checksum and look for it in the list:

sha256sum card_the-sower.png            # Linux
shasum -a 256 card_the-sower.png        # macOS
Get-FileHash card_the-sower.png         # Windows PowerShell (prints capitals)

Or put the list next to your downloads and run sha256sum -c --ignore-missing checksums.txt.

A match means the file is the original, byte for byte. Each original also carries a label inside it, in its XMP metadata: made by a trained AI model (the IPTC digital source typetrainedAlgorithmicMedia), creator Sower Tarot, licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. A copy that was resized, recompressed or stripped of that label, as most social media do, no longer matches. That shows only that it is not the original file, not that the picture was changed.

Licence and credits

The cards, clips and texts are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: you may share and adapt them for non-commercial use, if you credit Sower Tarot and share your version under the same licence. The site's code is licensed under the MIT licence.

Made with FLUX.1 [dev] by Black Forest Labs, Qwen Image and Wan 2.2 by Alibaba, ComfyUI, Claude by Anthropic, and drand by the League of Entropy. Type: IM Fell English, EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond.

The site, its cards and texts, and the skills that make new cards and the daily reading are open source at github.com/rayh1/sowertarot.