Psychic Telephone · 61
Tradition
When I consider what we mean when we say psychic, and why this matters to us, I find myself thinking about the relationship between bodies and stories. Bodies as bearers and transmitters of stories; stories as expressions of bodies’ truths and their many mysteries. I have noticed that psychic work, as it exists in America today, is primarily the purview of women. Nearly every psychic I encountered in my search was a woman—mothers, single women, transgender women, queer women, women of color. To a large degree, the story of psychics in America is a story of women giving readings to women. Women paying attention to women.
When we ask what psychic practitioners mean to us as a society, it’s worth considering not only how they fit within the tensions of contemporary life, but how those tensions bear specifically on women, and on anyone not traditionally favored in Western thought. On those of us who might be considered the ideologically dispossessed, those whose experiences were ignored by the great philosophers and theologians when they wrote the works we were assigned to read in school. Instead, the stuff of our lives has been told and shared by less official means. I think of Steven, the only man I interviewed, carrier of an ancient Lakota oral tradition. He declined to be interviewed by phone or Zoom but instead invited me to his home to speak in person. So we sat and shared space, stories coming through the air in the room.
Psychic work and the body of storytelling that swirls around it form a means through which practitioners can circumvent those who would not write them into being. And I think it’s no accident that much of this storytelling falls under the umbrella of New Ageism—a movement in which divination and development of psychic abilities have always been centrally important as means of accessing deep spiritual truths. As a set of beliefs and practices that can be considered a folk religion, New Ageism is at its core about the idea that everything is connected and the belief that God exists within us and all things. Adherents also value its eclecticism and egalitarianism, and the tenet that every individual may choose the elements that best suit them. This is in fact central to its origins, as the New Age worldview formed over the past century from a blend of European esoteric and occultist beliefs, Eastern metaphysics, and Indigenous shamanic traditions.
With its mix-and-match ethos, New Ageism has been called a “confused ideology” and has been criticized for its long history of blithe cultural appropriation. Perhaps this is why the term “New Age” has fallen out of use in recent years, to the degree that those who embrace its tenets today often don’t understand them as part of this distinct modern spiritual tradition. But the New Age worldview hasn’t disappeared. On the contrary, it has gone mainstream. It’s in the way yoga, meditation, and acupuncture are no longer considered weird or fringy. It’s in how even its more “woo-woo” manifestations like tarot reading and crystal healing are now practiced widely. It’s in the way people commonly say things like Maybe the Universe wants me to do this—imbuing the cosmos with desires, with intentions. And it’s in the loose, expanding network of people, mostly women, who disseminate these ideas.
This brings me back to thoughts about truths and mysteries, and to a widespread need for different stories—stories that express what is carried by those of us whose bodies, whose experiences, have historically been marginalized, dismissed, or erased. In this context, psychic work can be seen as part of a larger effort to disjoin spirituality from patriarchy and colonialism, and as a rejection of the minimizing, disempowering stories so many of us were raised on.
Psychic work is also a means by which to deliver new stories. Nothing provides the wow factor needed to make a story stick like the feeling that something magical, something impossible, is happening. I think of how the image of my “crumpled” chakra, so inexplicably accurate, surprised me and stirred my sense of awe. How that can lend an idea the emotional force needed to catalyze lasting change. Maybe with our deeply rational, scientific approach to mental health, the value of the unknown has been overlooked. In this age in which we’ve become so separated from nature, from mystery, from the sublime, perhaps the inexplicability of psychic readings, the wonder they conjure, is a key source of their power.
I remember a scene from Small Fry, a memoir by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, in which the author challenges her mother’s longtime habit of reading her palms. Through their many years of poverty and instability together, Lisa’s mother would often tell her that the lines on her palms indicated she was meant for a good life, a life of success and abundance. When Lisa finally asks about this purported palm-reading expertise, her mother admits she has none. Instead she says, “We needed to get to a radically different place than where we were. I didn’t know how else to get us there, besides stories.” She adds, “Anyway, the things I was saying—they were true.”
Perhaps what psychics offer, in contemporary America, is help in finding our way to a radically different place. Help by way of stories—and not just as individuals, but as a collective. Not just as clients, but as members of a culture desperately engaged in exploring and testing new ways forward, against the undertow of all that draws us back.
YESS!!!