On Spiritualist Workers: Healing and Divining through Tarot and the Metaphysical

Abstract

In the following article, I explore how tarot card readers (and other spiritualist workers) “control the future” to heal and empower their clients, emphasizing the porous roles of therapy and advocacy that assorted “psychics” perform. I examine how these workers navigate interactional trials, including misassigned identity, ethical challenges, and interactional boundaries in readings at psychic fairs and in private practice. Tarot card readers and other “psychics” are independent contractors and (self)help workers that are cast aside from both science and religion, labor outside of conventional credentialing systems, and are reputationally marginalized. I argue that this cultural and structural marginalization allows these “libertarian spiritualist” workers to construct amalgamate identities, exercising role flexibility as readers and querents, and healers and survivors.

Keywords

stigmatized labor work and occupation social psychology religion and spirituality ethnography

Introduction

I bought my first tarot deck in the 1990s when I was in high school. Then I put it in a closet, too lazy at that age to learn a stable-yet-mutable system like the tarot. I came to the tarot again as an academic—but not for the academic—in mid-2017. My immediate goal was to survive a series of personal crises that I endured. I began to self-medicate through the oracle in a rural area with few mental health resources. A few months after buying the lone deck of tarot cards at the local mall, I noticed a metaphysical church nearby. I began to attend the church (also known as an “Institute” or a center), discovering that many folks arrive there the same way that I did—by trying to navigate grief or loss. According to literature, even ordinary experiences become defined by turning points such as these (refer to Ebaugh 1988; Strauss 1959). Profound personal shifts can alter behaviors, thoughts, and performances (Bruner and Weisser 1991; DeGloma 2014) and can result in “changing selves” (Halldorsson and Katovich 2019). My crisis-coping led me to a new role and a new community. I now read tarot cards at psychic fairs and I am building a client base.

In this article, I examine the occupational practices of spiritualist workers through participant observation (e.g., Adler and Adler 1987) as a tarot card reader at psychic fairs and for private practice. I argue that tarotists and other “psychic” workers are reputationally and structurally marginalized. This allows them to embrace porous and wide-ranging identities as quasi-therapeutic workers rooted in a metaphysical worldview. This work adds to the sociological literature by exploring how tarot card readers navigate the freedoms and burdens that come with their amalgamate identity of marginalized worker, healer, and supernaturalist. Specifically, I explore how metaphysicalist workers attempt to heal and empower their clients and how they negotiate interactional challenges, including navigating their identities vis-à-vis patrons, enforcing personal ethics, and establishing boundaries as independent workers.

Background and Literature

Metaphysical philosophies and practices are collectively referred to as “new age spirituality” or “neopaganism” (Bloch 1998), irrespective of the miscellany that characterizes them. Tarot specifically has existed in the Western world since at least the 1400s, initially as a game (Farley 2009). Tarot is lumped together with other mystical devices and practices, including voodoo and witchcraft, crystal healing, palm, auras, and runes readings, freeform psychic divination (e.g., clairaudience, clairvoyance), astrology and numerology, mediumship, and even further-flung practices like ghost hunting and treating crop circles as a tool for divination (Ghidina 2019).

While there are many varieties of card decks used in “divination” (like angel cards and oracle cards), there are features that render a deck tarot and not some other thing. A tarot deck is reliably comprised of 78 cards for divination, 16 of which are “court cards” (representing people in a querent’s¹ life, personality traits, or approaches to problems), 40 of which are “pip cards” that symbolize the banal actions of an ordinary day, and 22 of which are “major arcana cards.” Major arcana cards are numbered 0 through 21 and feature archetypal roles such as father and mother (the Emperor and the Empress), religious or secular power (the Hierophant/Priest and the Emperor, respectively), organized religion versus individual spirituality (the Hierophant/Priest and the Hermit), and the mysteries of the subconscious (the Moon), to name a few. They are often used to represent celestial forces beyond a querent’s control.

Tarot card readers and (other) psychics ascribe to supernatural beliefs. The supernatural is defined as any phenomenon that humans encounter that is currently unexplained or unexplainable (Force 2018) and falls into a category of beliefs and experiences that are rejected by science and organized religion (Baker, Bader, and Mencken 2016). This category includes psychics or other fortune-tellers (refer to Baker et al. 2016; Muzzatti and Smith 2018).

