The Absolute Grind: Why I Even Bothered Taking This Stupid Quiz
I’ve been messing around with the cards for years now, mostly just reading for friends or trying to suss out my own messy life. But honestly, I’ve never actually put a number on it. It’s one thing to know the vibe of the cards, but quite another to spit out the textbook meaning under pressure. A buddy of mine, a real smart-ass who thinks “intuition” is just a fancy word for guessing, challenged me last week. He said all Tarot readers are full of it and only remember four or five cards tops. That stuck in my craw.
So, I decided to prove him wrong—not to him, but to myself. The goal was to find the nastiest, most straightforward meaning quiz I could, the kind that only accepts the dictionary definition and doesn’t care about your feelings. I fired up the laptop on a rainy Tuesday afternoon and started hunting. Most of what I found was garbage—three-question fluff tests or stuff clearly written by someone who had only skimmed a book once.
I must have clicked through six pages of Google results before I finally landed on a serious-looking site. This wasn’t some pretty, interactive thing; it was a plain white page, 78 questions, simple multiple-choice, all timed, and it covered every single card, Major and Minor Arcana. It didn’t ask “What does the Ten of Pentacles feel like?” It asked, “The Ten of Pentacles Reversed most commonly represents:” and gave four brutally specific options. I grabbed a lukewarm coffee and settled into the chair, knowing this was going to be a real slog.
The Messy Middle: Not Just Meanings, But Flashbacks
This whole exercise wasn’t just about the quiz score; it was about settling some old scores with my own past, and I mean that literally. The reason I care so much about specific meanings, about getting the details right, stems from a disaster of a job I had a few years back. I was working on a platform migration, a huge, expensive piece of work, and I kept sounding the alarm. I kept saying we were moving too fast, not testing the foundation properly. It was a textbook Tower card situation, right? Sudden upheaval, structures collapsing.
My old boss, a real piece of work, just shook his head. He said my concerns were “abstract” and that I needed to stick to the spreadsheets. He totally dismissed my gut feeling—the exact type of clarity that comes from understanding patterns. Naturally, the whole thing blew up two weeks before launch. Data was lost, customers were furious, and the boss, of course, was fine. I, on the other hand, spent four months burning myself out cleaning up the mess, feeling completely stuck, like the figure hanging in the Hanged Man position, staring at the world upside down but unable to change anything.
As I clicked through the quiz questions, those memories kept flashing up. When the Five of Pentacles came up, asking about financial distress and loneliness, I almost tossed the mouse, thinking about those weeks when I was unemployed and watching my savings shrink. When I saw the Chariot, asking about willpower and direction, I paused for a full minute, remembering the desperate, forced energy I had to conjure just to send out resumes.
I really stumbled on the Swords suit questions—the mental battles. The Eight of Swords and the Nine of Swords are so similar in terms of anxiety, but the quiz demanded the precise difference between feeling mentally trapped (Eight) versus genuine night terrors (Nine). I had to think hard. I visualized the specific images of the RWS deck to try and dredge up the book definition. This quiz was designed to break your intuition and test your pure memory, which is exactly what I needed.
The Final Tally: Score Achieved, Lesson Learned
After what felt like three hours, even though the timer said 95 minutes, I hit the big red submit button. I held my breath. The screen refreshed, and the final result flashed up:
- Total Questions: 78
- Correct Answers: 71
- Final Score: 91%
Seventy-one out of 78. Not perfect. But I pumped my fist anyway. That’s a solid A. I immediately scrolled back to see what I missed. It was a scattering of details, mostly reverse meanings on the Minor Arcana. I got tripped up on:
- The reversed Two of Cups (conflict instead of separation—a subtle distinction).
- The reversed Hierophant (rebellion against tradition versus an inability to conform).
- A specific context for the reversed Knight of Swords (carelessness vs. volatility).
The main lesson here isn’t just that I know my cards, though that’s nice. The real takeaway is what I was trying to prove all along: You can feel the truth, but if you can’t articulate the facts and the details, the world—represented by that old boss or by a simple online quiz—will always find a way to dismiss you. I now know exactly which seven card meanings I need to drill into my brain until they are second nature. The quest for knowledge is never done, and sometimes, you just need a nasty little test to show you your blind spots. Time to put the seven offenders on flashcards and start the grind all over again.
