Wattpad brings you a guest post from Jane Sevier, author of Fortune’s Fool:
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Ever wish you could see into the future? Commune with your grandmama after she has passed over? Communicate with beings on another plane of existence? Well, you’re not alone.
Oracle. Clairvoyant. Medium. Shaman. Seer. Psychic. Whatever you call them, every culture has its version of the gifted who can do just that. From the time human brains advanced enough to embrace the idea that there is a tomorrow, people have wanted to foresee the future or plumb the unknown.
There are accounts of prophesies in the Bible, and the pharaohs of ancient Egypt consulted psychics on everything from the most auspicious time to plant crops to what day to engage an enemy to ensure victory in battle.
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“Priestess of Delphi” (1891) by John Collier [source]
From as long ago as the 8th century B.C. until the 4th century A.D., petitioners came from throughout the Greek world to slopes of Mount Parnassus to consult the Pythia, the priestess who served the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, perhaps the most renowned of the ancient seers. Consultations were restricted to Apollo’s birthday, the seventh day of the Delphic month (possibly our March 4th). To win one, you needed a powerful sponsor, were required to undergo a purification ceremony, and had to bring along an appropriate animal to sacrifice. To prepare herself, the Pythia first bathed in the Castalian spring, then drank from the sacred spring Cassotis before she entered the temple. She chewed leaves from the laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo, which may have contributed to the ecstatic state she entered to deliver her prophecies.
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16th-century prognosticator Nostradamus [source]
Back in the 16th century, nobody thought it strange that a doctor also practiced astrology.
Medical science—and science in general—weren’t what they are today. This was lucky for French physician and astrologer Michel De Notredame, aka Nostradamus, whose prophesies have enthralled readers since he first began publishing them in 1550. Because some seemed to come true, he grew so famous in his own time that Queen Catherine de Medici invited him to the Paris court and Charles IX named him his personal physician when Charles became king.
Nostradamus supposedly sat awake at night for years, peering into a brass bowl filled with water to summon his visions of the future. Some believe that he forecast the French Revolution, the rise of Fascism in the 1930s, and the explosion of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
Many pour over the writings of Nostradamus today, hoping to decipher what’s next in store for the human race.
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Southern Spiritualist, orator, and minister Jesse Babcock Ferguson [source]
When he became pastor of the Nashville Church of Christ in 1846, perhaps the Reverend Jesse Ferguson should have foreseen that his changing beliefs would one day make him a figure of such controversy that he would be forced to resign despite the support of his congregation.
Ferguson embraced the tenets of the growing Spiritualist movement, which taught that the spirits of the dead both can and wish to communicate with the living. He claimed that the spirit of Universalist minister William Ellery Channing had influenced his evolving religious views through messages that came to him through séances. Despite the controversy, Ferguson became a popular orator, lecturing across the South on politics and literature. He also traveled to England with the Davenport Brothers, magicians who claimed that their illusions were the result of supernatural ability, where he warmed up audiences with discussions of Spiritualism. In London,
a spiritualist colleague gave Ferguson a set of spirit dispatches for President Andrew Johnson, which Ferguson delivered in Washington.
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Italian medium Eusapia Palladino apparently levitating a table at the home of French astronomer Camille Flammarion during an 1888 séance. [source]
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of uber-rational fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, believed in psychic phenomena and was a devotee of séances. Conan Doyle ardently defended Eusapia Palladino, a Neapolitan medium whose admirers also included French Nobel laureate physicist Pierre Curie. Perhaps the most storied and scrutinized medium of the turn of the 19th century, Palladino included among her paranormal abilities levitating herself and objects, making spirit hands appear, and communicating with the dead through her spirit guide, John King. In 1908, her powers so impressed a committee appointed by the American Society for Psychical
Research to test her that they declared her to be genuine.
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American psychic and medical clairvoyant Edgar Cayce [source]
Twentieth-century psychic Edgar Cayce claimed to have discovered his gift for healing while under hypnosis to treat a severe case of laryngitis. Having cured himself and then his hypnotist, Cayce was persuaded to offer his trance healing to the public. Throughout his life, healing would remain his primary interest. He also gave readings on topics as wide-ranging as Atlantis, politics, and theology and counted Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, and George Gershwin among his clients. A devout member of the Disciples of Christ and a Sunday school teacher, Cayce also believed in reincarnation and in the akashic records, a concept popularized in theosophical movements that describes a sort of cosmic repository of all knowledge of human experience and of the history of the cosmos. Cayce founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment to explore holistic health, ancient mysteries, personal spirituality, dreams and dream interpretation, intuition, philosophy, and reincarnation.
So, are psychics real? For a very, very long time lots of people have believed in them.
I leave it up to you to decide for yourself. As for me, I’m with Hamlet. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Check out Jane Sevier’s mystery-suspense fiction about hesitant psychic Nell Marchand and her adventures in 1930s Memphis.
Fortune’s Fool
When her husband dies and leaves her penniless, a 1930s Memphis socialite becomes a fortuneteller, only to discover that she has the true sight.
It’s 1933, a quarter of all Americans are unemployed, John Dillinger grabs headlines
knocking off banks, and FDR is in the White House, promising a New Deal for the country.
Nell Marchand has never worked a day in her life. When her philandering skunk of a husband suddenly drops dead, leaving her without one red cent to her name, she lands smack dab in the middle of the hard times she has only heard about in newsreels. Nell tries to find a job to support herself and the household that depends on her, really she does. Her typing is a disaster, she cuts off every call in her one day as a telephone operator, and laundress leaves her back aching. There has to be an easier way.
A reluctant visit to prosperous Joseph Calendar, her flighty mother-in-law’s medium, persuades Nell that there are fortunes to be made in, well, telling fortunes. As society fortuneteller Madame Nelora, she is soon the toast of Memphis. But when a desperate father begs Nell to find his daughter, she has a true vision of the missing girl. Terrified that she’s losing her mind, Nell turns to Calendar. She may suspect he’s a charlatan, but he is the only man who can help her embrace her gift and the responsibility it entails. To find the girl-and unravel a secret from her own past-Nell must outwit a corrupt banker and his gangster pals who will do anything to keep her hidden.
Fortune’s Fool was a finalist for RWA’s Golden Heart©.