August 4 was my late mother's birthday; it also happens also to be National Psychics Day, which facts combine to remind me of the occasion when I was in my late teens, during which my mother and grandmother were briefly under the thrall of a medium.
The person they sat with purported to go into a trance, summoning a spirit who spoke with a Scottish accent, and proceeded to tell them this or that about their futures. Mom had a cassette tape of one of their sessions. Upon hearing it, I couldn't resist tearing apart the rather poor Scots dialect and otherwise debunk the patent charlatanism that was so plainly afoot. I've since regretted the manner in which I did so, and I've mellowed a great deal since in my attitudes towards such practices. But teenagers gonna teenage. And quite frankly, that's the self-same lens through which I have come to view the gleeful triumphalism of all debunkers. It's immature. "AHA! It isn't real!" So what? Whether we're discussing religion or wrestling, whether or not it's empirically "real", so the hell what? If it's a cultural practice that people find fulfilling in some way, that enriches their short, brutish, nasty lives in some manner before they croak and turn to dust, so the hell WHAT?
Well, it's a con, you say. Money changes hands under false pretenses. The gullible are fleeced. Fair enough, and where such cases are egregious, they should be stopped. But much of the time, one doesn't get the sense that skeptics and debunkers are being lovingly protective of their fellow humans. The attitude is much more one of superior scorn. "How stupid are YOU that you believe this? Well, I gotcha now, moron!" This attitude, so prevalent among my own set, goes a long way toward explaining the political division in this country right now. Yes, a substantial portion of the country can be spoken of as members of a cult. And yes, it happens to be a dangerous one. But no one was ever deprogrammed by a full frontal assault on their belief system. The media loves to misquote Chico Marx on this score. (The actual quote is "Who you gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?" It was a line he spoke in the film Duck Soup, written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. I have no idea where everyone keeps getting the "Lyin' Eyes" part from, except maybe the Eagles song. I guess they no longer employ fact checkers at major television networks anymore, or perhaps, they figure in this case, it's not worth it).
This is a major digression to start off with, but I hope you'll agree that it's no small issue. Liberals, including myself, have been banging our heads against the wall since MAGA flamed into existence, wondering how the phenomenon is possible in this day and age? But the answer is right there. It has been baked into human culture for tens of thousands of years. It has been bred or educated out of some, but for most of humanity, old habits die hard, or not at all. We want to believe in an UNseen. We WANT to. It gives meaning and color and pizzazz to life. When I hear the usual riposte from some dried-up atheistic scold "Why do you need a belief in the supernatural for all that? Why can't you just be turned on by what actually exists right in front of you?" I can't help but point out what ought to be obvious "...um, because it's what actually exists right in front of me!" Magic and Mystery and Possibility are what intrigue us -- it's inherent in the very words. Taxonomists categorize birds. Animists SPEAK to them. ("No they don't", you reply from your comfortless, terrifying, anxiety-ridden vantage point in the dimension where birds don't speak.)
And so we go round and round and round. Unless we don't. Long ago, I carved out a place to live in the world that acknowledges that there can be room for both scientific and spiritual truth. Or, if you prefer, cultural truth. I thought I coined that yesterday, but it turns out that, as always, a thousand people were ahead of me. I love the broad, endlessly diverse, and ancient array of human cultures far too much to want to scrub the world of its folk practices. For me, the joy of living is inextricably interwoven with that lore, handed down by ancestors over millennia. It's "inaccurate"? How I DESPISE those who live for factual accuracy in any case where it goddamn well doesn't matter. The correct dosage of medicine? Of course that matters! The correct perpetrator of the crime that matters? Of course! But whether ghosts or gods or goblins are "real"? Get bent! Take the gas pipe! Get off my lawn! And if you go trifling with the mental space I reserve for the possibility of such magic in the universe, I WILL tear your head off and use it for a bowling ball.
Here is where I point out the two meanings of the word "charm". 1) A talisman with supernatural properties. And 2) a personal quality of warmth, beauty, attractiveness, and sex appeal. You think that's a coincidence? You want to uncouple the one from the other? You'd better invent a new word.
I guess it's time to buckle down and get to Madam Lillian (pictured above). I have no idea who she was, and I don't care, so please don't write to tell me. I find it probable that her ilk have been with us since shortly after the invention of language. It is language that permits us to conceive of such things as past and future, here and hereafter. And after that came specialists: priests and priestesses, shamans, medicine men, soothsayers, and so forth who were designated by their communities to be the interpreters of such, and the conduits between this world and the imagined one. Here is where I note the similarity of the word "mage" and "image". Again, surely no accident. The one conjures the other. (Is it literally true? I think we've already established that I don't care).