Some spiritualists embed the supernatural within a scientific frame to make it sensible (Eaton 2015; Sagan 1995), including taking social-psychological or psychoanalytic approaches to tarot. They use the tarot as a supernatural messaging system and to delve into their subconscious minds. They do “self and identity work,” addressing patterns of personality and social structure (Francis and Adams 2019; House 1977). Moreover, therapists contend with metaphysical questions in their private therapy practices (refer to Yar 2019), and cross-cultural psychologists explore intersections between psychology, and shamanism and witchcraft (Winther 2018). Indeed, scientific and supernatural features have always co-existed. For example, Carl Jung lectured about tarot in his psychology seminars in the 1930s (McConnachie 2017). His knowledge of the occult informed his and others’ psychoanalytic theory (Katz 2005; McConnachie 2017). Jungian archetypes “reflect themes such as birth, death, and separation that are common across cultures and deeply embedded in the human psyche” (Baldwin 2018, 137).

Spiritualists in my metaphysicalist church (my research setting) take a “hard approach” to divination rather than a “soft approach” to same (McConnachie 2017). A “hard approach” to divination means that practitioners emphasize the supernatural, sometimes referencing the mysteries of physics. The “soft approach” to divination emphasizes pop-psychological features in addition to spiritual features. This is a continuum, not a binary. Mystical workers have diverse spiritual beliefs and practices (Coco and Woodward 2007), but occasionally include atheists, or those who see themselves as entertainers.

People in Western nations increasingly practice deinstitutionalized forms of spirituality (Bloch 1998; Davie 1994; Eaton 2018; Heelas and Woodhead 2005). Despite the widespread prevalence of the supernatural in our symbolic order, sociology and anthropology have not studied it sufficiently (Force 2018). This is because the dominant “frames” (Goffman 1974) of science and organized religion have the “cultural authority” (Hufford 1995) to classify the supernatural as operating outside of accepted systems (Baker et al. 2016; Berger [1967] 1990; Force 2018). This marginalization of “outsider” spiritual groups fosters them to create their own “idiocultures” (Baker et al. 2016; Eaton 2019; Fine 1979), and to have their own “plausibility structures” (Berger [1967] 1990) to assign meaning in their communities and to clarify in-group membership.

Tarotists and other (who I call) "libertarian spiritualists" are often “precarious workers” (Kalleberg 2011) in the service industry. They labor in unstable conditions and they receive limited social benefits and entitlements (Kalleberg 2018). Spiritualist workers are independent contractors (e.g., Lavin 2017 on strippers) in an apprenticeship occupation in which there is no uniform credentialing (e.g., Sanders [1989] 2007 on tattoo artists). Disadvantages of independent, precarious labor notwithstanding (e.g., lack of good wages, benefits, and security), mystical workers’ freedom from formal employers and mainstream credentialing give them direct control over their occupational roles. These workers often identify as healers akin to therapists and psychologists. As rogue therapists and life coaches, spiritualists define their services and conduct, and construct their paid exchanges, more dynamically than in (officially) organized domains. This freedom-of-practice for precarious workers reduces the extent to which their exchanges are typified or “sociomental” (Zerubavel 1997)—that is, filtered through and structured by preexisting social and cultural scripts that actors inherit (Force 2018; Zerubavel 1997).

Tarotists and psychics are also “deviant” (i.e., stigmatized) workers. Stereotypes paint mystics as “crazy” or predatory (Evansl, Forsyth, and Foreman 2003), despite the fact that social interest in supernatural services is common (Bader, Mencken, and Baker 2010) and fortune-telling has been more mainstream (read: more white and middle-class) since the late twentieth century (Muzzatti and Smith 2018). Robin Wooffitt states the following regarding mediums: “Sceptics and some academic psychologists treat mediums’ discourse suspiciously, regarding it as the site of deliberate and exploitative fraud, or at best a collaborative exercise in self-delusion by well-intentioned but credulous individuals” (Wooffitt 2001, 351). Nonetheless, tarot readers and other spiritualists perceive themselves as legitimate healers who are rooted in metaphysical techniques. This self-definition is developed and supported by like-minded practitioners, like those in the metaphysical Institute that I attend and study.

