How does your future look? Wealth or poverty, love or loneliness, good health or illness? Would you like to know or prefer blissful ignorance?
I tried to answer that question in a way that people have done for centuries – by consulting a fortune teller. In fact, I met with three to confirm their predictions and also to find out a little about what the ancient ritual of divination looks like in London in the 21st century.
But first I wanted to see why these three oracles thought they had the right to tell me what my future held. What set them on this path, how do they help other people like me and how does such a dubious ‘gift’ as a business work for them.
Fran Tarot – Tarot card reader and psychic
The first one I met was a tarot card reader in Teddington who goes by the name of Fran Tarot. The 67-year-old says she is a psychic who can speak to the spirits of dead loved ones too, and claims to be able to use her cards to predict the future.
She said: “I foresaw the death of a friend. I was about 27 or 25 and I was having lunch with him in West One and I looked at him and suddenly it was like the world sucked in past him. I thought ‘You’ll to be dead in a month’. And I felt this big ball going around in my head – smashing every side of my head.”
She said the feeling was “very, very disturbing”. A month later, she said she was watching the news and saw the same friend had been murdered outside a nightclub. “I literally shot up in my chair, I kind of screamed,” Fran said.
Since then Fran worked in advertising but returned to fortune telling later in life, joining a psychic phone service doing virtual readings for a business while living in Camden. She then decided to start her own business and do readings from her flat in Teddington.
A few weeks later, Fran said she came back and the woman had “met the multi-millionaire online”. She said: “I was blown away, even though many of my predictions are coming true, I was still blown away.”
There have been several studies of tarot card and psychic readings that examine whether there is a science or clever technique behind them – asking questions and listening carefully to draw out information they attribute to being told by a spirit. But Fran is not convinced by these. She said: “I don’t think it’s a science. I think it’s hugely organic.”
She added: “It’s not religious, I don’t think. A lot of people say it’s the work of the devil but I help so many people it can’t be.”
She offers four different length readings: 20 minutes for £34, 30 minutes for £50, 45 minutes for £70 and finally an hour for £85.
Bernard Ilsley – The London Medium
Bernard Ilsley uses a slightly different method than Fran with his Tarot card assisted readings. Bernard says he is a pure medium psychic and uses three “spirit guides”: Dr. Chan, a Chinese spirit he consults for spiritual healing, Silver Cloud, the North American guide for clairvoyance, and finally Master Chow, the samurai master for protection.
Bernard also had an odd introduction to the psychic world. He said: “When I was a boy I painted an egg in the back garden and I found that by just relaxing the brush went off by itself. So the brush went like a needle on a sewing machine and painted for me. .
“So I was kind of channeling, but I didn’t realize. And it’s painted this sort of Chinese pattern. And looking back, I realized it was a spirit guide that I connected with.”
Things started to get more serious when he was 20 and he met Maureen Plant – the ex-wife of Led Zepplin singer Robert Plant – at a psychic meditation development circle. He was invited by Maureen who said they had booze at their country mansion. Since then he has gone on nationwide UK theater tours and tours across America as well as doing private readings.
Unlike Fran, Bernard attempts to base some of his claimed abilities in science, citing Einstein and Stephen Hawkins’ theories of multiple dimensions. He said: “So as a medium I work mainly with vibrations, energies, auras. I’m what you would call a clairvoyant medium – so I see future situations, the past, the present and the spirit worlds. I work with all dimensions really.”
A high-profile prediction Bernard said he had made was whether the White House would be hit during 9/11. He said his ex-wife’s best friend worked at the White House and she called him during the attacks.
“Obviously you get put on the spot when it’s something this big,” Bernard said. “And I kind of got this flash of the plane going down before it got to the White House — there was an image of it going down and I could see that it wasn’t going to hit the Pentagon (actually a plane did hit the Pentagon) and it wasn’t going to the White House. And that’s what I said and then she turned around and said, “It’s not going to hit us! It won’t hit us!” How does he know?!
“Then about five minutes later they heard it had gone down – an accurate prediction, thankfully it was. But yes, it’s very true.”
Bernard has written a Book called Divinus Spiritus which is for sale on Amazon.
Surya Ji – palm reader
The last fortune teller I visited was a palm reader called Surya Ji in Brixton. He has a long family history in the world of oracles and takes deep influence from Hindu practices.
Surya has 18 years of experience and has been working in Brixton for three years now. He explained how hand grips work and how it is not an infallible practice. He related it to modern physicians’ diagnosis and treatment. he said, “If you have some disease and you go to the doctor, he can’t tell you what it is right away. When you go, he can check, he can see, and he can use the stethoscope to see what happened. He can give some pills or medicine, for example. If that hasn’t worked, he may need to have a blood test.”
If the problem persists, it escalates to things like surgery, he said. Similarly, Surya explained that handgrip therapy works on a similar basis of escalation: “When you come here for a reading, we can’t immediately tell you the problem. If you then tell me that I have this kind of problem, we will give you a solution to it – ‘You do this, we do this and we fix it’. If the problem turns out to be more than we first thought, we will explain ‘You have to do this, it will happen like this’. “
Although the practice is Hindu-oriented, “anyone can come,” Surya said, welcoming anyone who needs help, regardless of religion or belief. Surya says it is more than just telling the future but also treating problems and providing solutions to anything that may appear in your future – “If you go the wrong way, we will get you back on the right path.”
“No one can predict the absolute future,” according to Surya who says that your palm can give away clues about what may happen during vague periods of time that he is equipped to help you with through advice and prayer. He also uses other forms of reading such as horoscopes and planet readings to make predictions.
He has a four-year-old son whom he plans to teach hand healing techniques when he turns 12 to continue the family tradition. A reading from Surya costs £30.
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