I recently bought a gift for a friend and a fortune teller fish was included in the package. It’s been resting on my desk for a week, and while I haven’t opened it or used it, I find it catching my eye over the week, wondering when the right moment would be to use it. Even though I know how the illusion works—absorbing certain amounts of moisture in your palm, the polymer reacts in different ways—it’s still fun to think of what questions you’d ask of fate.
I try to absorb the guidance of staying present—how pervasive it has become, to be told to be present, to manage anxieties by focusing only on the moment at hand. I get the why of it, and yet there’s something that doesn’t completely sit right with me—because thinking about the past and future is life, it’s human. And if we don’t think about the past or the future, how do we care for those we come from, or those to come? There’s a small cynical question in the back of my mind: doesn’t telling people to focus on the present also act as a way to keep people from focusing on what has happened in the past and seek reparations, or forget about the future and keep stoking the fires of climate change? Staying in the present might also keep us from reckoning with what happens over time.
Divination, augury, and prophesy, have such a long history, aspects of which still echo in many communities across the world. The Romans took their tradition of augury from the Greeks, dividing the sky with a crooked wand to determine the messages from the gods that come on the wings of the birds. Depending on the species, the bird’s behavior—flying to the left or right—was used to forecast marriages, government policy, or war councils. There were private auguries who officiated weddings after taking the news from the sky, but many more public auguries, a college of government officials who were schooled in the ways of fortune-telling. The word auspicious ties to these traditions, when augury meant literally the flight of birds, thought to be messengers of the gods—an auspicious augury, a good omen.
But there were also the oracles, sybills—ecstatic, wise women who wrote down prophecies and the messages of Apollo, the books of wisdom consulted by the Roman authorities in times of plague and disorder. And there was also the warning of Cassandra—the most famous prophetess of them all, doomed to have a wisdom and sight of the future that no one would hear or listen to.
I’ve always been charmed by superstitions that have come down through generations: salt over the shoulder, knocking on wood, a black cat crossing the road. A four-legged creature that crosses your path was a Roman auspice, or sign, depending on what kind of animal it is. The superstition of a black cat crossing our path is what remains known to us today, most likely because of its association with witches.
The history of fortune telling is, like witches, like Cassandra, another instance where primarily women are persecuted and dismissed as frauds, old wives’ tales, and criminals. Of course, there are many stories of fraud and cons in fortune telling that continue—it’s still officially a crime in New York, as well as in other places across the country. Several women have been arrested and imprisoned for fraud in New York in the last decade. But what those stories also dismiss is that fortune-telling has been a source of immense healing and community throughout history—women’s knowledge shared across kin, neighbors, and other women—in ways that were otherwise unavailable to those considered to be on the margins of society.
Fortune telling, and divination, are primarily the work of women traditionally—networks of women who are approached by other women to allay worries at times of transition, of problems within the home or family—offering a type of supportive counseling in times where there was no access to such counseling or social support publicly. In Iceland, networks of fortune-telling women provided the means for assurance, reframing an anticipation of negative events, and soothing fears with intuitive, experiential wisdom1.
A recent find at the Tenement Museum in New York brought these practices to light, with the discovery of an advertisement for fortune-telling by a woman in the Jewish community. Navigating a world in a language other than one’s own, with unfamiliar structures, the guidance and wisdom of a fortune-teller can be a means of holding on to familiar traditions, networks, and healing.
But of course, this comes with the threat of stereotypes and accusations of fraud, which increased and was repeated by police, government officials, and the legal system. Anything outside the normal structures of society is suspect. And there are always opportunities for fraud when money is involved. But with no social services, psychologists, and access to medicine, fortune-tellers—especially women who guided women—were a source of reassurance that was otherwise unavailable. And the cost may have been thought well worth the peace of mind that it afforded.
Still, laws against fortune-telling remain on the books. As recently as 1967, fortune-telling changed from a disturbance of the peace to a Class B Misdemeanor in New York:
a person is guilty of fortune-telling when, for a fee or compensation which he directly or indirectly solicits or receives, he claims or pretends to tell fortunes.
In order for something to be “alternative,” it by definition is other, on the margins of what is deemed official. A scam is making money when one should not— income is intended to be a function of hard work. In a capitalist system, women who do so, especially, become an easy object of derision. It’s unsurprising that as a practice where generations of women have so often found support, it becomes a source of persecution when it is pushed into the public sphere of capital. As recently as 2003, the ACLU of Tennessee is representing a woman who was arrested and prosecuted for offering tarot card readings as a business.
