It`s the day before Halloween and you`re in the mood for something
”spiritual.” If you haven`t been to your neighborhood psychic in a while, you may be in for a few surprises.
Forget about the image of a caftan- and turban-clad mystic sitting in some dark, obscure room, peering into a crystal ball.
If you want your horoscope charted, chances are it will be run out on a computer. If you`re interested in having your tea leaves read, be prepared for plastic cups. You didn`t quite catch everything in that tarot-card reading?
There`s a cassette to take home and listen to again.
Crystal balls have given way to computer chips. The 20th Century has finally invaded the ancient art of fortune telling. Even the term ”fortune telling” is old school. Instead, readers prefer to be referred to as psychic ”counselors” or ”consultants.”
Some even call themselves ”tarascope counselors,” such as Deon. A few days a week Deon sets up shop behind a curtain in a tiny corner of the Occult Bookstore, 3230 N. Clark St.
Looking as if she stepped out of a 1950s movie, Deon sits at a table covered by a plastic sheet with a zodiac circle printed on it. On top of the circle she carefully lays out tarot and playing cards. From their position she determines things such as ”some money you don`t expect will be coming to you really soon” and ”your mother is not feeling well.”
Deon wants to make sure the tarascope, a modern merger between the horoscope and tarot readings, gets its due respect.
”I do this to help people,” Deon says. ”A lot of people come here and leave with answers. It really does help them. We`re not gypsies here or anything like that.”
Psychic readers are very sensitive about being portrayed as gypsies or unscrupulous cads taking advantage of the gullible or misfortunate. Many see themselves akin to the psychologist.
”I am an astrological consultant for psychological therapy,” says David Horbovetz of the Astrologer`s Medium, 2615 N. Halsted St. Besides consultations, the Astrologer`s Medium also sponsors classes and workshops in psychic readings.
”We are not fortune tellers,” adds Horbovetz. ”That term conjures up the image of a gypsy in a storefront somewhere telling you something very fatalistic–like `this or that is going to happen.` Instead, we have a tool here that gives a person perspective on how life patterns and cycles are unfolding. People can then take that information and utilize their free will to make things happen.”
That information can pertain to everything from your love life to a medical diagnosis. Horbovetz says that through an astrological reading, aided by a computer, he was able to diagnose his own kidney stone problem and effect a cure by drinking an ”age-old cure” of cold-pressed olive oil and lemon.
Ages-old practice
Historians trace the practice of consulting psychic readers to ancient Babylonia. Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand, a famous fortune teller in 19th-Century France known as La Sibylle du Faubourg Saint-Germain, was said to have been consulted and hailed by the painter Jacques Louis David and the Empress Josephine.
Women, psychics will tell you, comprise roughly 80 percent of their clients.
”Men in our society are socialized into thinking from the time they are little that they can and should control the world,” says one reader. ”Women are much more sensitive to the environment and the idea that cycles do affect things.”
For those who yearn for something beyond pure entertainment, psychics offer a sort of hope for the future–a sense that there is a pattern or higher order to things. Some readers with less sophisticated clientele utilize religious and cultural cues. The unscrupulous play off these superstitions.
One Ohio Street palmist has clients place their $10 fee in an open-faced Bible located in a dark room before religious effigies and candles. Near the end of a recent half-hour reading, she gasped and claimed to find some
”blockage” that lay in the ”mystery of the mount” dating back to some childhood trauma. For an extra $20 she said she would be happy to research the details.
Illinois psychics are not licensed or regulated by any governmental body. Contrary to the belief that psychics are the ”poor man`s shrink,” no socio- economic class can claim a monopoly on their services. Fees vary from $10 for a tarot card reading to about $100 for a full astrological chart interpretation.
Horbovetz said that among his clients are prominent members of the stock exchange ”who utilize this concept of cycles affecting the market.”
Businessmen and tea leaves
Businessmen also patronize Ella`s Tea Leaf Studio. You have to time your visits to Ella`s on the 7th floor of 32 N. State St. In a tiny room with five tiny Formica tables sit four readers. At lunchtime and in the early evening hours, there`s sometimes a pile-up of executives waiting to plunk down $10 to learn how to handle their six-figure corporate accounts and to drink tea out of plastic cups.
Russell, a reader at Ella`s, reads fortunes from Cozy cups and will read your future from a deck of playing cards. Don`t be surprised if through some odd coincidence the same cards keep turning up, even though you randomly pick 14 cards one time, 9 the next, half the deck the third time.
To some it may seem rather odd to be reading playing cards instead of tarot cards, but if you know how, you can read just about anything, psychics say.
For instance, Agnes Nelson, an Eastern European woman who lives in Mt. Prospect, reads futures from coffee grounds.
From her living room, peering hard into the tiny Turkish coffee cup, Nelson will survey the coffee leavings, take a long drag on her cigarette and then in her heavily accented English tell you all sorts of intimate details about intimate friends (which shouldn`t be mentioned in a family newspaper). If you miss any crucial points, Nelson has it all on a cassette tape.
Nelson also conjures up all sorts of wonderful images:
”I see you standing in the middle of some ruins holding an ancient object of some spiritual significance. . . .
”I feel you will be showing up in front of a large audience. . . . You are wearing something from the fashions of the `30s . . . an outfit with fur . . . at an event with an official or important meaning that will bring you fame.”
If you opt for a more scientific approach, try a computerized astrological chart.
Astrologer Wendy Hawks is so confident of her system that she even offers a guarantee ”to improve your life.”
A precise, businesslike woman with stylishly cut reddish-brown hair, Hawks has a crisp accent from her native Wales. She claims a national reputation through writing columns for such papers as the National Examiner.
”Oh, that`s just entertainment,” Hawks says, waving her articles aside. ”But this,” she points to the computer charts in front of her, ”this is serious.”
The four charts that she had printed out on her computer did look serious. They contained a whole series of symbols reminiscent of all those horrible equations you forgot just as soon as you passed that last
trigonometry final.
Don`t despair. Hawks will interpret it all and explain how your planets rise and fall and configure all over each other, which is something else that probably shouldn`t be mentioned in a family newspaper. It all seems like rather fresh talk coming from something as technical as a computer.
”Look, it`s all the same knowledge as before,” Hawks says. ”All the computer does is save time. It used to take me hours to sit down and write these charts out by hand. Now, with the computer, I can do it in just minutes. The possibilities are endless.”
It just makes you wonder what Merlin could have done with an Apple computer system.
