Why random cards mean anything

Sooner or later someone will ask you the question, if you haven't asked it yourself already. You shuffle a pack of cards. Whatever comes out comes out by chance. So how can it possibly tell you anything about your life?

It's a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a mystical one. The straight answer has two parts. First, there are several ways of explaining why readings feel meaningful, and none of them has been proved. Second, you don't need to settle the question to find the cards useful. People drove cars for a long time before they understood the chemistry of combustion.

One careful writer on tarot puts it in a single line: observing that something works doesn't explain how it works. Keep both halves of that in mind.

Is a reading really random?

Start with the word "random". It usually means two things at once: that an outcome came from the chance interaction of mechanical forces, and that it has no meaning.

A reading isn't quite either. It's the end of a long chain of choices: you decided to learn tarot, chose a deck, picked a question, shuffled in your own way and stopped when it felt right. Then you, or someone, looked at the cards and interpreted them. At every step a person is involved. What you can't do is pick the cards on purpose, because they are face down. That's the point of the shuffle. It keeps your conscious wishes out of the choice while keeping you in the process.

So the honest description is something like this: the cards are chosen without your deliberate control, by a process you take part in. What that means is where the explanations differ.

Explanation one: meaningful coincidence

In the 1930s the psychologist Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli became interested in coincidences that feel too meaningful to be chance. Jung had been drawn to the subject by astrology and by experimenting with the I Ching. Together they gave the idea a name: synchronicity, events that have no cause connecting them but do have a meaning connecting them.

Their suggestion was that there might be a principle linking events by meaning rather than by cause. If so, the way to give it room to work is to take cause out of the picture, which is exactly what a shuffle does.

It's worth being clear about the status of this. Jung and Pauli didn't get much further than saying such coincidences happen and that something must lie behind them. The word has become popular partly because it's a comfortable way of not thinking too hard about events with no apparent cause. As an explanation, synchronicity is an idea, not a finding.

The Wheel of Fortune, above, is the tarot's own picture of chance: a great turning wheel with creatures rising and falling on its rim. In the Renaissance it was a reminder that fortune is fickle. It's a good card to keep in mind for this lesson, since chance itself is the subject.

Explanation two: the mirror in your own mind

The second explanation needs nothing outside you at all. Each card is a rich picture with many possible meanings. When you look at one while thinking about your situation, your mind does what minds do: it finds the connection. You notice the part of the image that fits, and that tells you what you were already thinking or feeling, sometimes before you knew it.

This is close to how a psychologist uses an ambiguous image. The cards work as a prompt. They give shape to things you half know.

A well-known beginner's course makes a nice point here. People worry that they only see in a reading what they want to see. In fact, it says, that's exactly the point: the reading helps you find out what you do believe, so that you can look at it. On this view the cards are less a window onto the future than a way of hearing yourself think.

Explanation three: the reader's skill

The third part is the reader. A good reader, whether that's you or someone else, brings experience, attention and a sense of how a situation hangs together. The cards give them material to work with, and their skill does the rest. This is why the same spread can produce a shallow reading from one person and a striking one from another, and why the next lessons spend so long on what the cards mean and how to put them together.

You don't have to choose

These three explanations aren't really rivals. Plenty of experienced readers hold some mix of them, and many say plainly that they don't know. Some are convinced there's more to it than psychology, and tell stories of readings that seemed to know things nobody in the room knew. Others are happy to treat the cards as a structured way of reflecting.

You can learn tarot from either position, and this course doesn't ask you to pick one. What it does ask is that you keep the claim modest. A reading can help you see your situation more clearly. It can't prove that the universe arranged the cards for you, and it doesn't need to.

One way to find out for yourself

Here is a simple habit that lets you judge from your own experience, rather than from anyone's say-so. Each time you do a reading, write down the question, the cards and what you made of them. Come back a few weeks later and read it again. Which readings told you something you later recognised? Which were off the mark? Which helped you act differently?

Over a few months that notebook will tell you more about how tarot works for you than any theory can.

What to take from this

• A reading isn't random in the everyday sense. You take part in every step; you just don't choose the cards on purpose.
• There are three main explanations: meaningful coincidence, your own mind finding the connection, and the reader's skill. None is proved.
• That something works doesn't tell you how. You can use the cards without settling the question.
• Keep a record, and let your own readings show you what they're worth.

Next, we open the deck itself and look at its shape: seventy-eight cards, two arcana and four suits.