The effort at moral legitimacy for the levers of the wealthy is itself a long con. As Cody Delistraty2 writes:
How does a capitalist society make playing the stock market look like labor, so that the high earnings that often come from it appear to be derived from proportional work? How do the affluent “cleanse” their earnings, overcoming the taint of chance through the appearance of work, thereby conferring moral legitimacy on their positions of power? The elite solution has been to disguise the stock market as a place of complex probabilities and algorithms rather than what it fundamentally is: luck. It is chance rebranded as morally righteous labor.
I’m not a fan of anyone making money off someone who is asking for help in any way—but that so many corporate CEOs make millions on hours a day, the fact that women working as fortune-tellers are not only arrested but prosecuted and given life sentences in some cases, feels medieval. Or maybe just more now than anything. After all, we are still watching the most egregious examples of cons by white men who get away scot-free and resist any kind of prosecution for their real crimes—including those against women.
Women—through gossip, kin networks, fairy tales, and shared work—find ways to support one another in a world where patriarchy demands silence. Forecasting the future, connecting with those past, is a form of discourse and voice that can be otherwise inaccessible to women.
In the wave of spiritualism that took place in the nineteenth century, women as mediums gained access to a means of power in public that was otherwise unavailable to them. Through spiritualism and clairvoyance, women were able to claim a type of authority that the church, politics, and mores of the time otherwise denied. With spiritualism and clairvoyance, stereotypes ascribed to women—like passivity, emotion, intuition, self-sacrifice—were turned into strengths. Through a willingness to be open to channels beyond the rational or reasonable dictated in public, women could claim a role of holding a wisdom beyond what a world of reason prescribes.
Spiritualist networks in the 1860s were ones where abolitionists, feminists, and advocates for labor reform, child labor, and ideas of free love held sway3. Women like Harriet E. Wilson, a bi-racial woman who grew up as an indentured servant in the North and wrote one of the first books to be published by an African-American woman in the US., Wilson spoke alongside other spiritualist political reformers, like Victoria Woodhull4—who, with her sister, would become the first women to open a stock brokerage in New York, start their own newspaper advocating for free love, and the first woman to run for president. A well-known spiritualist, her spiritualist beliefs and advocacy worked alongside many social justice issues, an unbroken line between the emotional and intuitive ideas that are absent in a world that reasoned for enslaving and exterminating others, and denying women the vote.
Many of the women who were fortune-tellers traditionally were also skilled in healing—intuiting ailments and concerns, including midwives who were skilled in birth control and abortion. But the reasons why are fascinating—or obvious: the distinction between physical illness and emotional well-being didn’t exist among traditional ways of dealing with life’s uncertainties:
…being abandoned by a lover, having an alcoholic husband. Both were serious disturbances in their life and caused unhappiness. Thus, the same person was often consulted about how to deal with a variety of problems which we, steeped as we are in the rational discourse of science, rate as incongruous.5
I wasn’t surprised to find that derision of fortune-telling as a means of healing is a part of the internalization of the white patriarchal values we swim in, but I was surprised to consider that it is also fundamentally about how we have been conditioned to understand illness:
Since the advent of health insurance it increasingly fell to doctors to adjudicate on their patients’ state of health. Illness was usually pronounced when patients were considered to be incapable of working. Conversely, a patient’s ability to work was a sign of good health. But this approach depended on a patriarchal concept of work, i.e. waged labour outside the home which ignored women’s unpaid, and frequently even paid, domestic work…6
As I read that I immediately thought of my fury as I entered the work world, and learned that the benefit afforded to employees when/if they become pregnant is disability pay. Of course—a pregnant body is unable to work for wages in a public life, never mind that such bodies are working more than they ever have in their own homes and bodies to bring forth new life. So obviously: no wages, not working. Pregnancy as disability in the official, government-regulated, “professional” system. Ridiculous.
