Tarot cards -- good, bad, or indifferent?

In our fifth novel, Hot as a Firecracker, Tarot cards play a big role as clues to the motives and identity of a murderer. 

We had heard about Tarot before but never thought about it other than as an occult legacy from the Middle Ages.  In fact, the Scribe had once had her cards read by a friend at a party (actually, by the mother of a fairly famous actor), but the experience left no mark.  The Scribe was a skeptic even then.

We had several reasons for including Tarot.  Mama Bee, the palm reader in Murder for Old Times’ Sake, was too good a character to abandon.  And the public is now fascinated with the occult, hence the popularity of werewolf, vampire, zombie, ghost, and other occult stories.  Furthermore, the Bible predicts the rise of occult practices and other heresies in the days preceding the Second Coming. 

So we bought a pack of Tarot cards and a companion booklet explaining their use.  As soon as they arrived, we unwrapped the package, took out the cards, and looked at them one by one.  The cards are beautiful, inscrutable, and alarming in equal measure.  We can’t explain why, but the images made us uneasy.  Perhaps it was the thought that knowledge of the future is forbidden and some Tarot enthusiasts believe that that’s what the cards reveal by disclosing the spiritual trends in a person’s life.

We handled the cards as if they were snakes and joked darkly, nervously about their meaning. 

The next morning, the Storyteller sister woke up with a severely swollen, rashy face.  She vowed never to look at, let alone touch, the cards again.

The Scribe sister had no choice but to figure out a meaningful spread for the reading Mama Bee would give to an important character early in the book, so she spent several days with the cards and the booklet.  A few days later, at a peaceful, happy dinner with friends, the Scribe had the first -- and only -- panic attack of her life.  She could take air in but not expel it.  Try as she would, she could not exhale.  She felt herself blowing up like a balloon with no release.  The attack felt like suffocation from oxygen rather than from the lack of it.

The plot of our fifth mystery novel required two more readings, but the Scribe refused to lay out the cards again.  Her real-life reaction to the first spread became the model for Mama Bee’s hysterical response to the second fictional reading. 

Do Tarot cards emanate something evil, a breath from the underworld?  Or were our responses simply a physical manifestation of our fear of them?