How do Tarot cards work?

They don’t.

Sorry @partyrock, but they don’t work. If you want to have your cards read for a bit of fun, fair enough but don’t expect to hear your future being told.

Manipulation of a gullible mind.

Here is some information on reading tarot cards. The reality is however, that reading tarot cards is really a distraction from life. One cannot use tarot to tell the future or decide what to do with their life. Tarot cards work as entertainment and nothing else.

The science and logic behind Tarot cards is…...........oh I forgot, there isn’t any.

They’re magic.

They don’t. They’re union.

They can be a form of channelling and/or of sensitive perception.
Some people are able to resonate with others intentionally and allow the unconscious to manipulate the cards to form the story/answer sought.
Others who are adept at working with channelled guides will employ the guides assistance to work the cards into the story/answer sought.

On top of that once the cards come out into the spread, there are the same skills employed to interpret them.

Someone without training in the above skills is more likely to be simply exercising confirmation bias, making up a story they think suitable. This is almost always the case for recreational users. That is the fair basis for all the poo-poo answers you will see for a question like this.

A good tarot card reader just plays off the info you give them and works the story from there. The more info you give them the more they can make the story fit your expectations. Kind of like any medium.

As others have said, they don’t work. But that doesn’t answer your question, does it? So, to answer your question, it depends on what literature canon you want to base your belief on (i.e. whether zombies are created by a virus or a curse, or whether being bitten by a vampire kills the victim or turns him into another vampire, for example).

Tarot Cards (like all magic such as Ouija boards and magic wands, etc.) work because you are really asking a demon to do your bidding. For some obscure reason, demons only understand Latin (which is why magic spells are always spoken in Latin). Although with Tarot Cards and Ouija boards, you don’t need to speak to the demon, so there’s no need to know Latin to use these things.

And, of course, demons can’t always be trusted (ask anyone who’s ever used a monkey’s paw, or rubbed a magic lamp, for instance), so take the Tarot results for what they’re worth :-p

I am a very logical person, so any kind of fortune telling doesn’t compute with me. However, my daughter was into all that stuff for a while and read my cards. She predicted my husband’s death! At the time, we laughed about it and said he was to onery to die, and would probably outlive all of us. When he passed away with a cardiac arrest about 8 or 9 months later, we both remembered that Tarot reading, but didn’t want to talk about it until a few years later.

They are not accurate at all. They can’t be. Tarot card reading means analyzing voice and body language and drawing conclusions. The cards are just for show because people like shows.

It’s called “cold reading”.

If you believe in them, by magic. There’s not really a way to break it down scientifically, that’s why it’s magic.

But, I’ve found that the way the cards are interpreted leaves a lot of room for seeing what you want to see. It’s not, you’ll get hit by a blue Mercedes next Sunday, it’s, sometime in the future, you’ll suffer a physical injury, which can be anything from getting hit by a car to twisting your ankle to a papercut, so eventually that’ll be true for anyone. Or, it’ll reference a personality trait we all have to varying degrees.

They work by presenting a set of random images. The reader throws out a very generic observation watching the readee to see how they respond. When the readee responds, the reader uses that idea to develop the reading. You pass through topic after topic in a similar way, building a customized reading that is essentially mirroring the readee back to them.

You can do this with other tools, too. Astrological signs and readings and palm readings and tea leaf readings all use the same principle. Throw out enough gobbledygook until the readee responds positively, and then you are off to the races.

It is a form of psychological analysis that uses standard stories as a way get started. The only thing is you don’t need a PhD to do it. You don’t need any formal training in psychology in order to do it. You just need to understand people, and the understanding gained from life experience is enough to fake one’s way into a card reading. Well, not quite. You also need to know some stories about each card.

It’s a shame y’all have been to such incompetent readers, or none at all, but it’s clear most of these expert opinions are based on that.

Yes, cards can be used like a rorschach test. They’re fairly good for that too, but no better than any other introspective exercise.

Yes, someone who saw a reading in a movie once can mimic the practice, and have a good time making stories up.

Yes, someone who reads others ‘tells’ can ask enough leading questions to get a story out of the customer.

Imagery plus imagination. That’s apparently what most people have experienced as a tarot “reading”. But that is how people play with them, that is not how they work. It is no more valid explanation of how tarot cards work than someone who saw their reflection in a car’s rearview mirror once thinking they know how cars work.

