Medium Readings Spirit Guide Reading Tarot Cards
Photos by Jane Bruce
From crystal gazers with neon-signed storefronts to regular-seeming geriatric nurses with side jobs as clairvoyant mediums, Brooklyn is home to untold scores of professional person psychics, readers of auras and tea leaves, casters of cards and runes. And although one Brooklyn man claiming psychic powers and contact with aliens was recently fined for bilking elderly Iowans out of thousands of dollars, not everyone offering intuitive reading services is an evil con artist. Far from it: The local communities of believers in the paranormal are vast and colorful, function of what keeps Brooklyn interesting and its chi in bank check.
In the spirit of keeping an open up listen and offer a guide to spirit guides, I sought out readings from 7 local psychics. They offer a taste of Brooklyn's paranormal smorgasbord, using a multifariousness of methods, from runic divination to the Tantric Dakini Oracle, to gain insight into their clients' lives. Some do at Bushwick New Age hubs like Catland Books and the Tarot Social club; others read from the quiet of their Bay Ridge apartments. Hither, psychics offering predictions for Brooklyn'due south future (spoiler: "more gentrification"); explain how they defend their work to skeptics; and offer tips for developing your own intuitive powers ("use yoni eggs"). I accurately predicts, via Norse runes, who will win the NBA finals. None foretell whatever sort of doom.
QUEEN MAMA DONNA HENES
Prospect Heights
Specialties: Tarot, Sky Reading, shamanic rituals, blessings
"QUEEN" is spelled out in big metal letters on the pinkish wall of Mama Donna Henes' Tea Garden and Healing Haven, a skylighted sanctuary on the pinnacle flooring of a one-time public elementary school. Henes, whom The New Yorker in one case dubbed the "Unofficial Commissioner of Public Spirit of New York Metropolis,"lives and works hither with her little black-and-white canis familiaris, Poppy. Mama Donna once learned from an beast psychic that she has spent many lifetimes with Poppy, whom she accurately calls "perfect" and "a truly ascendant beingness."
Fans of this kindly earth mother include former New York Urban center Mayor David Dinkins, who once honored Henes' "skill to communicate catholic consciousness" with her public rituals, such as didactics how to stand an egg on its end during the Spring Equinox. Notable clients include the stars of VH1 reality show Mob Wives, for whom she performed a televised business firm blessing, exorcising "a trivial fleck of the devil." Henes blesses pets, too–at a contempo ceremony at 1000 Army Plaza, she blessed 100 dogs and a parrot, every bit well as a stuffed toy cat, meant every bit a "symbolic surrogate for all the stray cats of Brooklyn." As leader of the annual West Village Halloween Parade, Mama Donna marches with her Blessing Ring, sprinkling attendees with a fairy dust concoction of glitter, sugar, and cornmeal (a "traditional approval substance") in honor of the holiday'due south Pagan roots.
How she reads:When I visit Mama Donna, she kickoff dips her index finger in a fiddling vial of glittery water and amethyst crystals, 1 of many blessing oils she'southward concocted, and presses it to my third eye. "I bless you," she says, "on your path, in your life." And I experience #blessed. Next, she reads from the Voyager Tarot deck, her preferred manner of divination. The cards say, amid other things, that I need to better laurels my inner hermit.
"For me, the benefit of the Tarot is prescription," says Henes, "non prediction. It points out patterns, it points out where the free energy is, how you might be blocking yourself, what talents you can explore. Only I think predictions are so stupid. Do you really want to know the solar day you're going to die?"
Philosophy: "Shamanism is the oldest make of spirituality, predating any kind of organized faith. It's actually the belief that everything has a spirit. Even what we would consider the inanimate: rocks, clouds. It'due south that connection to spirit and the understanding that everything is interconnected, that nosotros're all part of the aforementioned weave of life. And, of course, science backs that up these days–that's every flake of quantum physics."
Cost: $180 for a 90-minute Tarot reading.
