Recently I heard a well-respected tarot professional say that tarot can’t tell her anything she doesn’t already know.

That struck me. I’ve been spending some time thinking about whether this is true for me. Tarot is such an intensely personal thing; we each experience tarot in our own way.

I know for a fact that tarot does indeed tell us things we already know. This can be wonderfully affirming and confidence-building. Tarot can help us feel seen. Tarot can help us understand ourselves.

This is true whether we are reading for ourselves or receiving a reading. Very often clients say to me, “You just told me everything I already knew, but now I know I am seeing things correctly.”

Tarot also has a way of bringing to the conscious mind things that are buried within the subconscious. This is where things get tricky. When tarot reveals something that we truly did not know, the question is this. Did we truly not know it, or was that knowledge there, in the subconscious, all along?

To some extent, this question is academic, and meaningless to the tarot divination process. Yet, in another way, this question feels important. While I cannot speak for any other tarotist, I truly would like to be clear for myself when I consider this question.

Can tarot tell me things of which I truly had no prior knowledge?

Because most of us who use tarot identify as psychic, intuitive, or both, this question may be impossible to definitively answer. Even when discussing a future prediction that has proven true, the question remains. Did I intuitively know this would happen, and tarot simply confirmed it? Or did tarot give me knowledge I would not have otherwise had?

It is without a doubt in my experience reading for myself and others that tarot gives new perspectives and new ways of thinking about things. “I’ve never thought of it that way before” is something I hear from clients quite often. Tarot helps us reframe things in ways that are helpful and healing.

Tarot can also give us insight into things that are happening behind the scenes. Sometimes, for example, when planning business strategy, it is good to know the potential plans of the boss before the boss wants to tell us. Whether or not our intuition might have known these things, our intuition would likely not have supplied the information with the same clarity we can get from tarot.

My experience is that it feels that tarot tells me, and my clients, things that we did not know prior to checking the cards. Sometimes it does feel that a hidden part of our psyche knew these things all along. Sometimes it really feels that we are accessing new information.

I have very often used tarot to make predictions for people who found my prognostications utterly ridiculous and unlikely, until those things indeed came to pass.

This question of what is intuitively known and unknown in the subconscious is a conversation that could be had long into the evening with tarot friends and several bottles of wine, and still yield no definitive consensus.

I am going to say that my experience with tarot is different than that of the professional who feels tarot cannot tell her what she does not already know. For me, tarot absolutely gives me information that I did not know before. In fact, for me, this is part of the magic of tarot divination.