And that's why it works. Sort of.
Obviously the little pieces of cardboard don't know anything about you or about whatever problem you're worried about or the future or any of that. But there is a level at which you do. At which you already know the answer you're looking for. And a good reader has access to that level, consciously or unconsciously, and can couch the answer in terms that will make it easier for you to accept it.
Twenty years or so ago, I was reported at work as a witch. Fortunately my fellow witch was an executive in the company. She was a lowish-level executive who made friends with temp workers, which was how I started at the job and knew her. One of her other former temp worker friends was worried about the state of her marriage and wanted advice, but she didn't have the money for a marriage counselor. So I was asked to give her a tarot reading.
(My former boss was a Christian, by the way. The kind who actually believes in the power of Christ and God and goodness, not the kind who thinks the devil is stronger and will win every time if you give him an inch like fortunetelling.)
So I gave her the reading. The only thing I clearly remember now is that the outcome card was The Sun. So I told her she knew, in her heart, what she needed to do, and she was going to make the right decision.
So she divorced his sorry ass and began to tell people about the physical abuse he was putting her through and the cards had told her all the right things. Because the cards are complex enough, and the narratives you can make with them flexible enough, that she had been able to project the right things onto them and onto the (actually fairly vague) things I was able to tell her based on them. The difference being, when her brain tried to tell her those things, she wasn't listening. She needed to hear them repeated by an outside source, or what she thought was an outside source, before she could give herself permission to trust her own gut.
But we were seen one of the oversupply of the kind of Christian whose faith is really in the devil, who complained to management, which is why my friend called me later that week laughing and telling me that we'd been accused of witchcraft. Even if she hadn't had the rank she had there wasn't a damn thing management could have done, because though we were right outside the building we were on public property and on our lunch breaks. But I suppose it relieved someone's mind to make the complaint and they felt like a virtuous warrior against evil or something.
A good tarot reader, or fortuneteller of any kind, will never tell someone "this is inevitable" or "these bad things things will happen." They will always finish up the reading with some kind of affirmation of the querent's power to find their way through to a positive outcome, and perhaps a little gentle pointing at how to get started accessing that power.
It's a useful process if you don't take it too seriously as an objective reality, which is the real thing behind the scared Christian identification of this sort of thing as "of the devil." Yes, you can lead yourself astray with it, if you treat it as something entirely outside yourself and give it the power it's supposed to enable in you, instead of using that power for yourself. And if you get into the hands of an actual confidence trickster, you'll be a lot poorer before you get wiser.
It's very much like organized religion in that way.
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