When something unexpected happens during

You can't — not from the cards, and not reliably from the event. A ritual is a situation you set up to look for meaning, so anything that happens inside it is already halfway selected for being meaningful. That's the whole risk.

The honest distinction isn't "real vs fake." It's between an event you can *check* and one you can only *interpret* — and interpretation is where signs get manufactured.

A few working tests, none of them mystical:

The written-before test. If you wrote down what you expected before starting, an unexpected thing that contradicts it is more informative than one that flatters it. Congruence is cheap; friction is the data.

The counterfactual test. Would you have noticed this on an unremarkable Tuesday? A crow on the way to work is an accident. A crow on the way to work, twice, at the point where you'd asked something — that's a coincidence with a pattern, and pattern is still not message.

The repeatability test. Signs in most traditions are allowed to be *noisy*. They arrive out of order, fail to confirm, and cost something. An event that arrives perfectly, immediately, and only ever says what you hoped is almost always you talking.

The corroboration test. One event is an anecdote. Two or more unrelated channels agreeing is a signal worth taking seriously; one event in one channel is a mood.

What tarot actually gives you here is a place to put the event. A card drawn after the fact won't tell you whether the thing was a sign — the deck has no opinion on the event, only on the question you bring to it. So the move is: write the event down, then read it, and let the reading be about *what you'd do now* rather than *what it meant*. Meaning is the part you can revise; the next step is the part that has to survive being wrong.

One thing to keep: a card cannot make a real-world claim true. If a sign ever points at danger — illness, a threat, harm to someone — the only real check is the real-world one, not another pull.