Editorial Policy

Publisher and bylines

The publisher name shown on ArcaSeer card-reference pages is ArcaSeer. It is the public-facing publishing name of this independently operated service. A named author or reviewer is shown only when that person has agreed to public attribution and their role can be documented.

General questions and corrections can be sent to [email protected].

Source hierarchy and scope

1. Historical reference: Rider-Waite-Smith names, sequence, and common visual context use The Pictorial Key to the Tarot as a public-domain historical reference.
2. Artwork provenance: the reviewed card-face family is derived from Pamela Colman Smith's Rider-Waite-Smith artwork and matched to the public-domain file family in the Wikimedia Commons Rider-Waite category. This artwork source is not presented as the source of every modern interpretation.
3. ArcaSeer editorial interpretation: upright and reversed summaries, contextual advice, examples, reflection prompts, and yes-or-no reference tendencies are site-specific editorial material. They are not described as a universal tarot rule or a fixed answer to a visitor's actual question.
4. Modern interpretive cross-checks: card-level editing also consults Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Benebell Wen's Holistic Tarot, and Johannes Fiebig and Evelin Bürger's The Ultimate Guide to the Rider Waite Tarot. These works sometimes disagree, especially about reversals. ArcaSeer uses them to check which interpretations the sources support. It does not treat one book as the only rule or reproduce an author's wording.

“As a person” sections are ArcaSeer behavior-focused applications of a card, not a classical system assigning a fixed personality to all 78 cards. They describe how a pattern may appear in conduct at a particular time and should not be used to diagnose or permanently label a real person.

How card-reference content is governed

Each published card is maintained as structured data with separate fields for keywords, symbolism, upright and reversed meanings, love, career, yes-or-no reference tendency, common misreadings, spread positions, and a reflection prompt. Template and data tests require all 78 published slugs to be unique and complete before the site builds.

The repository does not expose a sentence-by-sentence authorship ledger, so ArcaSeer does not claim that every sentence was written without AI assistance. AI may help draft or assemble language. Published reference text still follows the same source boundaries, safety limits, and build checks.

In a live reading, AI cannot replace the selected cards or orientations. For Yes/No readings, it receives the exact question, selected cards, orientations, concise orientation meanings, and spread positions. It does not receive the directory's reference tendencies. The provider returns yes, no, or maybe from the complete pattern. The server then checks that answer against the active spread contract.

Elena’s editorial role

Elena is ArcaSeer’s named tarot editor and interpretive voice. First-person wording such as “I read” expresses that editorial lens. ArcaSeer remains the publisher responsible for the material.

Selected card-reference pages include a compact Elena reading note where it adds a distinct interpretive cue. Notes must stay consistent with the card’s identity and direction, avoid certainty about another person’s private state, and be reviewed for accuracy and repetition. Every card page retains a link to this editorial-role disclosure.

Review and update rules

A material review is required when any of the following changes:

• a card's meaning, yes-or-no reference tendency, traditional association, or artwork source;
• the shuffle, orientation, spread-position, or answer calculation;
• the AI provider, prompt constraints, provider-failure behavior, privacy handling, or safety language;
• a legal, licensing, or source-provenance fact used in public copy.

Editorial dates are manually updated when the published framework materially changes; build time and file modification time are not presented as human review. Minor spelling or layout changes do not automatically create a new review claim.

Corrections and disagreements

Tarot is interpretive, so a different tradition is not automatically an error. A factual mismatch—wrong card orientation, inconsistent yes-or-no tendency, broken source, inaccurate rights statement, or text that overstates certainty—is treated as a correction issue.

Send a correction with the page URL and the disputed passage to [email protected].

Read How ArcaSeer Works for the draw and interpretation process, About ArcaSeer for project purpose and independence, and the Privacy Policy for data handling.