The Fortuneteller’s Secrets Revealed
Article by: Dennis Marlock & John Dowling

The wish to know what the future holds in store for us has existed as an active yearning for as long as human beings have been able to conjecture about things and events as they might become. It is a craving that fuels ongoing interest in the vague prophesies of Nostradamus more than half a millennium after his Centuries was penned and makes today's newspaper incomplete without an astrology feature. Many religions lay claim to knowledge of the future but their future is eternity, not tomorrow. Yet it is the tomorrows about which we are most immediately anxious.

The preponderance of evidence indicates there is no mystical cure for this insatiable itch to know future events. No astrologer calculating the distribution of the heavenly bodies, no shaman pondering the configuration of chicken innards, no fortuneteller contemplating the topography of a client's palm can do more than guess at tomorrow's contents.

Still there is a large segment of our society which believes that our lives are ordered by the stars, the gods, the fates or perhaps other people with occult powers. Many also believe that there are those more prescient than we who can comprehend and explain the forces directing our lives, people who can assist us in counteracting, influencing or avoiding those forces. Such believers are not limited to the uneducated, the poor and the lowly as demonstrated by Nancy Reagan's habitually checking her husbands travel itinerary with her astrologer.

At the beginning of every year the tabloids prominently displayed near the check-out counters of virtually every supermarket publish predictions by a stable of seers. Those seers are right far less frequently than we keep our New Year's resolutions; they often contradict one another, make ambiguous pronouncements, predict events that never occur and fail to predict momentous events that do occur. At the onset of 1981, for example, not a single psychic anticipated that both Pope Paul II and President Ronald Reagan would be shot that year. (Mrs. Reagan's astrologer obviously missed a golden opportunity.) The true-believer never recognizes the inconsistencies, contradictions and failures and is unimpressed when they are pointed out.

Here we are concerned with fortunetellers, primarily women, who do a land office business with elderly clients who are also predominantly women. The fortunetellers know they are frauds but they also know that they can con others into believing they have supernatural powers. No one in the fortunetelling community would ask another fortuneteller to tell his or her future. To do so would make that person the butt of countless jokes and an object of general derision. Telling fortunes is something they do to their clients, not for them.

Fortunetellers nevertheless continue to hold a fascination for many of us, a magnetic attraction, an "I doubt it but what will it hurt to try" attitude. Every spring the Chamber of Commerce in a suburban Chicago community sponsors a "Fortunetelling Day" at a local shopping mall. They invite tellers to perform and set up booths for them, then bus in senior citizens for a day of shopping and fun. The tellers charge five dollars a reading and each earns several hundred dollars for her day's work. When a bunco detective suggested that the event be discontinued because of the probability that the tellers were inviting exploitable clients to visit their fortunetelling parlors and there fleecing them, his recommendation was rejected. Fortunetelling is legal in that community, he was reminded. Not only that but "Fortunetelling Day" is one of the most popular events of the year.

THE LAW

Ordinances concerning commercial fortunetelling and allied "spiritual" activities vary considerably across the country. Many cities, towns and villages prohibit all predicting of the future except by preachers, teachers and weather forecasters. Other communities attempt to gain a modicum of control over fortunetellers through licensing. Some municipalities simply disregard the problem. Even where banning ordinances exist, they are commonly ignored. There is a prevalent belief among the public, city attorneys and many police officers that if people are stupid enough to fall for the psychics' con games they deserve to lose their money. Police departments are typically understaffed, overworked and faced with many problems that seem much more critical than the "petty" theft carried out by fortunetellers. As a crime, fortunetelling has an extremely low priority.

NEIGHBORHOOD PSYCHICS

There was a time not long ago when most fortunetellers were as nomadic as home repair swindlers and home invasion burglars. In fact, they were often the wives and daughters of such rip-off artists. That was an era when the bujo was a weapon in the arsenal of virtually every fortuneteller. Bujo is a Romany word which originally meant "bag" or "cloth" but has come to denote a swindle, one in which the client's money is wrapped in a head scarf or handkerchief, sewn closed, blessed and returned to the client with the admonition to keep it under her clothing next to the skin for a week. At that time, the teller promises, the money will have doubled. Actually the packet containing money is surreptitiously switched for an identical one containing paper. Before the week is out and the swindle is discovered, the fortuneteller's band is well down the road and out of reach.

