While the Tarot has traditionally been associated with fortune telling, and while I am not against that use, I tend to wonder about channeling benign supernatural forces for arranging the cards in a way that foretells the future. Rather, I think that that the person who is having their reading done (the sitter) is being helped to access their own deep unconscious anticipations, concerns, and responses, prompted by a colourful spread of intriguing pictures.
In a way, many oracular means of divination, including the Tarot are pre-modern forms of psychotherapy or counseling. They were effective in helping those who had lifestyle challenges many centuries before psychologists such as Freud and Jung began to reason how a troubled soul may be down to the mind’s functioning, and thereby relieved through talking therapy.
The image of the gypsy seer amusing curious holiday makers at the seafront is fine. I think though, that the benefit of how the Tarot can address the woes of the human condition is often overlooked. Having studied and practiced hypnotic communication and change-work, I take a similar view that stage hypnosis is a great form of entertainment, but the real benefit arises where hypnosis can help overcome difficulties (ie hypnotherapy). Indeed there appears to be a remarkable overlap between Tarot reading and hypnotherapy whereby the sitter (and reader) become absorbed in the allegorical stories that those weird pictures on the cards are weaving. It is the cards are doing the work in accessing the profound resources of the unconscious mind. Pre-modern mystics, in their psycho-therapeutic role, were onto something, even if they explained it in a very different way than we might today.
As a means of finding solutions to problems, the Tarot might be thought of at the level of life-coaching. More severe mental health conditions are best referred to the relevant medical professional. But as a way of handling lifestyle difficulties, or of making decisions, or as a guide to the path to be taken, the Tarot, whatever anyone’s theory maintains, is truly a potent instrument.