Methods

I observe and interact with communities of tarot readers and other metaphysical practitioners through multiple points of entry. I am a “complete member” (Adler and Adler 1987) in the field as an independent tarotist affiliated with a metaphysicalist church² and other (local and virtual) circuits of practitioners. A “complete member” is one who is fully embedded in a research setting (refer to Adler and Adler 1987). Since I have my own psychospiritual practices, much of the data from this exploratory project are autoethnographic; I rely heavily on my lived experiences and field notes.

Autoethnography is useful as it explores the sociological features that surround personal experiences (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011) and reveals discounted but important social realities (Lavin 2016). My reflexive participation as a practitioner of tarot and as a social scientist is multipositional and so illustrates cultural phenomena in complex ways and fosters investigation (of spiritualist workers) in real time (Adams 2012). This benefit is not always afforded in traditional ethnography (refer to Adams 2012). Adams (2012) notes the immediacy of autoethnography in the following quote about coming out as gay:

Although I cannot observe others’ coming out as it happens, I can observe how my coming out happened to a variety of audiences; I am the person—the researcher—who lived through and observed the experience. Thus, another joy of autoethnography: I am able to provide valuable, insider insight not possible with other research techniques (surveys, others’ self-reports). (Adams 2012, 186, 187)

In short, as a practitioner-researcher in the communities under study, I am a character in my stories. That is essential to experiencing, showing, and telling them (refer to Blinne 2011; Denzin 1997; Rose 1990; Wolfe 1973).

My data for this article are field notes that include my (paid and unpaid) tarot readings with 98 people (some repeat clients) that I have given at 4 fairs (34 readings) and for private practice (64 readings). I also draw on (approximately 25) readings that I received from other practitioners in exchange for my services. All readings (given or received) were conducted face to face or over Skype or Zoom. Most of my clients so far have been white (girls and) women between the ages of 16–76 that reside in the United States. My data also include conversations with church members and metaphysical practitioners in the United States and the UK, face to face and virtual, and casual conversations with over 80 attendees at fairs. All names that I use in this article are pseudonyms.

These notes also incorporate analysis of material culture at the church and at metaphysical fairs, including hundreds of fliers, handouts, and business cards laid out for consumption. It incorporates miscellaneous events, including several “full moon parties” that I attended in 2018 and 2019, my patronage at psychic fairs, church seminars that I attended and one that I offered, dinner at the residences of practitioners, guided meditations, visits to a spiritualist shop in an adjacent state, and a seminar on ethics and protocol for psychic readers. Lastly, my data include livestreams that I view on YouTube for tarot card readers (or card slingers). There I learn from the vibrant presence of established practitioners (some of whom call themselves witches) and hear the occasional gossip of well-known people in the community.

I produce and analyze data in this article according to the practices outlined by Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw ([1995] 2011). I take quick notes between reading for clients at psychic fairs, after private sessions with them, or after other notable observations. (Usually the next day) I expand them into full-length field notes that include my own experiences and impressions (self-reflexive notes). I have been taking intentional and systematic field notes since early 2018 (when I began reading at psychic fairs). Notes also include traces of retrospective data as far back as 2007 from readings that I received from “psychics” and tarot readers in the northeastern United States.

The Church and the Psychic Fairs

The Church

The church has practitioners in multiple arenas in the metaphysical spiritualities, including readers of tarot, angel, and oracle cards, psychics and mediums, and Reiki energy healers. According to Helen (a founding member of the local chapter of the Institute, ordained minister, and president of the board of directors), the church has approximately 40 parishioners who have memberships and donate money annually. Another dozen or so attend sporadically. Members are predominantly white, middle age or elder, of mixed social class, and are women. In fact, only four members are currently men and three of those men are partnered with active women members. The predominance of women in tarot reading and other “ephemeral phenomena” (Baldwin 2018) has been documented by other researchers of the supernatural (refer to Bader, Mencken, and Baker 2010; Baldwin 2018).

