Why and how does tarot work?

Tarot is a deck of playing cards that's been around from the 1450's, originating from Italy. The traditional decks consists of 78 cards, including 4 suits (14 pip cards from Ace to 10 with the Page, Knight, Queen and King in each suit) and 21 trump cards (major arcana) and one single card, 0, known as the Fool. Different variations of the original games are still played today.

Tarot has been used in divination practices across Europe and America since the late 18th century and the practice is often associated with the travelling romani population. Many psychics and mediums have adapted tarot into their own practice as a tool to receive messages from the spirits. Tarot has also been hugely associated with the occult and modern witchcraft. However, tarot can be, and in my opinion, should be very far from all that. Tarot can be a very useful tool in therapy, meditation and self studying.

All you need to succeed in reading tarot for yourself and others is the ability to think creatively, think outside the box, from a different perspective, create a story and connect the dots. Intuition and empathy helps the process. And what helps intuition, is imagination. There really isn't anything mysterious or unexplainable about tarot!
Reading tarot is a creative thinking technique, called Conceptual Blending. This technique has been studied and incorporated by many corporations and workplaces today. Conceptual blending is a creative thinking process that involves two or more concepts in the same mental space to form new ideas. With this technique we can resolve a problem, find an answer and potentially predict an outcome.

You might have to learn meanings to some of the cards to read tarot with confidence, but most of the time you can find those just by looking and describing what is happening in the card. Each tarot card's meaning is fluid, not rigid. The card answering one question can, and often will, have a completely different answer to another question. Each card can help you find answers to whatever issue you are looking into at the time. This is why each reading also feels so accurate, as your mind will conceptually blend a tarot card's meaning to the position. It is placed in a way that will fit and make sense to what we are looking into.

From a book called Stray Tarot: How to survive as a tarot reader, by Vincent Pitisci

I've been asked this question, how does tarot work, so many times and I have to admit, most of the time I could not give an answer that would make sense. But somehow Vincent Pitisci in his books and other writings has managed to put my internal thoughts into actual concepts!
Tarot doesn't have to be anything mystical and magical, it's just been proven to work by cognitive scientists. 

In slightly other news, I've just completed my 2nd Therapeutic Tarot Series workshop with Stephen McCabe, regarding running tarot group sessions, and this gave me so many good ideas! I aim to organise small tarot related group events and maybe even workshops here in Eastbourne, once I've got it all thought through. Better use my conceptual blending habits on figuring a few things out!

​-Enni