Like I say, it’s a shame y’all have been to such incompetent readers.

Tarot Cards do NOT predict the future. The Tarot Cards will only tell you what will happen (to you specifically) if you do not make the changes that are needed. Any changes that you make in your life changes the direction of your life. The Tarot Cards tap into the Universal Consciousness to let you know where you are succeeding & where you are falling short of your goals. A good reader can tell you things about yourself that will surprise you because you had no idea that they would have any way of knowing these things. You can believe, or you can not believe, in the Tarot – but that does not make the Tarot any less valid.

Neither does belief make the Tarot more valid.

@Linda_Owl – Finally an answer that makes sense to what I was asking, thank you.

@dabbler – Thanks

just saying, when I was 14 years old my mother took me to a card reader. I am middle aged now. Everything she said came to pass. She couldn’t see any further than into my mid 40’s in which I almost lost my life to drugs. Maybe she did see but didn’t want to say. Who knows?

@partyrock Wait. We’ve told you about cold reading (Wundyatta actually described it very well), and Linda Owl tells you some, sorry but drivel, about “universal consciousness” and you say that it makes sense? Really?

@Rarebear – I understand and know what cold reading is, but there were things that could never have been assumed just from cold reading. It was pretty remarkable, to say the least.

@partyrock – I wanted to know the mystical or spiritual aspect of how tarot cards work, or even psychological, when Tarot card is done right and does prophecies things. 99.9% of everyone here pretty much dissed it, but the reason I asked was to see if anyone did get a reading that was truthful to their life, and how it was possible. The card reading I got wasn’t just random things, and I wasn’t telling her anything about myself or showing emotion. and everything she said came true, and things about me that no one would have ever known or guessed.

Skeptics will be skeptics and say it doesn’t work. I just wanted to know specifically about the cards and how they work.

Actually, it can ALL be explained by cold reading. I encourage you to look at the work of Derren Brown. He is an expert cold reader and he has youtube videos explaining exactly how he does it.

Opps I sent that @ to myself. Blunder.

No, skeptics look at the evidence for something to determine if something is real or not.

I, too, am an excellent cold reader. I find things that even amaze me. I honestly can not figure out how I figure out these things. So it looks and feels like some mystical connection to spirit. Indeed, I do it by accessing my spiritual side. It is amazing the shit I see that turns out to be true.

I have seen and accurately described buildings in parts of the country I’ve never been to. Or at least, I was told that my vision had an uncanny resemblance to the reality. They even sent me a picture to show me how accurate I’d been. It was pretty scary.

But, alas, it is pure cold reading. I’m good. I have a very good model of how the world works in my cognitive brain and I am very good at getting in touch with my non-linguistic brain. Good intuition together with good analysis can accomplish a lot of magic. I don’t even need cards.

There is research about this—about the kind of people who believe in astrology or religion and whatnot and what they get out of it. I read an article tonight about it. It pretty much confirms what I’ve already figured out.

You clearly want magic. You want it to be in the cards and not in the person… or at least not so much in the person. So you will respond well to responses that confirm your bias, even if they really say nothing at all. You need to feel comfortable about the readings you have received, which seemed uncanny to you and you wondered how that could be.

It’s ok to have faith in the cards. It’s ok to believe what they told you. It feels right because they were reading you. That’s what they do. The psychic energy coming from you moves the cards so when you shuffle them, the ones you need come into position. Then, all the reader has to do is lay them out and tell you what they say.

Oh MAN! I thought @wundayatta had it right but then I read the second to last sentence.

Sadly, there is no such thing as psychic energy. The cards come down at random. It is up to the person reading the cards to tell a fortune based purely on the techniques of cold reading that have been well documented elsewhere.

There is no magic. There are no psychics. There is no universal consciousness. There is only reality. Anybody claiming otherwise and thinking they can prove it can win a million dollars by the Randi foundation.

I’ll easily grant you that the working of Tarot cards, or channelling, or sensitivity to the Universal Unconscious, is beyond current science to explain. That doesn’t make it bogus. A century ago quantum phenomena were inexplicable, were they not real at that time or simply unprovable?

And yes there are plenty of hucksters out there who will tell people whatever they want to hear to make a buck. Some of them are tarot card readers and some of them are politicians.