Some people arrive at the church because they are alienated by the perceived hypocrisy and rigidity of Christian beliefs. Most members of the Institute come from a Christian background and (according to Helen) “might have been regarded as feminist,” or open to feminist beliefs and practices if they were exposed to such. Many in the church are also drawn to the individualistic “take what works for you” approach to spirituality, something that is common in spiritualist communities (Baker, Bader, and Mencken 2016). Finally, members (like myself) were drawn to metaphysical spirituality after they experienced loss or trauma. This is because the mystical arts can offer the worldviews and the interpersonal resources necessary to render meaning from hardship.

For example, Helen was prompted to spurn Christian precepts when her devout father died by suicide when she was in college. She could not accept the Christian framing of his suicide as sinful and worthy of hellfire. Helen says:

I regularly questioned Christianity due to my father’s concurrent devout religiousness and mental illness. It made me question it all the time and (they) would shut me down saying it was not my place to question the will of god (intentionally not capitalized). There was an overall attitude that “good Christians” did not ask those kinds of questions . . . and that seemed like a cop out to me.

Perhaps ironically, services at the church are like the Catholic masses that I attended as a child. They include sermons, prayers, and hymns conducted by clergy (refer to Wooffitt and Gilbert 2008). Except the clergy are women. Church meets every other Sunday at 10:00 and goes until 11:15. The service is initiated by one of the ministers, including opening announcements and prayers. Then we sing 2 or 3 songs from the blue, hardcover books that are placed on our chairs. Next, there is a period of meditation. Meditating can build meaning, alter states of consciousness, and reduce stress (Winther 2018). After the period of meditation, several sanctioned “healers” stand at the front of the room behind chairs. Parishioners walk up spontaneously, sit in a chair, and have their “energy field” worked on by one of the healers. The healer stands behind the chair with their eyes closed and their palms open, supposedly directing “healing energy” toward the person in the chair. Sometimes they lightly touch the person on the shoulder or on top of their head. Toward the end, organizers send a basket around and congregants offer a “love donation” of several dollars. There is a period of socializing, eating, and drinking after the service concludes—sometimes delicious home-made soups and other hot food that Rowena makes. Rowena is a clairvoyant medium, a ghost hunter, and one of the ministerial students. She supports the Institute by reading “angel cards” at (fundraiser) psychic fairs sponsored by the church.

The Psychic Fairs

Pastor Denise allowed me to read at my first psychic fair because Helen (referenced earlier) vouched for my skills. I met her in the Spring of 2018 when I attended a church-sponsored event. She offered a lecture on practical protection magic and she and I liked each other instantly. We started to socialize outside of church. We traded tarot readings for fun. I was eager to read for people other than myself and my family, and eager to have others read for me. She ultimately served as a “witness” and therefore as a “gatekeeper” (Adler and Adler 1987) to my nascent tarotism. After receiving several readings from me, Helen indicated to the pastors that I was a “tried and true” cartomancer,³ and I signed up to read for clients in my first psychic fair.

The psychic fairs feature tarotists, mediums and other psychics, vendors, lecturers, activities, and sometimes theme-appropriate entertainment, like dancing witch troupes. Workers must pay a “house fee” to work, like in other forms of marginal labor (e.g., Lavin 2013, 2014, 2017). The fee to have a booth in psychic fairs ranges from $75.00 to $225.00 or more. Workers usually keep the rest of their earnings. Sometimes a percentage goes to support the church or a cause.

Most practitioners have day jobs and work at the psychic fairs to advertise their side businesses, to build their clientele, and to make extra money. They arrive before the fair to set up their station. My church puts readers/healers in one room, and vendors of spiritualist wares in another room. Readers often set their own prices and length of readings. As a relative novice, I generally charge $50.00 for 30 minutes or $30.00 for 15 minutes. Vendors set up their stations with merchandise. Because metaphysical spiritualities are commercialized (Waskul and Eaton 2018), props for sale, including things such as candles, crystals and essential oils feature heavily at psychic fairs.

Workers have sign-in sheets where clients book an appointment in advance. Many slots are available for walk-ins, the bulk of clientele. Clients are local spiritualists who attend the fair as well as people who seek something novel to do in their small, rural town. Organizers, practitioners, and vendors advertise the fairs to would-be clients via social media channels like Facebook, and participants and their allies (e.g., regulars of the church who may attend fairs but not read or sell wares at them) disseminate flyers online and around town.

