FORTUNE TELLER

Explained ...

(by Lyn Shea)

Some people still use the phrase fortune teller even though there are very few practitioners who would like to be thought of as a 'fortune teller'. It has to be said that it does conjure up the vision of ladies in tents at fairgrounds bedecked in gaily coloured head-scarves speaking with foreign accents and pouring over crystal balls in order to conjure up visions of their own for the client.

The fascination with crystal balls is another interesting thing, and I guarantee that if you bought one and sat in any large open public space in any major city you would be inundated with people who wanted your services - irrespective of whether you could see into the thing accurately or not. Actually the crystal ball - for the fortune teller - was actually just a focal point for focusing the mind. The correct way to use them is to place them to one side, in the periphery, because they act very much like receivers or transmitters and aid the act of clairvoyance.

At one time in any fairground, travelling circus or local fete the fortune teller was indispensable as an attraction, because there was no such thing as the daily or weekly horoscope in the newspaper and no tarot phone lines or websites and people were starved of the kind of advice and counselling that is now taken for granted as a mainstream adjunct to active living.

Nowadays for any self respecting practitioner of the art of divination in any form, the term fortune teller would probably make their toes curl. Although there are bound to be a few 'old school' purveyors around who will cling lovingly to the label in a kind of neo-sooth-sayer rebellion against too much dumming down of one of the few areas of life still entitled not to reveal too much of its trade secrets. A fortune teller is in a sense like a priest in that what is brought before him/her will eventually reveal itself and be enlarged upon in some way either by thought or word to the greater relief or mortification of the customer. Thus the art of fortune telling has gone out of the window in favour of a more liberal form of advising/counselling/obtaining information about future and past which offers better perspective or insight to the person requesting it.

Things like newspaper horoscopes, online tarot services and so on are far less invasive in their dispensing of the wisdom. They are much less in your face than a fortune teller, and even a live psychic, analyst or clairvoyant these days is much less intimidating than a fortune teller, who in the old days would have you in an out within 10 minutes after telling you like it was and calling a spade a spade, with no redress and no apology. There was very little flexibility or respect for the individual free will of client. Fate was the master! Destiny, fate and absolute pronouncement were fundamental to the service! But gradually, since the turn of the century and with the advent of the interest in psychology and self development,the name of the game has changed considerably. And thank heavens for that! Most people know now (and if they don't they should be told) that no-one can put there anything which isn't part of your current scenario, either consciously or unconsciously, and most issues in what is considered to be 'the future' can usually be modified, improved or avoided. Therefore, as we are fond of saying, the future is a movable feast and not carved in tablets of stone. We cannot stress this often enough - although any fortune teller still left out there may not like to hear it.

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