PHILLIP ENGLISH
Bushwick
Specialties: Readings using the Elderberry Futhark (Runic Divination) and Intuitive Tarot
In 2012, along with two friends, Phil English co-founded Catland, a bookstore that caters to the surrounding communities of occultists, yogis, Pagans, gnostics, mystics, witches, Chaotes, and Thelemites (followers of Aleister Crowley). The blood-red-painted shop is stocked with "grimoires" (magic texts) and titles like Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos,as well every bit wands, genitalia candles, an apothecary, and an altar devoted to Anubis and slain Twin Peaks heroine Laura Palmer.
Psychic path:Born and raised in Titusville, Florida, Phil started studying runic divination at historic period nine, under the tutelage of his male parent, a folk musician and practicing neo-Pagan. "It was really weird," Phil says of his babyhood. When Phil was 19, two Norse gods came to him in a vision, a kind of fever dream–first Heimdall, so the primary god Odin–and told him to "go learn magic." After this vision, Phil consulted a psychiatrist, who reassured him he wasn't psychotic, so he went ahead and obeyed the gods' commands.
How he reads: While shooting at Catland, photographer Jane Bruce, our resident sports fan, asks Phil to predict via runes who volition win the NBA finals. "That seems sort of frivolous," he says, just agrees to do it anyway, casting from a velvet satchel 24 runes, which look similar Scrabble pieces, onto a little table. "Who'due south playing?" he asks. (Cavaliers versus Warriors.) Subsequently flipping over a few runes, he declares that "the Warriors are improve slated to win, simply one of their players is gonna have an injury, and it'south gonna exist an important player, probably having to sit it out in an early phase." Equally he says this, Jane gets a notification on her iPhone, maxim that Klay Thompson is out with a concussion. While we wonder whether he'south somehow checking up sports news under the reading table, Phil seems satisfied, simply not too surprised, by this freaky coincidence. (The Warriors ultimately won the finals).
"I ordinarily get into a trance when I read," Phil says. He prefers to call himself an "oracle" rather than a psychic, though he believes "everyone has psychic abilities." "When I'm in a reading, I'm speaking with intelligences exterior of myself, and transmitting information they give me," he explains. "The runes are a kind of language," one that's native to him. "They've been a source of power and truth and wisdom for my whole life." In a second, non-sports-related reading, Phil tells me that I need to "get angrier." Very Thor.
The future of Brooklyn:Phil opted not to read on the future of Brooklyn, considering "everyone knows information technology'south merely more gentrification."
Toll:$60- one-half hour, $80- hr.
PENELOPE
Bay Ridge
Specialties: Clairvoyant medium, Tarot reading, spiritual counseling
There are no crystal balls or Ouija boards in the Bay Ridge apartment where Penelope, a geriatric caretaker by day, lives with her dachshund, Basil. "People have this prototype of psychics wearing turbans and levitating, but I'm understated," this twinkly-eyed Brooklyn native says. You'd never guess by looking that Penelope as well works as a clairvoyant medium–sometimes helping crevice cases for the NYPD–and that'due south how she likes it. "I'm shy," she says, though she's also secretly a tearing drummer, able to play any percussion instrument. "I've never advertised. I've never been online. I've gotten all my clients through discussion of mouth."
Psychic path: As a teenager growing up in Flatbush, Penelope started "hearing information" in the course of images, symbols, and voices in her mind. A bit like Buffy when she start discovers her Vampire Slayer condition, Penelope initially wanted zero to do with the psychic lifestyle. "I actually wasn't interested. It made me feel unlike and crazy. I thought, 'Why is this happening to me? I want to cease doing this.' And I tried, but the more I tried to suppress it, the more the data came," she says. "I'1000 only wired differently–I also never sleep. I tin run on 3 hours of slumber a night." Luckily for Penelope, strong intuition ran in her family unit–"Nosotros'd call my mother 'the witch,' because she e'er just knew things"—and then her parents and siblings were happy to be her first subjects when she started doing psychic readings at age eighteen. Now, she has clients all over the world.