Some fairs offer orientations where organizers communicate norms and standards of conduct. Norms for readings within the church do not differ much in form or content from those conducted at psychic fairs. However, there are small differences. Readings at church often have a teaching and learning component. That is not the case at fairs because the audience includes patrons who consume psychic services casually.

In short, my time at church and reading at fairs was instructive of the larger therapeutic, philosophical, and occupational realms of tarot and tarot-adjacent beliefs and practices. Tarotists work to command the “personal unconscious” (Jung [1921] 1981; [1933] 2017) to the daylight so that clients can grow their awareness of their motivations and limitations. These spiritualist workers attempt to control and predict the future as healers of themselves and others. They do so between the dominant paradigms of science and religion.

Spiritualists as Healers and Workers

Tarot readers and other metaphysical spiritualists use medical and mystical discourses to manage their encounters with clients and to position tarot reading as a legitimate tool for helping people deal with turning points in their lives. Co-existing scientific and spiritualist discourses also shape the amalgamate identities and roles of these psychic workers. In the following sections, I offer examples where tarot readers and other mystics offer scientism, therapy, and self-help to advance their role as psychic healers. Sometimes they do this by presenting themselves as health care practitioners with training and certification. Readers act in a counseling capacity to help people heal from trauma, grief, or loss, and they promote personal empowerment through a non-patriarchal spiritualism.

Spiritualists as “Credentialed” Health Workers

Through advising clients, mystics claim domain in the realms of secular practitioners. There are educational pathways for diviners that include, for example, the famous Lily Dale Assembly in upstate New York. Graduates from Lily Dale open churches and independent businesses. Some offer classes, sell merchandise, offer one-on-one counseling sessions, and create certification programs for clients and other workers. “Certified psychic” practitioners regularly incorporate their credentials in their self-talk and in their formal claims about their skills and services.

For example, Bryce, a metaphysicalist that I met at a psychic fair in 2018, occupies multiple categories of help worker—uncredentialed and credentialed. Bryce offers hypnosis sessions. He boasts the dual identity of “long practicing psychic” (i.e., a generic and hearsay role) and “certified hypnotherapist” (i.e., uses status-enhancing words like “certified” and “therapist”). In a similar example, a walk-in client that I read tarot cards for at a fair in 2019 identifies as a “psychic psychiatrist” and claims to have a PhD in psychology. Some metaphysical spiritualists consider “light work” along with conventional career paths, like Kristia. Kristia is a young, college-educated psychic medium (she claims to see the future and commune with the dead) who abandoned plans for graduate school to pursue metaphysical certification from the church.

Some practitioners even lead with preexisting credentials to advance their role as tarot readers and other healers. For example, Pastor Clementine (a medium and adjunct professor of comparative religion) refers to herself as the “Ivy League Medium,” using her elite university affiliation to boost her credibility in marginalized healing arts. Clementine frames “Spirit” in scientific principles as she markets a church lecture with the following tagline: “Clementine connects Scientific Research into consciousness studies, and the human energy field, until we understand how our bodies are wired for telepathy and intuition.” She even capitalizes the term “scientific research.” In another example, Marcus—an environmental scientist—uses his credentials to advance his identity as a spiritualist. Marcus explains that he is also a “Vedic astrologer,”⁴ which means that he is an “Eastern astrologer.” He draws upon legitimizing discourses of science when he tells me that Eastern astrology is based in science and mathematics, unlike Western astrology. Through this framing, he elevates his “more scientific” astrology. I listened to Marcus analyze a sample client’s astrological chart to a rapt audience, referencing their health in the following analysis:

(He has) a potential chronic imbalance to his constitution that flares up in the bhukti’s of Saturn (sic). One year after he was born, he may have suffered a blow to his constitution (Ketu into Saturn). Perhaps involving kidneys or intestines. Saturn is in the sixth house. He has a malefic Planet (Saturn that is in retrograde) in the house of hospitals, acute illness, enemies, and injury. Fortunately, the Saturn Dasha (when that specific Marma became ripe) comes at the end of his life and may be involved in his death.

