The Jokers

Lesson 6 of 12 — the Arcana cartomancy guide

Two cards the old readers never had, and what to do with them if you choose to read them.

Key points

• The Joker entered the deck in the nineteenth century, long after the reading traditions formed; most traditional readers leave both Jokers out.
• Arcana ships with Jokers off. Turn them on in the Cartomancy settings if you want them.
• When read, the Red Joker is the wild card: surprise, luck, a fresh start outside your control.
• The Black Joker is the trickster: a bluff, a hidden agenda, your own blind spot.
• Jokers never take a column in a large spread; they color the card beside them.

The Joker is an American addition to the deck, created in the 1860s for the game of Euchre, which is why no eighteenth- or nineteenth-century reading manual mentions it. Most readers who learned from a grandmother or an old book still take both Jokers out before they shuffle, and that is a perfectly good practice. Arcana follows it by default.

Readers who do include the Jokers usually give them a pair of opposite meanings, and that is the approach here. The Red Joker is the kind surprise: a stroke of luck, a chance meeting, a fresh start you did not plan, the closest thing the playing deck has to the tarot’s Fool. The Black Joker is the trick: a bluff, a secret, information withheld, or the blind spot in your own thinking. Both say that something is in play that the ordinary cards cannot account for.

Treat them lightly in practice. A Joker does not fill a position in the Nine-Card Square or the Romany spread on its own; read it as a modifier of the card it sits beside, and if both Jokers appear in one reading, take the tradition’s advice and read again another day.

Practice

Do a three-card reading with the Jokers in, then the same question with them out. Notice whether the Jokers added meaning or only noise, and set the toggle accordingly.