Many (but not necessarily all) people who sell this type of paraphernalia or services are con artists looking to make a buck off of desperate people who are looking to make sense of their lives in places where they won't.
I have some personal experience with this kind of thing. Back in the `70s my father had a small group of "followers" who considered him to be a sort of "guru". We lived in Hollywood, so there were a lot of folks into that sort of thing.
They believed he had mystical powers. Truth was he was only looking to get laid, and he hurt a lot of women who fell for his BS, and their husbands/boyfriends.
I have a family member now who claims he's a "God". He lived in Hollywood too when he "realized" this. He's not quite as convincing as my father was, but he's pretty good at getting others to believe him.
Tarot cards / systems of interpreting them are a good window into how human minds work, and insofar as that's relevant may indeed be useful. Many of them are also pretty.
The tools of rationality, collection of evidence and the scientific method are the best ways we have yet developed to further our understanding of the world. They are not (nor ever will be) complete.
Blanket dismissals of the metaphysical are as baseless, and no more worthy of consideration than, the simplistic assertions like "the sun revolves around the earth... because we say so".
One could believe in things and not care about proving them to others, yet this will not convince others nor produce any evidence.
One could also hold the view that everything is false and not worth looking into unless someone else provides proof. This will not produce evidence either.
Obviously the range of how individuals approach things is continuous and not discrete like this. But I still think those willing to entertain ideas without accepting or denying them can better explore that topic and use those thoughts cross domains. A world without strict self imposed mental boundaries can be beneficial.
"One could believe in things and not care about proving them to others, yet this will not convince others nor produce any evidence."
Sure, but just because someone believes something doesn't make it true, so beliefs without evidence don't matter. That is, except when those beliefs inform the person's behavior; then they matter greatly, because they affect people around them despite not having any basis for their behaviors (since they have no basis for their beliefs).
"One could also hold the view that everything is false and not worth looking into unless someone else provides proof. This will not produce evidence either."
"Someone else" could also be "that same person"; but even if it's not, then it would still motivate the production of evidence by requiring someone to look for evidence in order to convince said person.
"But I still think those willing to entertain ideas without accepting or denying them can better explore that topic and use those thoughts cross domains. A world without strict self imposed mental boundaries can be beneficial."
I agree completely. And the biggest imposed mental boundary is equating "I believe" with "I know" :) "I don't know" is valid and, indeed, generally the best approach, epistemically speaking; "I neither believe nor disbelieve" is apathy at best, self-deception at worst.
There might be some things we don't understand, like the 21 ounces or whatever that one loses after death. Very interesting, so far unexplained, yet documented phenomenon. Similar things can be said about certain reincarnation and near death experiences - how could they know some of the stuff they do? Maybe there are yet unidentified physical explaination, maybe something else. I am looking forward to answers either way.
For stuff like tarot, there are probably some interesting body language or physiological things that are behind it. I have a hard time believing most stuff like this and mediums. However, that could be that there are a large number hacks obscuring an extremely small number of people with actual talents. I'm also looking forward to any research finding on these topics.
Sorry, but this has been pretty thoroughly debunked[0].
All my comment was meant to show was that there are things that happen that we have no proven explaination for. The world is still full of unexplained, and even uninvestigated, stuff. It would be interesting to hear the real reason for the weight changes after death (in goats). It may not be about the soul or whatever, but maybe we will learn something new about the physical world.
In science, this burden of proof idea is called the null hypothesis: we assume nothing is true, and look for experimental evidence to "reject the null hypothesis" -- that is, we assume a positive claim is not true until we find evidence that it is. There's a fairly straightforward inductive syllogism for why that approach is the most reasonable, which I'll leave out here (unless you'd like me to outline it?) for brevity.
Therefore, Tarot, ghosts, an afterlife, psychics, etc. are all subject to the same burden of proof / null hypothesis rejection process as any other positive claims: until there's empirical, reproducible evidence supporting them, we must assume they are not true. And after centuries of asking for (and looking for) evidence, and even a long-standing million dollar prize for any that can be found, all we've ever had in that regard is... personal anecdotes and deeply-held beliefs. Neither of which constitute objective evidence, and neither of which manage to be consistently reproducible.
So the null hypothesis stands: they aren't real, and I genuinely invite anyone to find the evidence to reject that assumption, as long as the evidence they find is logically consistent, objective, and reproducible without confounding factors (i.e. if such evidence can only be reproduced while someone is on hallucinogenics, or while someone is in a house with a carbon monoxide leak, or while other factors could more plausibly explain the results, or...)
"Mysticism is a personal, subjective framework for insight and self-improvement that doesn't have to follow the rules of the scientific method."
Anything that makes claims about how the world works does, in fact, need to follow the scientific method. Why? Because it's a process that's literally designed to counteract the most common mistakes and biases that humans make in order to find the truth, and because so far, it's been the most accurate and effective method of predicting the future.
If you want self-improvement or mindfulness, that's fine and personal, but making claims about the nature of the universe isn't a personal opinion, it's a statement of fact about things external to yourself that is either true or false irrespective of your own experiences.
I'm not saying that we should accept metaphysical claims as true, but our world does not strictly follow the null hypothesis either.
For instance, aspirin works as a pain reliever. This has been shown with empirical evidence. However, if I said "aspirin relieves pain by infesting your blood with microscopic fairies who kiss your boo-boos from the inside out" -- that claim does not have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis.