There are many ideas about how Tarot works. Some attribute various spiritual entities or forces – Angels, Demons, Ascended Masters, Akashic Record, Ancestors, Spirit Guides, and so on. Some believe that Tarot has certain energies; or that the cards acquire energy from the Reader, the Querent, or others. Some believe that it is necessary to perform careful rituals to cleanse the cards of dark energies, to protect against dark entities, to align with positive energies, and so on. I have a simpler and more mundane notion of what’s going on.
I believe that any “magic” is within ourselves, and not the cards. I believe that when we shuffle a deck of cards, we are creating randomness; that the shuffling doesn’t cause any special ordering of the cards. They just come out haphazardly. I realize that many Readers would be aghast at such blasphemy, but there it is.
What I think happens is that this randomized arrangement of cards offers the intuition a field in which it can work. The conscious mind is distracted, allowing the intuition to make connections and leaps that the conscious mind couldn’t do. Tarot is a tool that allows us to connect with our intuition.
When I say ‘intuition’, I don’t mean psychic powers. I just mean the aspect of our personality that forms beliefs without relying on logic or reason. This is a sense that we all have.
You might have seen intuition working, if you ever watched an expert working in his field. For example, a well-experienced auto mechanic can often diagnose a problem just by hearing how the engine sounds. He’s been doing this so long that now he just knows what’s happening. It’s not ESP or magic; it’s just that he’s learned it so well that he no longer has to try to figure it out. And of course, no matter how skilled or experienced, his intuition is going to fail him every so often, as he encounters something novel.
A Reader can attain such a level of skill, with practice. At first he’s going to have to look up the meanings of the cards. He’s going to struggle. I like to say that in order to learn how to do something well, you have to start out by doing it poorly. Like every other discipline, Tarot requires practice and experience.
This is one reason why I don’t consider Tarot to be useful as fortune telling, though it is commonly used for that purpose. A person’s intuition doesn’t make him psychic. And Tarot doesn’t tell us our Fate. It tells us where we’re heading right now, at the moment of the reading. Anything can change the outcome. In fact, in my opinion, that is the point of Tarot.
I see no point in telling someone their Fate, if it’s something that will happen no matter what they do. Even if there were such a thing, how does anyone benefit from it? You’ll find out eventually; what’s the rush? Besides – if you find out you’re Fated to die on a certain day – would you really want to know?
It makes more sense to me to use Tarot as a check on what we’re doing, where we’re heading, so that we can make informed decisions about what to do. If Tarot tells you that you’ll flunk the test, then you might decide to work harder, study, and wind up passing the test. Does that mean Tarot was wrong? Well, the outcome it predicted didn’t happen, so some might say it was wrong. But it motivated you to study; you benefited from its prediction, and by changing your behavior, you changed the outcome. In this case, it was effective, even if “wrong.”
This is why I’m not too impressed when someone claims that their readings are “accurate.” To me that just says that the readings weren’t helpful. The Querent didn’t receive knowledge that might help them along their path. To me, it’s something like spoilers in a movie. Most of the time you don’t want to know how the movie goes; you want to watch how it unfolds. In life we may prefer to know how it unfolds – but how it unfolds isn’t set in stone.
I will note that many, many people disagree with me, and insist that the main use of Tarot is to see into the future. That’s fine. Maybe I’m wrong after all. If someone wants to use Tarot for divination, it’s their choice. I just choose to use the cards in a different way, that’s all.