The aforementioned examples demonstrate spiritualists’ signaling mainstream credentials and statuses to increase their credibility, and relatedly, to decrease their marginality. I circumvented some avenues for “certification” because of my status as an academic. Indeed, the formal process by which one becomes a reader (as stated in the formal standards) includes a short form that asks us to detail our related education and experience. Credential signaling notwithstanding, because tarot reading and other metaphysical work are cast to the periphery of respectable occupation, it most often serves as a means to practice therapy for people who stand outside of acceptable educational systems (McConnachie 2017). However, education is not seen as the cornerstone of practice.

Metaphysical spiritualists believe that all people possess intuition, and that training and certification help to “open the third eye” or cultivate the “sixth sense.” Through a nature-cultivated-by-nurture mindset, tarotists and other spiritualists understand their abilities as simultaneously natural, for example, “I was sensitive since I was a kid,” and as fortifiable through formal pathways of education. Pastor Clementine says: “Everyone is psychic, it is just a matter of tuning into gifts that we have and use all the time.” This mindset is reinforced in the material culture. See the following quote in paperwork entitled Standards for Psychic Readers:

Psychic abilities are an elusive talent that rely on not only one’s abilities to connect to Spirit and discern messages, but also rely on the common sense and processional ethics and conduct of the reader. We have found over the years that people who have taken supplementary coursework in subject areas such as counseling and communication skills are more likely to understand how to relate appropriately to a client, many of whom come to a reader because they are in distress.

Many people seek out tarot readers and other mystics while in distress, as confessed earlier. These “eclectic” (Bruce 2002; Eaton 2015; Ghidina 2019; Heelas and Woodhead 2005) intuitives and healers try to rise to the occasion. They act as counselors who aid their clients in navigating trauma, grief, or loss, and as coaches and cheerleaders of personal empowerment.

Spiritualists as Counselors and Coaches

Dancing with shadow

Readers and diviners are renegade psychologists who explore the personal unconscious (Jung [1921] 1981; [1933] 2017) as they sift through the pain of their clients. Sophisticated practitioners even tackle the collective unconscious (Jung [1969] 1980) as they exorcize querents’ intergenerational dysfunction. They empower clients by doing something called “shadow work.”

Our "shadow" side (refer to Jung [1952] 1969) refers to our negative traits, or “demons” that we endure or expel. Sometimes these are a result of unresolved trauma. Anya, a 74-year-old German woman with a psychology background explains: “Our vibrations come from our subconscious, but when we get stuck with unresolved traumas in our subconscious, we attract more of the same. What we experience reflects where we are.”

The notion of shadow is built into the metaphysical arts. For example, astrological signs have shadow traits, for example, “Sagittarius has a hot temper.” Tarot cards represent a shadow side, which refers to any negative traits and situations represented by the card. For example, the Tower card represents sudden disasters in the world (structural), or more commonly, in the querent’s life (individual). A tragic “Tower event” happened to Penelope, a shaman with a PhD that I met in 2019. Shaman Penelope reports having become psychically sensitive when she suffered the death of her young daughter from a chronic illness. Indeed, she is one of several women in the community to have lost her child to accident or illness. Marc Eaton states regarding his research on paranormal investigation that several of his respondents “reported that their abilities ‘turned on’ after an accident or illness that led them to the brink of death” (Eaton 2018, 78).

During Penelope’s presentation for the Institute, she asked the audience to lean into our pain and to “dance with our shadow.” She set up an altar and spit Florida water (apparently scented water) at people who wanted a “cleansing.” Shaman Penelope held back tears at certain points during her performance, pausing to regain control of her emotions. She stated: “Loss is an opportunity. You ride that wave into your future unknown. If (your shadow) is part of you, you aren’t getting rid of it.”

My own time as a reader has shown me that crisis plays a role in bringing people to tarot card readers (refer to Baldwin 2018) and other psychics. For example, I read for a woman in her early 30s for a fundraiser for the Institute in early 2020. She told me that she was a married primary school teacher and mother of four children. I insisted that the Prince of Cups card that she drew from the tarot referred to a young, sensitive boy in her house, and that, based on the adjacent cards, she is especially worried about him. She began to cry. She talked for 20 minutes about her son’s developmental struggles and her husband’s inability to parent him well. Our session ended with me offering her tissues and encouragement that things are going to improve.

