Tarot is a beautiful, sophisticated system of divination that can be leveraged to provide us with insight into ourselves, the world around us, and events to come. Unfortunately, like all divination, it has its limits. Some of these are obvious—Tarot cannot tell you the winning lottery numbers, it can’t predict exactly when and how you’re going to die, and so on. Basically, anything that someone’s going to ask a menacing fortune teller in a horror movie is the sort of question Tarot can’t answer.
But even within the scope of appropriate questions, Tarot has its limits.
The problem with Tarot—as with every other form of divination—is that it’s a fundamentally interpretive art. Tarot generates a series of symbols and then relies on the reader’s ability to interpret those symbols and make a coherent reading out of them. The pressure point in this system is the reader themself; no matter what symbols Tarot puts out, the reader has to be able to correctly identify and interpret them.
Most of the time, this is totally doable. If you ask “Does he love me?” and draw the Five of Swords, you should probably look elsewhere for your romantic prospects. Sometimes a bit more interpretation is required, but you can still identify a clear theme that answers your question. If you ask “Does he love me?” and draw the Six of Cups, his feelings for you are more like a childish infatuation than something likely to last in the long term.
These are easy answers to find because they’re within the range of answers we already consider possible for a given question. Our minds are willing not only to accept those answers, but to produce them; we’re able to connect the dots that lead to these messages when they appear in a Tarot reading. The problem arises when the answer to your question is something that you would never have considered in the first place.
I did a reading not too long ago for a friend who was going to a work event and wanted to know how it would go. We did the reading and I told them “There’s a senior colleague who doesn’t have your best interests at heart; watch out for someone trying to undermine you.” The event came and went, and lo and behold, there was indeed a senior colleague who behaved badly. However, that colleague’s bad behavior wasn’t in the form of professional undermining; it was a much more direct, in-your-face confrontation.
This was an error on my part. It genuinely hadn’t occurred to me that someone would behave this way in a professional environment, so I didn’t even consider that possibility when interpreting the cards. Instead, I saw a conflict with a senior colleague, and I framed it in a way that made sense to me given my assumptions about the world.
This is the sort of thing you’ll hear a lot from Tarot readers, a platitude to the effect of “The cards are never wrong, but readers can interpret them wrong.” And to a certain extent, I think that’s true. If I get a reading wrong, I can always go back with hindsight and see how those cards could have been interpreted to give the correct answer. To a certain extent, I can learn from revisiting old mistakes so that I identify patterns can avoid similar mistakes in the future.
Nonetheless, I think this is a severe limitation of Tarot, and of all divination. In hindsight, everybody is omniscient; there’s no need for divination, because we already know what’s happened. The point of divination is that it’s supposed to give us foresight, but that foresight is always and inevitably constrained by our own assumptions about what’s possible.
There could be a massive earthquake tomorrow, but I would never be able to predict it in a Tarot reading today. Even if I pulled cards of catastrophe and destruction—the Tower, the Four of Pentacles in reverse, etc.—I might interpret that as “tomorrow is going to be a bad day,” but I would never make the leap to “earthquake.” Earthquakes aren’t part of the general goings-on in my life. It would be unreasonable for me to leap to that conclusion. If I screamed “earthquake!” every time I drew cards of ill omen, I would be rightly accused of (literally) catastrophizing; moreover, I would be wrong the overwhelming majority of the time. Rationally, it doesn’t make sense to interpret those cards as an earthquake, because it’s much more likely that tomorrow will be a bad day for tamer, more expectable reasons.
The unfortunate result is that Tarot is really bad at predicting genuinely extraordinary and unexpected events. The cards themselves may show “something extraordinary and unexpected is going to happen,” but the ability to interpret those cards is always going to be constrained by the reader’s own space of assumed possibilities. If something happens once in a lifetime, a Tarot reader won’t be able to predict it, because Tarot readers can only interpret the cards according to what makes sense to them in the world they know.
Jack Chanek 