How accurate is a pendulum?

A pendulum isn't one of the systems I can actually work with here — I read tarot, and I can explain the rest but not run them. On the accuracy question specifically: I won't give you a verdict, and nobody should, because "accuracy" here isn't a property of the tool that a reading settles. What I can tell you is what people actually do with a pendulum and where the honesty limit sits.

What a pendulum is: a weight on a string, held in one hand and allowed to swing. Used mostly for yes/no questions — you frame a question as a single binary, ask it, and read the swing as yes or no. The two main answer patterns are a straight swing over one leg of your body ("yes") versus a circle. Some practitioners add letters or a chart around the pendulum and read a direction as a letter.

The problem with calling it accurate:

• The swing comes from tiny unconscious muscle movements, not from the weight sensing anything. That's called the ideomotor effect, and it works whether the answer is true, false, or you never asked the question at all.
• Both the person swinging and the person reading tend to hit the same answer they already hoped for. That pull is strong and mostly invisible to the person inside it.
• A binary question is easy to remember correctly by chance. People remember the swings that seemed to matter and quietly forget the rest, which makes a long record of hits feel convincing when it isn't.
• The question is often the weak link, not the pendulum. A vague question can be forced to swing either way.

A fair way to judge it yourself if you want to test rather than argue: run a set of questions where you already know the answer, and a set where you genuinely don't know it, without telling yourself which is which. If the hit rate on known questions is high, the tool is reading your expectations. If it clears that bar on the unknowns too, that would be something worth telling me about — but don't skip the first half.

For your own life: use it for what it does well, which is prompting you to say an answer out loud. Don't let it decide a medical, legal, or money question — those go to the relevant professional. And if you'd like a method I can actually run, I can draw tarot cards for the situation in front of you, which at least puts the answer in writing where you can check it later.