how do you read future with tarot cards?

Tarot, like any sort of divination (including weather forecasting) is basically looking at the impact and interaction of larger forces at a specific area.

In meteorology, it is understanding the forces of clouds, wind, precipitation, pressure, temperature, etc, in a certain area (usually locally and/or nationally) and, once grasped how they have acted in the past, using that information to predict how they might act in the future.

In Tarot, the forces are just as ‘evident’ but in a more ephemeric and individualistic form: love, death, money/fortune, happiness, sadness, adversity, comfort, achievment, failure, etc, and thus can be more prone to ‘error’ due to the fact that individual activity can interfere with a given reading.

Let’s say, for instance, that you are given a reading and the ‘Lovers’ card is shown in the future, right-side-up. While dew point pressure usually means one thing, what ‘lovers’ means to each individual can be quite different: you can be physical lovers with another, spiritual lovers, lovers of good books, lovers of similar political ideas, lovers of a cause, etc etc etc, so that a careful examination and explanation must be given to the ‘querant’ so that any possible misunderstandings are cleared up.

Why Tarot, or other methods of divination, get a bad rap can be oftentimes be attributed to it being mostly done by amateurs and those haphazzardly working solely to fill some void of importance in their own life. Imagine joe-schmoe walking in off the street and trying to give a weather report, and then everyone saying ‘wow, meteorology sucks at predicting/understanding the weather, look at how off that guy was.’ Haphazzard amateurs give haphazzard amateur efforts.

Tarot works, basically, just like any other method of prediction, only instead of attempting to use limited physical data, it attempts to latch onto the emotional, spiritual, and psychological data of the querant (and the larger forces to which they are a part of) to give an overview of what is happening in their life. The cards, therefore, represent themes or ideas that are central to most human beings, and thus must have an influence upon their life. Most readings have the querant represented in the center, with the conscious above them, the unconscious below them, the future in front (to the right or left, depending upon the reader) the past behind (the opposite side) and sometimes 4 influence cards, to better flesh out the querant’s environment.

Since every querant will bring different forces with them to each reading, no two readings (like no two stocks on Wall Street) however similar, will mean the same thing, or lead to the same result. Because of the haphazzard approach of fly-by-nite practitioners, such nuance is often lost, and thus most readings are of a dubious nature, leading again to the ‘failure of meteorology’ metaphor. Keeping these principals in mind, understanding Tarot is often only as good as understanding who is practicing it.