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October 5, 2023 · 1:05 am

Faulty Fortunetelling

by Lillian Csernica on October 4, 2023

I was raised Roman Catholic. When it came time for my Confirmation, I decided to leave the Roman Catholic Church. Confirmation meant making a commitment to act as an adult according to the Church’s dogma and practices. I told my mother I did not believe what the Roman Catholic Church taught, mainly because I couldn’t reconcile the contradictions between this God of love and mercy I kept hearing about and the really scary people who served him. In my parish, we had several fire and brimstone Irish Catholic priests, the kind with silvery hair and brick red faces who never smiled.

Mom let me off the hook for Confirmation, but she didn’t give me any ideas about filling the sudden void in my spiritual life. Chaucer said an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop. He must must have known a few teenagers. I had an active mind, a strong curiosity, and a love of reading, so I started looking into subjects much better left alone. Back then I liked to watch horror movies, classics featuring Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing. I wanted to know where the filmmakers got their ideas for the monsters, sorcery, and strange occult organizations. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Lucky for me, my Holy Guardian Angel kept a lifeline attached to my silly soul and hauled me out of danger more than once.

I mention all this to give you a context for what I was like when I plunged into the world of divination, or fortunetelling. A lot of those scary movies I’d been watching featured curses, omens, and ancient artifacts, even items that could help foretell the future. So I rushed right out and bought myself a Tarot deck. Being very much a traditionalist, I bought the deck created by Arthur Edward Waite along with his book on interpretation. Waite was a member of at least one of the occult organizations very prominent at the turn of the century when spiritualism was all the rage among the intelligentsia. The enormous popularity of séances, table-tapping, and Ouija boards prompted professional illusionists such as the great Houdini to debunk the frauds. I’ve met a lot of people who have really wanted to believe they were psychic. Many of them just wanted their dreams to be real. The problem with that kind of thinking is, you can’t have just the good dreams be real. The nightmares are part of the deal too.

When I was in high school I worked in community theater as a stage or lighting technician. That meant I got to hang around backstage, be part of the magic of a live performance, and go to the cast parties. The show onstage was nothing compared to what I’d see at the cast party afterward. At one of these parties I brought along my Tarot deck and set myself up in a corner. This was not a smart idea. Trying to peer into the mysteries of the Infinite for people who are drunk and/or wasted on recreational drugs does not end well. Divination should not be treated like a party game, like one more cool thing to do after you have your face painted, but there I was, sixteen years old and so sure I knew what I was doing.

A few people wanted to have readings done. The only one I remember clearly is the one I hope I never forget. An older woman wanted to ask the cards a question about a problem involving her daughter. I don’t recall the problem. I worked my way through the cards I’d dealt, watching the woman for her reactions. Fool that I was, I let my eagerness to please color what I saw in the cards and how I expressed the cards’ meanings. The woman went away with a smile that seemed a little too broad. I was bright enough to spot that, but totally blind to what caused it.

A man who’d been sitting nearby watching me do the readings asked me if I understood what I’d just done. He pointed out the way the older woman had asked the question indicated she’d already decided what her daughter should do. I worked so hard for her approval that I totally missed the trap and fell right into it. I’d given that woman the answer she wanted. Now she’d go to her daughter and tell her daughter what she should do. If the daughter had other ideas, Mom could back up her own opinion with the authority of my Tarot reading. I had given the older woman what could be called psychic leverage. That might cause friction and hidden resentments and who knows what other emotional and spiritual damage. The man who explained all this to me wanted me to understand that I had no clue how much responsibility went along with presenting myself as a fortuneteller. He was right. Even now, forty years later, I still feel ashamed for being so ignorant and arrogant.

There just isn’t the kind of Better Business Bureau that would be really helpful in terms of knowing whether or not a given psychic is any good at his or her predictions. It doesn’t take much to learn how to become what’s known as a “cold reader,” where you can just look at someone an be able to tell him or her all kinds of personal facts about his or her private life. I can do it because I’m a writer and a trained observer. There’s nothing mystical about it. What also helps is the fact that people fall into a limited number of types. Once you identify the type, you can make several fairly accurate statements or predictions.

And then there are the people who are flat out grifters. Liars and cheats and the kind of people who will use private detectives or the on staff equivalent to do the legwork needed to find out a wealth of information about the client. People simply do not realize how much can be learned about them from the Internet. Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, all the blogging sites, they’re all sources of information that will help the phony psychic amaze clients and keep milking them for more and more money.

Whether the psychic is legitimate or a con man, genuinely talented or a self-deluded fake, there is still the issue of responsibility. Clients come to psychics for all kinds of reasons. Hidden agendas are called that precisely because they’re hidden. What’s worse, the agenda may be hidden even from the client because of whatever emotional or spiritual baggage obstructs clear self-knowledge. The psychic can’t known exactly how the client will use the information the psychic provides. Just as I had no idea how that older woman might choose to manipulate her daughter with the “mystic insights” of my Tarot reading, so even the most honest and spiritually clean psychic cannot foresee all of the causes and effect.