So How Does Tarot Work - Different Theories Different Explanations

Many people have produced many different theories over the years. I’ve done my best to produce a summary of the most commonly found ideas below:


Synchronicity – this was an idea that Karl Jung was very keen on. He suggested that as well as causality (the idea that every event occurs as the result of a specific cause) there is another reason why events occur – synchronicity. In some ways synchronicity is a nice way of saying ‘by coincidence’, but the implication is that as well as events being shaped by random chance there are occasionally ‘meaningful coincidences’, that is events that appear to happen purely by chance but carry some meaning for the person to whom they occur. So by using an elaborate system like laying out a Tarot spread (Jung himself used to work extensively with the I-Ching), we are invoking synchronicity into our lives, and the cards will ‘just happen’ to have arranged themselves into an order which tells us something useful about ourselves, or the question we have asked.

Subconscious influence – this is the suggestion that our subconscious minds are more powerful than we usually give them credit for being. Different areas of psychic study credit the subconscious mind with a whole array of powers and abilities of which we are generally unaware. As an explanation for the Tarot, it is usually supposed that in some way the subconscious mind ‘knows’ the order of the Tarot cards, and, through the shuffle, re-orders them so that they will lay out in an order which conveys a useful meaning to the person performing the spread, based on insights that the subconscious mind has presumably already had. Likewise, intuition plays a major role.

Magic(k) – Generally magic means ‘to make events occur in conformity to your will’. In this case, the will of the reader is that the cards will arrange themselves in a meaningful way, in order to reveal something useful. The magical explanation is simply that this focussed intent is enough to make the cards arrange themselves in a useful way. This is, of course, not a mechanistic explanation, just a description of a particular way of viewing the Tarot. It involves accepting as an explanation that magic is real – the Universe really does respond and change according to the will of an individual. It also suggests there is some skill required in ‘making the Tarot work’ as well as simply interpreting the cards. A deck of Tarot cards is believed to be particularly susceptible to this form of magical influence, because of the way the cards are read. The uncertainty caused by the randomness of the shuffle makes it easier for the order of the cards to be influenced, as they aren’t fixed and could just turn up in the right order ‘by chance’. A great deal of magic is concerned with the simple manipulation of chance – which is one of the problems concerned with testing it.