I had a workmate once who was a unique human; she was half Irish and half Cherokee and her uncle was a medicine man on the rez in TN. She wsa mostly a pragmatic and hardnosed practical sort of person, but she had deep abiding respect for native spirituality mixed with genuine fear of its manifestations. Apparently her uncle had urged her most of her life to study native religion and healing with him. She chose to devote her life to nursing the elderly in institutions and in her words 'stay away from that creepy stuff'. I got pretty close to her and her kids, and spent a fair amount of time with them. I had known her well over a year when she introduced me to her Tarot cards.
She said she found them in her mailbox one morning years earlier, in a manila envelope. THey bore no postmark or postage, and the note included, typewritten, said only, 'the cards like to be wrapped in silk.' She told me that she scoffed at the notion, put the cards in a drawer, and went about her business.
And when she was shopping at the mall later that day, she bought a silk scarf, and went home and wrapped the cards in it. Refusing to give it any 'thought', she just 'did it.'
She told me she almost never touched the cards. She called it 'letting the spirits lead' her; she used the cards when she felt 'compelled' to do so.
She felt compelled to read mine once. I have never seen a reading like the one she did. Obviously she had no typical formal training in the Tarot. She didn't use any spread I recognize. She told me that the cards were showing her mostly past, and proceeded to tell me things that I had never told her or anyone. It was, in a word, uncanny.
When she was done, she seemed embarrassed and apologized for possibly hurting me by talking about sensitive issues. She also seemed very tired, as if the reading had sapped her strength.
She never mentioned the cards gain, and I never saw them again in the two years I knew her before I moved out of state.
I think maybe in the back of my mind I hoped (and feared) I would have some oogly-boogly psychic boost out of using the cards. But no... I bought mine in a book store, learned to read them out of a book, and although it pleases me how spang-right-on a reading can be, there is nothing supernatural or inexplicable about how it works. I sure can't duplicate the vibes that her reading gave off, or see into a querent's past accurately like she did.
'Psychic' is a pretty broad and IMO misused term to describe a variety of anomalous experience. This gal sure had something, but was she 'psychic'? Could she have 'seen' those things about me through some other medium, like trance or Ouija board or palmistry? Were the cards the medium of communication, or was she?
and the big ???... how come we ALL can't do this? and why does it come in unpredictable and unquantifiable chunks instead of neat tidy manageable bits that we could study easily?
And one last ?... how come when I do a reading for someone, it comes out meatier when they have 'crossed my palm' in some way? That started out as a joke, but we soon found that the best readings really are the ones that the querent has paid for in some way. Is this a psychological thing, and if so, is it my mind or theirs that makes this happen?