@Rarebear That was a line of patter. It is a metaphorical way of explaining what is going on. The psychic energy is in the mind of the reader, and the interpretations are based on the reader’s intuitive understandings of the other person as sparked by the images on the cards. Humans are pattern-finders. We find patterns where they don’t exist. Type I error, I believe. It’s not fatal in the way type II errors are—not seeing a dangerous pattern where it does exist.

“Psychic energy” is a metaphor for that process of combining one’s intuitive understandings together with random images to generate stories. It’s a pretty standard creative process. And usually if does feel like magic to people. It feels like the thing you create is coming from outside of you, not like it is something you created.

I don’t think that Tarot or channeling or “tapping the universal unconscious” are beyond the ability of science to explain at all. There are books about the subject and many scientists who study it.

The metaphors we use to explain these things speak to different people in different ways. Some people need magic. They need to think things are there that have no other evidence to support them. To speak to people who have these beliefs, you need to use their language. Is this hucksterism? Perhaps. Is that bad? Perhaps not.

It all depends on your goals. If you really want to help people and you do help people, then it seems to me that you are not a bad huckster. If you rip people off and tell them what you think they want to hear regardless of whether you believe it, then I think you are a bad huckster.

” If you really want to help people and you do help people, then it seems to me that you are not a bad huckster. ”

I disagree. All a “psychic” is doing is unlicensed psychology therapy. To me, there is risk and harm associated with it.

@Rarebear There’s an awful lot of unlicensed psychology going on then. Just about every friend to turns to another for that kind of advice. And there is payment being made in all cases. It’s just not monetary in the case of friendship. It’s still an exchange.

I think that if people are motivated to help each other, they can not be considered bad people even if they do harm. They can be bad people if they continue to do harm once they have been shown the error of their ways, but if you honest think you are doing good and you have no evidence to the contrary, then I think it is reasonable to consider you a good person.

If you require everyone to have a license to give psychological advice, you are going to eliminate about 90% of all conversation. 95% between women.

Now, before everyone gets on @partyrock‘s case for believing in hocus-pocus, consider this: There is an increasing body of evidence which suggests that the universe is an artificial construct. From quantum entanglement, to the double slit experiment, to relativity theory, and still other general weirdness, it is clear that the underlying mechanism of the universe doesn’t obey what we would call rational rules. Some thoughtful people are starting to wonder if the universe isn’t some vast virtual simulation, a.la The Matrix. And if so, why couldn’t that underlying software engine recognize patterns of matter (such as that of Tarot cards) and manipulate them for whatever purpose?

@HungryGuy Well, no, on many points. Allow me to parse out your answer.

1) There is no evidence that the universe is an “artificial construct.” This would imply that the universe is not natural and constructed by a being. This is also known as creationism.

2) Quantum mechanics, which includes the double slit experiment and quantum entanglement, describes the physics of quantum (meaning really small) objects. Not big objects like Tarot cards. Small objects like electrons. The largest object that quantum effects have been observed I believe is a C60 buckyball (but I’m not sure on this last point).

3) Relativity is the physics of gravity, how objects behave in gravity, and the effects of moving at high speeds. Again, nothing to do with Tarot cards. Nothing weird about it, actually if you understand the math.

4) “Doesn’t obey what we would call rational rules.” By whose definition? Yours? The orbit of Mercury was not considered rational until it was completely explained by relativity. There are certainly observed effects we don’t understand and are not yet explained, such as dark matter, but that’s the role of science and scientists.

5) “Some thoughtful people are starting to wonder if the universe isn’t some vast virtual simulation”. Who? I wonder if you’re thinking of the holographic universe theory which is an obscure extremely complicated mathematical theory that is derived from superstring theory, M-theory, and quantum gravity and was derived and proposed by theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind. But again, nothing to do with Tarot cards.

6) “And if so, why couldn’t that underlying software engine recognize patterns of matter (such as that of Tarot cards) and manipulate them for whatever purpose?” This doesn’t even make any sense. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Whoo-ho! Did I hit a nerve, @Rarebear?

(Or should I call you Agent Smith? Gonna flush me down to Xion now?)

No, just pointing out where you’re wrong, Mr. Anderson.

The cards are just a way to focus.
Same as tea readers focus on the tea leaves.
And Randomness plays a big part too.