In her 35 years of exercise, the NYPD has consulted Penelope as a medium in several tough cases, she says, including i in which she located the torso of a missing boy under a bridge. (She says she's non allowed to disclose details.) She no longer works with detectives, though, considering she tends to find such cases too upsetting.
How she reads: "When I sit in front of someone, the best way I tin can describe it is I become bare, and I'one thousand open up to hearing whatever I'm supposed to hear. Stories, information, images, pictures, and symbols come up up in my heed, which make no sense to me, simply they have to brand sense for the person sitting in front of me."
Penelope gives an example of how this happens: "I had a telephone call from a client, and I heard her say 'Hello, love' to her hubby. And I said, 'Get off the telephone and get him to the hospital correct now.' It was so loud in my head: Somebody but screamed 'go him to the hospital.' She was an old client of mine, so she said okay, and collection him to the hospital. As she got to the emergency room, he had a massive center attack. And they saved him." Penelope can't explicate how such information comes to her: "I don't know where that came from. Information technology only happens. And now I have a letter from the family unit that says 'You saved my father'due south life.'"
What she says to skeptics: "I love skeptics. I love when I can turn that effectually. Virtually of that skeptic stuff is about fear. I ever tell people, if you don't believe in what I have to say right at present, just exist honest. I don't want anyone to recall I'm doing whatsoever hocus-pocus, fancy-schmancy, reading-body-language stuff. I'm not that clever."
Tip for developing your intuition:Penelope, who teaches a class on getting in touch with your intuition, gives me a homework assignment: Light a white candle, sit in front of information technology, accept three deep breaths, and look into the flame. Ask it what it wants y'all to know. (I am withal waiting for it to tell me.)
Cost:Sliding scale discussed at appointment–electronic mail Pennym1956@gmail.com for data.
DESIREE MWALIMU
Crown Heights
Specialties: Tarot reading, Reiki, sex magick
Psychic path: Born in Zambia, Desiree is named afterwards her grandmother, whose centre proper noun, Bwanga, ways "child born of magic," or "witch." "I've merely ever been kind of witchy," Mwalimu, who teaches fine art at a Brownsville elementary schoolhouse, says. Later on moving to Takoma Park, Maryland and entering Catholic school, she was "always very drawn to the Virgin Mary." Later, every bit a visual fine art major, she started exploring goddess religions, matriarchal societies, sexual practice magick, and the Tarot. "My male parent wasn't into it–he was like, 'This is an abomination! This is evil! This is devil'south work! Tell God you're not a witch!'" she says. "I'd try to remind him that earlier Britain'southward colonization of Republic of zambia, the country's spiritual traditions celebrated the connection between human beings, ancestors, and the spirit world," and none of it was considered devil worship.
How she reads:Desiree started out using the Ancestral Path Tarot instead of the oft-recommended Passenger-Waite deck. "I needed to come across images that I could connect to. I needed the images to be black and brown," she says. Now, she reads with the Tantric Secret Dakini Oracle deck, designed past artist Penny Slinger, featuring trippy photomontages and cards with titles like "Totally Bananas," "Mother's Milk," and "Dangerous Pussy." "And so y'all're a witch, too," she says upon reading my cards, forcing me to confess to a middle school Wiccan phase.
What she says to skeptics: "I don't talk to skeptics. At the stop of the day, your willingness to receive what I'm saying determines the caste to which you lot're willing to investigate other realms. And if you're on the planet and you're living right now, you're going through some major heavy emotional stuff, whether y'all're conscious of it or not. Everybody is not okay. Cease interim like y'all're okay."
Tips for developing intuition:"Build a bridge to your unconscious. Look at art. Apprehend it instead of trying to figure information technology out. Listen to Alice Coltrane." Desiree is too a proponent of yoni eggs, egg-shaped crystals designed for women'due south "sexual free energy healing," sort of like sparkly tampons for absorbing bad vibes.