The same study continues:
In the dominant medical model, constructed by male scientists and influenced by notions of masculinity, illness was associated with the public sphere. Here the symptoms were generally physiological and the treatment was accordingly physical: either the administration of drugs or more invasive methods like surgery. In contrast, women’s experiences of illness and recovery were shaped by a female culture of women’s networks and their inextricable link with domestic affairs. Illness was not necessarily confined to physiological suffering but was perceived as a wider problem that was enmeshed with the well-being of the family. Its character was often defined as much by its impact on the other members of the household as on the self. That is why an unwanted pregnancy, an alcoholic husband, or an unfaithful lover were not necessarily perceived as different categories of problems but as misfortunes that had to be overcome by whatever means easily available on an open medical market.7
While medical doctors refused to provide an abortion, lay networks could be approached by a relative, neighbor, or friend, minimizing the risk of shame or persecution. But more importantly, perhaps was why so many women would usually turn to a lay healer:
Women patients were relatively powerless when confronted with medical men. But with lay operators fee-paying women became clients and thereby gained a certain autonomy over their fate. Instead of appearing as supplicants before an academic expert who normally assumed the role of sole arbiter about abortion decisions and methods, wise women and men often allowed women at least some say in whether an operation would take place and also where and when, and how it would be paid for.8
Yet women healers were vilified publicly for cases of illness or death, which were no worse than medical malpractice and blunders by professional doctors, of which there is much evidence—but where lay healers and midwives were punished severely, doctors were most often given the benefit of the doubt and exonerated. Because they were “professionally” trained.
As more women entered into paid labor in the early twentieth century, fortune-telling became a more public, income-making venture. Australia saw a proliferation of fortune-telling during this period, with one study citing 247 prosecutions from 1900-1918—82% of which were women.9 The remaining men were often immigrants or those who assisted their wives in the business, finding it a lucrative income.
And fortune-telling, while associated with women, was inherently also about working-class women. In a study in early twentieth-century England, Andrew Davies states that fortune-telling was “among the most basic forms of penny capitalism.”10 Opposition was inherently gendered, with the outrage over the “‘hoards of harpies’ allegedly making fortunes of the foolishness of ‘members of the weaker sex’”—i.e., genteel women who were being distracted by working or lower-class women, distracted from the concerns of the household, and whose money should be in the control of men.11
Women working in a public, professional way were ridiculed. An Australian female journalist in 1907 created a press campaign against fortune-telling, leading to a number of police prosecutions. Yet at trial, this was used as a point of attack by the defense attorney, who claimed it was ridiculous to launch court proceedings at the instigation of a female reporter, who would of course be better employed if “she attended to her household duties.”12 One Australian paper said the quiet part out loud, writing in 1903 that “palmistry was all right so long as it [was] kept in a back street.”13
While fortune-telling and abortion rights seem at the surface incongruous, the parallels between the prosecutions of fortune-telling and of witches centuries earlier become obvious. The laws criminalizing fortune-telling date from the Elizabethan period14—a time in which accusations of witchcraft were becoming more rampant.
Like witches, fortune-telling women were often prosecuted alongside sisters and mothers; most fortune-tellers were described as middle-aged or elderly, where opportunities for income were a key factor—where widowhood and physical ailments could decrease any other option for work. Many fortune-telling women were widows or had been deserted by their husbands, women who practiced fortune-telling publicly as a way to support themselves and their families.
Fortune-telling as business proliferated in the early twentieth century, a time when men were increasingly away at war, and when women were entering the public workforce more generally. Ironically, women were hired as police officers specifically to investigate claims of fortune-telling practices, as male police officers were immediately suspect, and were never read to for fear of arrest. And as any network with alternative practices, fortune-telling was feared as a front for accessing birth control, abortion, as well as prostitution—all practices that virtuous women were not supposed to be involved with. And so, new professions as police officers and detectives opened up publicly for women—to police and control the movement of other women.15
But what smacked me as I read was coming across the headline of this 1904 Australian newspaper:
Good lord. The press said it all in capital letters. The article goes on to claim:
Speaking with a prominent medicine man, [the] writer was informed that abortion was rampant in West Australia, not alone among single girls, but with married women, who are anxious to shirk the responsibilities of motherhood for fear it would spoil the symmetrical outlines of their figure, and entail the worries and cares of rearing a family.
I’m fascinated at how the alarm at birth rates continues to coincide in our own time, when abortion has again become criminalized. I’m frankly disgusted at how birthrates are talked about now (or then) in a world now surging past 8 billion people. Women are consistently accused as being responsible for low birth rates—as if shirking a duty to the state, the economy, and the strength of nationhood. Not anything about how the world does nothing to support such childbearing women. It’s everywhere—two articles of alarm over birthdates in just last week. And then of course, there’s our country’s own famous richest failed prognosticator, who has claimed that “one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate.” Not that the world is at risk from white men who insist on holding wealth, or insisting that his employees need to work “hard core” and sleep in the office as a sign of commitment. The disconnect is maddening.
I keep a magic eight-ball on my desk, and I’ve grown to think of tarot as a writing prompt at times—not forces of some strange force beyond, but as moments to think about aspects of life that arise when you think about the situation of your life, or of indecision that begins to gnaw. Sometimes flipping a coin is the push we need to dive into a decision, surrendering our illusion of constant control.
