Do Tarot cards have special powers, or is it all in the mind? Are Tarot cards any better at producing psychic messages than any other divinatory tool? This article attempts to find out.

During the 25 years or so that I have been reading the Tarot cards, I have been asked many questions by the clients I have helped. By far the most popular, however, is “How do the cards work?”. The simple answer to this is – they don’t. There is nothing special about the Tarot cards themselves – they have no magical qualities, nothing that sets them apart from a pack of any other kind of cards. So, how do the Tarot cards produce such accurate results?

The answer, of course, is the same as the answer to the previous question – the Tarot cards themselves do not produce any results. It is not the cards that produce the results, but the combined efforts of the person who is having their cards read and the person who is reading them. If it were the Tarot cards themselves that produced the results, every reading would be the same in that it would produce results with the same level of accuracy, but this doesn’t happen.

All Tarot readers will agree that some subjects are far easier to read the cards for than others and this has nothing to do with the cards themselves. The reader doesn’t forget what the cards mean from one reading to the next. The reason some subjects are difficult to obtain results for is down to the subject themselves and how easy it is for the reader to ‘tune-in’ to their thoughts.

The Tarot, like any other psychic medium, works by providing a tool with which to interpret the telepathic messages sent from the subject to the reader. It is because of this simple fact that it is actually possible to use anything to access this information. I attend a Psychic Club locally, where we have tuned-in to our subconscious minds using everything from flower petals to the patterns produced on a sheet of paper when it is held over the flame of a candle. All these methods have produced equally accurate results. The Tarot is used more often simply because it is more widely-known and therefore more acceptable.

If you ignore what is being used to conduct the reading and look solely at how the readings actually work, you will see that it is possible to obtain psychic messages from almost anything. You can see an example of this in the article Forget Tarot Cards – Read Trivial Pursuit Cards!, which you will find on this site.

The messages come from the subconscious mind of the subject to the subconscious mind of the reader via a telepathic, or psychic link and are interpreted in the same way regardless of what items are used to assist in that interpretation. It is rather like saying that it is only possible to take part in a telephone conversation if you use a certain type of telephone – i.e., it isn’t the telephone that matters, but the connection between the two people involved in the conversation.

Having said that, it is possible to conduct a reading using no tools whatsoever, simply by tuning in direct to the subconscious of the subject, in much the same way as a medium obtains messages from the spirit world. Most subjects, however, prefer the reader to use some form of tool when giving a reading, it can apparently be quite disconcerting for the subject if the reader simply sits opposite them and starts telling them their life story!

A lot of credence is also given to the ‘vibes’ on the cards. Some sources say you should not even let the subject cut the cards, let alone shuffle them, but I have never found this to cause any problems and it doesn’t seem to affect the accuracy of the reading. Indeed, it is not actually necessary for the subject to touch the cards at all, otherwise it would not be possible to conduct perfectly accurate readings over the telephone or even by e-mail. It is simply that most clients prefer to handle the cards so they feel more personally involved with the reading and this is perfectly understandable.

No one really knows for sure how the Tarot cards work. Some readers believe that the cards can be read without any psychic forces being involved and this may well be possible if they are used purely as a psychological tool, but it is my personal belief that even in readings such as this, the subconscious mind still plays a very important part.

However the Tarot works, there is no doubt that the degree of accuracy obtained from these simple pieces of cardboard is nothing short of incredible.