Tarot for Self-Reflection: What the Cards Can and Cannot Do

A friend draws a tarot card and turns it over. It shows a tower struck by lightning, with people falling from it. She looks at it for a while and then starts talking about her job. She has wanted to leave for a year and has never said it out loud.

The card knew nothing about her job. But the conversation that followed was real. This essay asks a plain question. Can a tool that predicts nothing still help you think?

Where does tarot come from?

Tarot did not start as a tool for fortune-telling. It started as a card game. The first decks were made in northern Italy in the early 15th century. They were normal playing cards with an extra set of picture cards that worked as trumps in the game. People in Italy, France and Switzerland played tarot games for centuries, and some still do.

A modern tarot deck has 78 cards. Twenty-two picture cards are called the Major Arcana. They have names like The Fool, The Lovers and The Tower. The other 56 cards, called the Minor Arcana, form four suits of 14 cards each.

The link to fortune-telling came late. In 1781, the French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed that the cards hid the secret wisdom of ancient Egypt. There was no evidence for this, and historians today reject it. A few years later, in 1788, a Parisian known as Etteilla published the first deck designed for fortune-telling.

The most popular deck today appeared in London in 1909. The artist Pamela Colman Smith drew it, working with the writer A. E. Waite. Her important change was to draw a scene on every card, including the 56 suit cards. On older decks, the five of cups showed just five cups. On hers, it shows a person in a dark cloak, looking down at spilled cups.

That change matters for this essay, because a scene invites a story.

Can tarot cards predict anything?

No. There are three reasons to say this plainly.

The first reason is that there is no mechanism. The cards are shuffled, and shuffling puts them in a random order. For a card to carry information about your future, something would have to arrange the deck according to your life. Nobody has ever shown what that could be.

The second reason is the evidence. Careful tests of tarot are few and small, so we should not overstate them. But they point in one direction.

In a study at Goldsmiths, University of London, the psychologists Itai Ivtzan and Christopher French gave about 30 people two readings. One came from cards the person had chosen. The other came from cards taken from the bottom of the deck. On average, the participants did not rate their real reading as more relevant than the control reading. Believers and non-believers rated the readings differently, but the real reading did not win overall. Tests of astrology, a similar practice with far more research, have also failed to show that it works.

The third reason explains why readings still feel true. In 1949, the psychologist Bertram Forer gave 39 students a personality test. Later, each student got a description that seemed to be about them personally. In fact, all students got the same text, which Forer had taken mostly from an astrology book. The students rated it as a very good description of themselves, on average above 4 on a scale from 0 to 5.

This is now called the Barnum effect. People accept general statements as if they were written only for them. “You are hard on yourself, but you hide it well” fits almost everyone.

Tarot readings are full of such statements, because the cards show general human situations: loss, love, conflict, a new start. A skilled reader can also use small signals, such as your clothes or your reaction to a word. This is called cold reading, and it can make a reader seem to know things they were never told.

So the honest position is that a reading can feel deeply accurate while the cards contain no information about you.

If the cards know nothing, why can they still help?

The answer is that the meaning comes from you, and that is the useful part.

Think of a writing prompt in a journal. A good prompt does not contain any knowledge about your life. “What are you avoiding right now?” knows nothing about you. But it makes you look at your life from a direction you would not choose yourself. A tarot card can work in the same way. It is a random picture that you did not pick, so it pulls your attention somewhere new.

Go back to the friend and the Tower card. The picture shows a building falling down. Many things in her life could match it. She chose her job, which tells us what was already on her mind. The card did not reveal that. It gave her a reason to say it.

Is there evidence that this kind of reflection helps? There is evidence for a related practice. Psychologists have run many experiments in which people write about their thoughts and feelings for a few sessions. A large summary of 146 such studies, published in 2006, found a positive effect on health and well-being. The average effect was small, and it varied a lot from study to study.

Nobody has tested tarot as a writing prompt in the same way. So the fair claim is modest. Cards may help in the same small way that other prompts help, if you use them for writing and thinking.

How can you use the cards as prompts without fooling yourself?

Here is a simple method that keeps the useful part and drops the false part.

1. Write down one real question first. Make it about you, not about the future. “What am I not seeing about my work?” works. “Will I get the job?” does not.
2. Draw one card and describe the picture. Describe only what you see, before you look up any meaning: a person, a place, a mood.
3. Write what the picture reminds you of. Connect it to your question. Do not worry about the “official” meaning in a guidebook.
4. Ask what you would do if this were advice from a friend. Write one small, concrete step.
5. Test yourself. Ask: would I have reached a similar thought with a different card? Usually the answer is yes. That shows you where the insight really came from.

One more trick helps with decisions. If you keep drawing until you get a card you like, notice that. Your wish to draw again tells you what you already hoped for. You can learn more from that wish than from any card.

There are also clear limits on what to ask. Never use cards to decide about health, money, legal problems or someone else’s life. These questions need facts and, often, a professional.

What are the risks?

The main risk is giving the cards authority they do not have. If a card frightens you, it can push you toward a bad decision. If you start to feel that you cannot decide without a reading, the tool has become a habit that works against you.

The second risk is money. Paid readers range from honest entertainers to people who exploit lonely or worried clients. A reader who tells you that something bad will happen unless you pay for more sessions is using fear to sell.

The third risk is reading for other people. When you interpret a card for a friend, your words carry weight. Use the same rule as with any advice: ask questions, and do not tell people what their future holds.

None of this means that people who love tarot are foolish. Many enjoy the art, the ritual and the quiet time with their own thoughts. For them, the cards can be one way to slow down and listen to themselves. That use does not need the claim of prediction, and it is more honest without it.

What is left when you take away the magic?

What is left is a deck of 78 pictures and a habit of asking yourself questions. That is not nothing. A picture you did not choose can help you say what you were not ready to say. The cards cannot tell you what will happen. They can help you notice what you think, as long as you remember that the thinking is yours.