The future of Brooklyn: Mwalimu consulted the Tarot to come across what's in store for the borough. "The major energetic thread that covers Brooklyn: Totally Bananas," she says. Other cards she pulled included "Magic Carpeting, Isis The High Priestess, Tree Spirit Yakishi, Mean & Heavy, Cutting Through, Mother's Milk, Three Fold Riddle, Fire of Sacrifice, Waves of Elation, Guardian, and Joker." Based on these, she ended, "Brooklyn is undergoing a major psychic surgery, so to speak. Things are beingness turned upside downwards through gentrification, which is creating an atmosphere of panic and an imbalance of free energy in the people that live here or want to live here. In that location'south a general anxiety being masked under the guise of pleasure… The ancestors that built their lives here for generation upon generations are calling to those who will listen to protect and maintain a Brooklyn that serves all people of all classes and ethnic backgrounds."
Prices: $160/ hr for private readings. At Crown Heights yoga studio Urban Asanas, Mwalimu also gives donation-based readings at events like Friday evening's Breath and Beats.
DAMON STANG
Bushwick
Specialties: traditional cartomantic prediction, spirit led gnosis, Tarot
"I just bought a $300 mandrake root on eBay," Damon Stang, who works every bit a reader at Catland, tells me, explaining it's "the ultimate magical talisman." While consuming mandrake could put you in a blackout, in that location's an apothecary run by i Sarah Lawless that specializes in diluted topical mandrake ointments. When applied to diverse body parts, these ointments can "take you to some extremely ecstatic places," Stang says. (Don't endeavor this at habitation!)
Psychic path:Damon began practicing witchcraft at age 12 in his conservative Christian town in South Africa, where "if you call yourself a witch, you're pretty much admitting to beingness a sociopathic criminal" and risk having your house burned downwardly. At 34, he's still at information technology. Later on existence initiated into three Neo-Pagan Wiccan orders, Damon now identifies as a "Traditional Witch." "Traditional witches are odd folk," he says. "Most of the public, outspoken ones are existent douchebags. They're such snots. They're similar, 'I am so perfect, then well-researched, so accurate. Oh, Neo-Paganism, oh, that'southward cute!'" he says. Now, every bit a Tarot reader at Catland, he tries to avert such 1-upmanship.
Cost:$sixty per hr.
KIM ALLEN
Bed-Stuy
Specialties: Astrology, tea leaf reading, Tarot reading
Kim Allen speaks with lots of assertion points, which serves her well while hosting psychic reading radio hosts on Hot 97 and talking over Boob tube host Maury Povich. At the Bed-Stuy dwelling where she works, Allen introduces me to her behemothic crystal brawl, flecked with obsidian, "really good for protection." She bought it at a flea market place in the West Village considering it reminded her of the one from The Wizard of Oz.
How she reads: While analyzing my astrological chart via an iPad app and tossing Tarot cards onto the table, she rattles off predictions ("Y'all'll meet a new guy while dating this other guy!"); unnerving diagnoses ("There might a cyst on your right ovary. Ask your gyno."); and skincare tips (she does "astrological dazzler readings" for Shiseido at Bergdorf Goodman). And so, she detects in some tea leaves the shape of an hawkeye and a few messages, saying "beware of a female with an South in her name–Sabrina? Sarah?" Her rapid-fire prediction style feels a little like she'due south throwing handfuls of darts at a dartboard and hoping one hits a bullseye.
Psychic path: Growing up in a devout Catholic family in Detroit, "I was e'er a footling strange," Allen says. "I'd say things to my parents, like, 'Oh, I don't like this friend of yours, he'southward thinking almost stealing something,' and they would requite me real weird looks. Only lo and behold, this person would end up causing a falling out." Decades later, Allen abandoned a career in paper reporting to "written report on the planets" full time.
What she says to skeptics: "I honey skeptics! They're but doubtful until something I've predicted comes true, and and then they become believers. It'south been my experience that men tin be the biggest skeptics, but one time you tell them something that no one else could peradventure know, they become your client for life! I accept a lot of male clients."
