One of the most common questions asked by those who are interested in learning tarot is whether or not you have be a psychic.
The answer is an no. Absolutely not.
To this answer, one may ask, ‘but how can you predict the future if you’re not a psychic?’
The truth is, tarot reading – and divination in general – isn’t about predicting the future. While I believe there are people with this ability, I also believe that this gift is extremely rare. And even for these people, seeing into the future isn’t something they can do all the time. Instead, the future is revealed to them on a need to know basis.
Having that said, many people’s questions to the cards are about the future and tarot can address those questions. This is because divination can provide probability on how likely a specific even will come to pass. Such predictions are based on what has already been established in the present moment and isn’t random. For example, a hopeful candidate can ask about the likelihood of her obtaining the job position she applied for or a student can ask how he will perform on the exams. The cards can address these questions because the querents are already actively working towards their desire outcome.
The type of predictions that I find bogus are specific outcomes in the far future with absolutely no ground in the present and information that wasn’t asked for. When I think of this, I am reminded of a woman who asked about her love life and was informed by a fortune teller that she will have four serious relationships and her true and lasting love will be from a foreign country. Because of this, she rejected a man with whom she felt a deep connection because she’s already been through three serious relationships and this man didn’t come from another country.
Divination is meant to empower people by offering clarify and information to assist them with the decisions they need to make. In the case of this woman, she wasn’t given useful information about the present or reassurance about the future – she was given a completely random scenario and was made to feel like she needed to make it happen. Instead of empowering her, her reading reduced her free will by channelling her down a path not of her own choosing.
For any tarot reader who seeks to help their querents, much more important than psychic abilities is empathy. Instead of predicting the future to prove our psychic powers, we should help our querents analyse the present so they can decide for themselves how to proceed in ways that will maximize their chances of reaching a desired outcome. This requires that we listen instead of just dishing out information. We don’t need to be magic mirrors. We’re much more useful as plain old common mirrors that reflects the current reality back to our querents.
The Mechanics of Tarot 