As the population of fortunetellers has increased, the market for their services has approached the saturation point, a condition which is increasingly bringing them into competition with one another and forcing many of them to become much more sedentary than they traditionally were or any of them wish to be.

In 1961 a fortuneteller described the movement of her band in the following way: "Last winter we had parlors in southern California. In the spring we moved east, to Philadelphia and from there to Boston. In the fall we moved west to Milwaukee and then down to St Louis on our way to Miami for the next winter." For most fortunetellers that kind of easy, unhampered movement is no longer possible. If they wish to work at their profession, they must find a productive territory and stay with it.

Parlors tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods where many residents are less educated, more superstitious and less likely to be analytical. In a poverty community the reality of life gives credence to a world view which holds that people are pawns manipulated capriciously by unseen malicious forces. Food, clothing, rent, heat and other necessities compete for dollars that are habitually inadequate to the need. Frequently people caught in this economic squeeze seek desperately for some panacea to treat their ills. Just as the constraints of poverty generate a morbid market for lotteries, the numbers racket and other get-rich-quick schemes, so they create a market for other things life consistently denies, things like love, respect, health and happiness; these the fortuneteller promises to provide. The fortuneteller who operates a store-front parlor in a ghetto may have to give readings for five or ten dollars but her calendar is full. New York and many other large cities have vast areas with an average of one parlor for every sixteen blocks, the optimum number for the available market.

As the neighborhood becomes somewhat more affluent, the incidence of parlors declines and store-fronts give way to homes with the parlor in a front bedroom. It is here that one is likely to see chauffeur-driven limousines waiting at the curb while the driver's employer is having her palm read. At fifty dollars or more a reading, the fortuneteller can certainly tell her own fortune; it will add up to several hundred thousand dollars a year. Since the transactions are all in cash, there is no or minimal income tax to pay. The husband of one such fortuneteller was not stretching truth too far when he said he turned in his BMW on a new one every time the ashtray got full.

Sedentary life has also had a dramatic impact on the patterns of client exploitation. While a few nomadic, hit-and-run tellers still employ the bujo, most present-day fortunetellers condemn the bujo as an evil trick of bad tellers who are giving "good" tellers a sordid reputation. Good tellers, of course, are those who must reject the bujo because they are stuck in one place.

Legally or illegally, virtually every city, town and village has its resident fortunetellers. Under "Astrologers" or "Psychics" they often advertise in the Yellow Pages; leaflets are handed out by their husbands and sons in subways, on buses and at street corners; first visit discount coupons and fliers extolling their powers are stuffed into grocery bags or inserted beneath windshield wipers. Many newspapers carry fortunetellers' ads while many radio stations broadcast their locations and repeat their claims to repair lovers' quarrels, restore luck, find lost property and much more. One way or another, fortunetellers entice their victims into their parlors.

SETTING THE STAGE

Like a majestic cathedral or a somber, stately courtroom, the physical setting of a fortunetelling parlor or "holy room" is designed to create a sense of awe in those who enter. The chamber is normally draped in dark, satiny or velvety curtains to make it appear smaller, more intimate and to deaden the noise of a nearby street. In the center, bathed in subdued light, stands a round table with a rich cover that drapes to the floor. The table is flanked by two chairs and on its top is a Bible, a crystal ball or a deck of Tarot cards, depending on the technique favored by the fortuneteller.

On a sideboard stands an eclectic array of icons: a contemplating Buddha, a Madonna, a figurine of the Hindu goddess Kali, a crucifix and others. At one end of the sideboard sits a vase of flowers, at the other end a thurible in which incense is burning. When the sideboard is used as an alter a large candelabrum is placed in the center. Here sacrificial candles are offered to God. Behind the fortuneteller's chair hangs a chart showing the delineated mounds and valleys of the palm. The room is shadowy, permeated by an aura of mystery and sanctity and presided over by a woman who can be kindly, sympathetic, brusk, stern or demanding as the scam requires.

Of crucial importance to the teller's success is being able to tell her client (victim) much about his or her past at the first reading. It seems patently obvious to many people that someone with occult powers great enough to see backward through time must also have the power to see forward through time and, consequently, be able to help them find love, health and wealth, those often illusive qualities virtually everyone desires.

In dealing with those who come to her the fortuneteller tells her client nothing that the client does not first tell the fortuneteller, although the client is ignorant of his or her roll in the exchange.       NEXT  PAGE