I thought of how, when Sheila Heti wrestled with the question of whether or not to become a mother in her book Motherhood, she decided to follow the flipping of coins as a decision practice moving towards that weightier decision, guiding the flow of her questioning and writing. She writes of consulting an imitation of the I Ching, flipping three coins as she asks yes or no questions the majority guiding her next steps. As if to dispel any false conceit, she introduces the book by writing:
In this book, all results from the flipping of coins result from the flipping of actual coins.
It becomes a meditative act, one that ultimately heals as well—not only herself, but her mother, her grandmother, in her decision to ultimately (spoiler alert) not become a mother.
And so when I look to the birds for signs of omen, touch wood, become curious about what a tarot card might lead me to, it’s not so much again of belief, but of curiosity—of interrogating the world and how it’s interacting with yourself, beyond and in exchange with your own body, thoughts, actions. It’s a surrender and an invitation to be surprised, nudged out of your own ruminations and thoughts, to explore something you didn’t already have control of. A reminder that we are so lulled into believing we do have control, and to not explore and depend and deepen relationships with others who might shed new light on our experiences—whether the appearance of a bird at your window, a line in a book chosen blindly after a question, the feeling of not wanting to tempt fate by spilling salt, a substance that had so much value and significance for generations. It’s a connection with the beyond—but the beyond is simply beyond ourselves, our own thoughts.
I now think about what generations of women, immigrants, and those marginalized by society have found in the sharing of secrets, of wisdom handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter to sister in a world that otherwise demanded their silence. How it is still alive and functioning to soothe and console and heal. And I look forward to what these traditions continue to symbolize—what one study titled “feeling” labor.16 It is labor that is intuitive, emotional, feeling work—to ask questions, create safe intimacy, share concerns, alleviate fears, soothe, and heal. Labor that should not be devalued, and is sorely needed in marginalized communities.
It’s the official practices that demand binaries, separate body from mind, human from nature, and claim an authority over—that is when our suspicions should be raised.
Kissman, Kris. “The role of fortune telling as a supportive function among Icelandic women.” International Social Work. 33.2 (1990): 137-144.
Delistraty, Cody. “The Surprising Historical Significance of Fortune-Telling,” JSTOR Daily, 2016.
Ellis, R.J. & Gates Jr., Henry Louis “Grievances at the treatment she received": Harriet E. Wilson's Spiritualist Career in Boston, 1868—1900. American Literary History. Summer, Vol. 24, No. 2, (2012). pp. 234-264
While a woman with a remarkable history, she later, like so many white feminists, supported eugenics, complicating her legacy of humanitarianism. How white women could reconcile and fall into such traps of belief are endlessly infuriating. But I digress..
De Blécourt, W., & Usborne, C. (1999). Women's medicine, women's culture: Abortion and fortune-telling in early twentieth-century Germany and The Netherlands. Medical History, 43(3). p. 387
Ibid. p. 391
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 386
Piper, Alana. “Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia” Labour History, No. 108 (May 2015), pp. 37-52
Davies, Andrew. Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900-1939 (Buckingham; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1992), pp. 79-80. Quoted in Piper, Alana, p. 38
Examiner, 30 March 1907, 9; Register, 15 June 1916, 7. Quoted in Piper, Alana. p. 38
Piper, Alana. “Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia” Labour History, No. 108 (May 2015), p. 40
Ibid. p. 42
Ibid. p. 43
Ewbank, Anne. “The Psychic Tea Rooms of 1930s New York Didn’t Predict All the Police Raids Tea parlors were the battleground in a war against fortune telling.” Gastro Obscura. December 7, 2017; See also Piper, Alana.
Korkman, Z. K. “Feeling Labor: Commercial Divination and Commodified Intimacy in Turkey.” Gender & Society, 29(2), (2015). p. 195–218.
This post is really hitting me, in the best ways. I keep selecting lines to highlight and then have to copy new lines. This is so so beautiful: “It is labor that is intuitive, emotional, feeling work—to ask questions, create safe intimacy, share concerns, alleviate fears, soothe, and heal. Labor that should not be devalued, and is sorely needed in marginalized communities” I would say it’s needed in *all* communities. Finally, totally here for tarot! & Magic eight ball forevva (takes me back to childhood)
I love tarot as a tool of reflection. I've fallen out of practice recently but I need to pick it up again. It's a practice I enjoy even if only as an excuse to look at cool art every day. So many decks are simply beautiful! That's a good enough reason for me.