I’ve been to a lot of “spiritual centers” in my time — strip mall palm readers, candle-lit séance parlors, roadside UFO museums complete with homemade aluminum hats — but few have been quite so aggressively adorable as The Divination Station in Mystic Grove. For starters, it’s housed in a repurposed gas station. Somewhere around 1962, … Read more
Some people spend their Saturday nights watching sports, drinking beer, maybe indulging in a little reckless online shopping. I spent mine sitting around a wobbly dining room table in a dusty antique shop, participating in what was billed as a “Traditional Victorian Séance Experience.” Traditional in the sense that it involved costumes, bad accents, and … Read more
Automatic writing is the noble tradition of zoning out, letting your hand twitch around on a piece of paper, and then insisting that the resulting illegible mess is a profound message from the spirit world. The idea is simple. Too simple. You grab a pen, empty your mind — which for some practitioners is less … Read more
You haven’t truly experienced spiritual capitalism until you’ve wandered through a psychic fair set up in the abandoned lot behind a defunct strip mall. The Crescent Moon Psychic Fair proudly offered “guidance, enlightenment, and authentic metaphysical experiences,” all conveniently located between an empty Payless ShoeSource and what used to be a Curves gym. Upon arrival, … Read more
Every few years, Nostradamus trends again. Someone cracks open The Prophecies, finds a quatrain about “great trembling under the sky of the seventh month,” and declares it proof that Nostradamus foresaw everything from 9/11 to last Thursday’s gas station sushi incident. It never fails. Nostradamus wrote hundreds of vague, cryptic four-line verses — allegedly predicting … Read more
If childhood was full of invisible companions helping you navigate playground politics, adulthood offers spirit guides — invisible companions who apparently help you navigate life, taxes, bad Tinder dates, and questionable decisions made after two glasses of box wine. Spirit guides are described as angels, ancestors, totem animals, or “light beings,” standing ready to offer … Read more
Just when you thought humanity’s desperation for meaning had scraped the bottom of the barrel, someone lifted the barrel and found an even slimier layer underneath: pet psychics. These are self-proclaimed “animal communicators” who, for a modest fee — usually something insultingly close to your grocery budget — will “channel” your pet’s thoughts, emotions, and … Read more
If there’s a cheaper shortcut to pretending you have psychic abilities than swinging a rock on a string, I have yet to find it. The concept is simple enough: dangle a pendulum — usually a crystal, a ring, or whatever happened to be lying around in the back seat of your car — over a … Read more
Tarot cards are beautiful. Gorgeously illustrated, richly symbolic, dripping with history. A deck of miniature works of art, each whispering vague, universal human experiences. And yet somewhere between admiring the artwork and flipping the final card, we decided that these painted rectangles could predict the future. Modern fortunetelling with tarot follows a simple formula: you … Read more
Once upon a time, you could call a 1-900 number, fork over five bucks a minute, and some stranger wearing pajama pants and fuzzy slippers would tell you that “great changes are coming” to your love life. Ah, the good old days, when hope was expensive and delivered in fifteen-minute increments by people who failed … Read more