The Secrets of Tarot Diviner

Seeking knowledge from the unknown, seeing and predicting future, reading people’s minds…Sounds like these magic skills will only appear in ancient fairy tales. However, in modern society, there is a kind of person who has these ‘abilities’. They are tarot diviners.

Tarot diviners use tarot cards to help people doing fortune telling. They can predict what may happen in future by interpreting tarot cards. As the promotion of anti-superstition in modern society, according to The Third "Sampling Survey of the Chinese Public's Views On Unknown Phenomena and Other Related Issues" Report , the number of Chinese people who believe in divination was decreasing throughout every decades. However, that doesn’t stop people from curious about occultism, divination and tarot diviners. Not only because of the ‘special abilities’ they have, there are too many puzzles around them: How did they do? How do they work? What is the principle behind?

Hu Yu, 38 years old, a professional tarot diviner from Shenzhen. She started to learn divination when she was in university and she was an architecture before. She owns a teahouse in Long gang District nearby her home and has worked as a part-time diviner for 5 years. In a whole detailed process of divination, she unveiled the mysterious veil of tarot diviner.

The teahouse named “Yun Quan Hui”, locating at Bantian. Selling tea and wine to business companies is Hu Yu’s main income. She usually does divination for customers in her teahouse.

Before starting divination, Hu Yu always makes tea and chats with customers first, to make sure they are cool down and calm enough for being divined. (Picture: Hu Yu is chatting with customer)

This is the desk for divination. As Hu Yu introduced, the table cloth for divining should be made by pure cotton or silk. When doing divination, it’s better to have candles, crystals, cinnabar powder and the deities you believe in beside. They are for exorcism and protections.

According to Hu Yu, different deities have different “frequency”. Usually, the deities from the sky have high frequency and the ghosts have lower ones. She believes in deities with high frequency so there are lots of sculptures and pictures of angles in her teahouse.

The first step is to light up candles. Candles can help not only in exorcism, but also in detecting the change of ‘energy field’. “Everyone has their own energy field. I used to have some customers who had Kuman Thong with them, their energy field was very unstable and the flame was jumping violently.”, she said.

Next step is “cleaning the field”. Diviner holds a burning white sage and move around the table, letting the smoke to fill up the space.

Kuman Thong: It’s a household divinity of Thai folk religion. It is believed to bring luck and fortune to the owner if properly revered. (Wikipedia)

White sage was widely used by ancient Indians as a tool for exorcism. Nowadays, it is mostly used as seasoning. This is a burning white sage, it smells like spaghetti bolognese.

Then diviner will put the whole set of tarots on forehead and try to concentrate on them. This is for a better interpretation of tarots later.

Meanwhile,client will read a prayer, for concentrating the questions that are going to ask. Different questions will have different prayer. This one is for divining who is the "Mr./Ms. Right" in life.

After client shuffles cards themselves, diviner will spread the whole set of cards as shown in the picture. There are 78 cards for each tarot set. When divining different questions, these 78 cards will be placed into different "spread". This one is the "loving spread".

Client will choose two cards from the spread. In this case, the right card represents the client, the left one represents the "Mr./Ms. Right".

After shuffling cards again, diviner will pick 9 cards and ask the client to reoreder them without seeing the heads of cards. Then diviner open the cards in order and interpret the cards for client. (Picture: Hu Yu is explaining each card and what these images stands for)

After learning about the results, some clients might be unsatisfied and want to change their situation. Then diviner can use this crystal ball to do a “ritual” to help them. For example, many clients wanted to have their ex-lover back.

In addition to tarot divination, Hu Yu is also proficient in setting crystal matrix. This one is called “Japanese Reiki”, for healing and recovery.

As for the scientific principle behind, Hu Yu explained: “Actually, the basic concept of tarot divination is about psychology. Simply put, the images on tarot cards can stimulate people’s subconsciousness, ability of association, imagination and memories. So that we can predict possible future by inference. It’s like a mirror that can reflect what you really feel inside.”

“It’s never easy to be a good diviner,” Hu Yu said by the end of the interview, “you have to be in good shape first. You should be very knowledgeable and have a broader understanding of the world. Only studying about tarot is far not enough. Otherwise, you can’t enlighten others.”