The Magi were ancient Zoroastrian wise men, the source of our words magic and magician. They were among the many forerunners of today's topic. Ultimately, it's such a broad subject that it is very hard to wrap one's arms around, which explains my delay in bearing down on it through, lo, these many paragraphs. Foretelling the future! Surely it is impossible. Yet scientists do it all the time, not just meteorologists and economists, which we have long been accustomed to, but nowadays also climatologists, evolutionary biologists, and others, with the ever increasing assistance of computer models. When these people are inaccurate, they shrug and admit that it's not an exact science, one can never compile enough information to tell the future with 100% assurance. In the scheme of things, I'm not sure how this makes them too very different from Criswell, but I'll extend them a courtesy they don't often afford others by respecting their right to their own way of looking at things.
I am being rhetorically facetious of course, but not only as a matter of degree, not essentials. Naturally, the projections of our most learned scientists are statistically more accurate than those of fortune tellers, especially Criswell, who pulled his predictions out of his ass. But by the same token, it must be conceded, and it rarely is, at least by the media, that ultimately scientists can't foretell future events either. Some guesses are better than others, that's all. I am delighted to observe here that the French verb "to guess" is "deviner"...to "divine". Divination is using magic to tell the future, and ultimately we're all just guessing. The ultimate sin, whether you're a scientist or a mind reader, is to claim that you KNOW. To a certainty.
When people base their claims of foreknowledge of future events on intuition chiefly, we associate it with religion. Sometimes, as with the sybils and the Oracle of Delphi, it is an instrument of the official, or predominating religion. Since the European Middle Ages, in western society it has generally been treated as outlaw religion, dubbed black magic, witchcraft, and so forth. More often than not in the past few centuries, the official religion tends to be male dominated, and the outlaw religion tends to be female driven. Make of that what you will.
Anyway, this is where the topic becomes especially interesting to me and (finally!, you cry) relevant to themes of this blog. For fortune telling can fall under the rubric of religion, but it also often (especially in recent centuries) has been connected to show business.
Why have fortune tellers traditionally pitched their tents on midways, fairs and carnivals, and amusement parks, and plied their trade in dime museums? At Coney Island at this very minute you'll encounter live ones operating out of booths, and Zaltar, a coin-operated automaton version of one. We memorialize them in movies like The Wizard of Oz and Nightmare Alley and The Wolf Man. I LOVE that every culture seems to have their version of one. The principal type in Western Culture is primarily drawn from Romani traditions (formerly known as Gypsies). There is also the Hindu Swami idea (as Professor Marvel emulates in The Wizard of Oz). The Persian Magi, as I mentioned. From West Africa, ultimately stems the powerful magic of Voodoo. From China, the I Ching. My mom's reading came out of the American tradition of Spiritualism.
The tools of the trade are centuries old: the crystal ball, palmistry, astrological charts, numerology, tea leaves, phrenology, tarot decks, the planchette (popularly known as a Ouija board), et al. I'm sorry, but if you don't absolutely love this stuff I can't help but regard you as some kind of antiseptic husk of a semi-human. Do you have blood and a beating heart in your chest? Or ice water and a sub-pump?
Now, on the vaudeville stage, it's quite clear and well established that the mentalists there use codes and so forth. It's a branch of stage magic, and we all know that stage magic is no magic at all, but elaborately wrought illusion. But when you enter the fortune-teller's chamber, it becomes ambiguous. It is environmental theatre. There is no boundary there between audience and performer, if those be the roles we are playing. And if the fortune teller relies on cold readings to get at the truth, is that really a debunking, to say so? They expertly assess your clothes, your manner of speaking, the price of your haircut, the roughness of your hands, where your scars are, the smell of your sweat and perfume and pheromones, and what your responses are to their questions and statements, and then fill out a mental portrait of who you are, and make projections about the future. In other words, they gathered lots of empirical data, then made an informed calculation about some likely outcomes based on what they learned? That's not science? And they played games with you, the cards, the props: that's not fun? It doesn't make your spine tingle? That's not art? And art isn't true either?
As to the claim of being literally psychic -- what this day technically celebrates -- no one knows that it's false any more than anyone knows that it's true. It's usually too be vague to be false. As for what we call intuition, that too is as real as anything else. There are certain things all humans have in common. We all share most of our DNA, we have the same biological instincts, our brains and bodies work the same way, and all members of our species share the same past. I know that, unless you're G. Gordon Liddy, you will jump if I touch you with a flame. Therefore, with careful study, cannot subtler predictions be made?
Here in New York, as in many states, it is technically illegal to be a "fortune teller", per se. The impulse being a sort of sub-component of consumer rights, I expect, and the right we all enjoy not be conned out of our money. But people ply the same trade under other names, such as "Reader and Advisor", "Spiritual Consultant", or what have you. Or they operate underground, and call themselves whatever they like.
Lastly, there is an aspect to what many of these people do that can accurately be described as the work of counselling. They are neither psychologists nor trained therapists, but they can be empathic, and help with things life grief, and loneliness, and your love life. As in all fields of human endeavor, some are predatory. But I think, were you able to take a survey somehow, the majority are not. Is it really more harmful than getting a massage, or crying on the shoulder of some hairdresser or bartender? By now, you know what I think. Hey! You must be psychic!
As for that medium who conned my mother, who knows? More importantly, if it brought her comfort, who cares?
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