The futurity of Brooklyn: Based on some Tarot cards she pulls, Allen predicts that "Borough President Eric Adams is going to have to put a lot more free energy into recapturing and stabilizing commerce here in Brooklyn, considering for some reason, it'southward at a standstill right now. In the adjacent 2 years, there's going to be more momentum put into alluring more than businesses in Brooklyn." Perhaps that rumored weed dispensary will open up on Fulton Mall after all?
Prices: Range from $xx for a "Quick Question" reading to $100 for a 30-minute "Premium Psychic Reading."
Darcey Leonard, via Tarot Guild
DARCEY LEONARD
Bushwick
Specialties: Palmistry
Wearing a floral garland atop her Wednesday Adams pilus, Darcey Leonard describes herself as the "Screwball Diva" of bacchanalian event production team Business firm of Screwball, which runs the Tarot Gild. This loungey "divination salon" is designed to provide a magical alternative to Brooklyn's bar scene. Witchy evening gatherings feature readers of all stripes, dubbed "psychic sommeliers," offering "a safe social space for people who don't necessarily experience like partying," Darcey says. She describes how studying acting as an undergrad helped her develop her skills every bit an "intuitive empath," a disposition that would later spark an interest in comparative occultism and palm-reading.
How she reads: "The lines in our hands that we're born with alter over time in relation to the choices nosotros make. So I observe the lines in the manus and their relationships to each other to develop a movie of the client'south strengths and weaknesses."
What she says to skeptics: "It's not for you. This stuff doesn't have to exist for everybody. I hope skeptics observe what works for them. I don't care how yous get to your self-knowledge. But go at that place, please."
Tip for testing your intuition: "I play games with myself. Sometimes I'll sit on the subway and close my eyes and feel where the energetic hotspots are. Sometimes it'll be like 'Wow, there's a real bright light over at that place,' so I'll open up my eyes and see: There's a baby."
Philosophy: "We're all cute piñatas… I believe in reincarnation, so information technology's like, come on, allow's do the work! How many times do you wanna come up back?"
Reading Brooklyn's palm: Darcey read a subway map of Brooklyn, imagining that the city were a mitt and the various railroad train lines were lines in its palm. "The blue line, the ACE, is like New York's lifeline," she says. "It's long. The JMZ looks similar a series of very long, intelligent head lines, which indicates Brooklyn is home to a lot of big-film thinking. The NQR is more like a heart line. And Coney Island is in the spot on the hand that would exist called the 'lunar spot,' the seat of intuition and psychic abilities. Coney Island injects Brooklyn and the rest of New York City with its psychic and imaginative side. That's why we get to the Mermaid Parade."
Cost: All Tarot Society readings are donation-based (suggested donation $5 to $30).
Some of these readings seemed questionable; others seemed eerily accurate. After a while, this psychic binge started to mess with my head–1 said I possessed "dark feminine magic," another accounted me a witch–so I sought the opinion of a non-telepathic compress. "Certainly much of it is well-nigh the Barnum result," Dr. Miranda Morris, a Brooklyn-raised, Maryland-based psychologist (and also, my 2nd cousin) told me when I asked for her thoughts on psychics. The Barnum Effect, in short, is a tendency people have to rate statements about their personalities equally highly accurate, when those same statements could employ to basically anyone. "That said, there is and then much we don't know," Dr. Morris says. "It's much cooler to deed as though you lot practice know, to maintain a certain level of cynicism. That style, people who kinda do believe will feel stupid and small-scale and they will close upward. But if y'all back up a fleck from the question of psychic abilities, you can see that much of what we now endorse as true–i.e., the universe is expanding and is infinite, the furnishings of traumatic feel tin can exist passed on genetically, face transplants–is stuff we'd once have scoffed at." Dr. Morris believes we do well to remain open to possibility in matters such as these. "A person can have awareness of events we don't perceive as having happened yet? I'thou pretty certain physicists do non anticipate time as linear," she says. "In some sense, all things happen simultaneously."
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Follow Carey Dunne on Twitter @CareyDunne
Source: https://www.bkmag.com/2015/07/07/a-guide-to-the-psychics-shamans-and-tarot-readers-of-brooklyn/
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