Many spiritualist workers see “embracing shadow” or “dancing with darkness” as a path to personal empowerment. Psychotherapists will likewise ask patients to face their shadows (pain, phobias, grief, loss, victimization) because trauma can be diminished with increased exposures to triggering stimulus.⁵ Psychic readers, and other counselors and coaches, propose that clients banish disturbances from their inner-self by meeting their darkness face-forward.

Love and light

Some readers and healers rebuke shadow work in favor of an exclusively “love-and-light” approach to the metaphysical arts. These “light workers” are committed to a sanitized and Christian-adjacent supernaturalism, hence their emphasis on angels and heavenly “spirit guides.” Such love-and-light spiritualists de-emphasize “controversial” beliefs and practices, including those that are perceived as influenced by Satanism or the occult. Refer to examples of this avoidance of anything “dark” from the Institute’s Statement of Ethics and Protocol for Readers/Ministers. Specifically, the quote refers to a reader’s responsibility to not deliver bad news: “Your job is to bring light, help the client to reconnect to their highest selves, so they feel empowered when they leave.” Further, in the same document, the church quotes Doreen Virtue, PhD.⁶ Virtue states: “True claircognizance is repetitive and positive. The true source is Our Creator. God only teaches one step at a time.” Similarly: “I will remember that a reading is to enlighten, and I will keep the tone of the reading light and fun.”

In this uplifting tone, readers direct their clients to the (conscious and subconscious) aspects of their constitution to encourage them in concrete ways. See Marcus the Vedic Astrologer do this when he says:

With Saturn in the Sixth House, you are conscientious and dutiful, even when you must do work which is not very interesting. You are very focused and set out to follow up on commitments. You have the patience and know-how necessary to deal with obstacles, and you overcome all hindrances on your way with perseverance. You are very capable of handling minute details for long periods of time. You take the responsibility in your job very seriously. You are proficient in whatever you set out to do. You could make a great assistant for some lucky employer. Keep worry and a tendency to overwork under control.

Similarly, see the following excerpt from a self-identified psychic and empath who analyzes photos of clients. She sought to empower me when I purchased her services at a fair that I attended in 2016. She first took a photo of me. She then examined the photo for several minutes. She claimed that my grandmother is around me, watching over me and my son. She said that my grandmother wishes that I would be prouder of what I have accomplished instead of focus on what I didn’t do. She wants me to throw my arms out to the sun.Like psychologists and other counselors, spiritualist practitioners invite clients to explore themselves to improve their lives. The aforementioned examples encourage action, agency, and confidence on the part of the client by highlighting their strengths and exploring their current mindsets. As much commanding as foretelling, this “personality profiling” orients a person to “who they are.” Labeling patrons as having certain traits or strengths makes them likely to incorporate them into their self-concept, and to shape their actions in a self-fulfilling prophecy (Becker [1963] 2018; Merton [1949]1968). This can provide a road map through the present and the future.

Tarot readers and other mystical workers face trials in this interactive and intimate work. These trials include but are not limited to navigating mutable identities vis-à-vis clients, determining and upholding ethical standards, and maintaining boundaries as they operate as independent healers. While not wholly anarchic, this is murky territory for metaphysical spiritualists of diverse and self-devised training, norms, and standards.

Interactional Trials

Mistaken Identity

Since readers and diviners have permeable and hybridized roles, it is no surprise that clients mistake their exact skill set. Sometimes they regard them as health experts, like ethnographers are sometimes mistaken for spies, narcs (Driscoll and Schuster 2018), or psychologists. Moreover, tarot readers and other spiritualist workers have the privilege of “querent/provider confidentiality” unless lives are at risk, further amplifying the similarities between them and (other) healers such as social workers, nurses, or clergy in institutionalized religions. They are firmly positioned in the “between space” of health professionals and supernaturalists, not wanting to endure the (legal) burdens of either.

In the class that I took in psychic/client relations through the church, Pastor Denise offered us paperwork that included advice for “audience management practices” (refer to Wooffitt et al. 2013), including a mock trial for practitioners at events, a list of rules for readers that represent the church, an ethics handout, and a story about unethical fortune-tellers. She commented that “clients think that we are therapists, and we are not.” She then advised us to have crisis-care resources available for patrons, like contact cards for psychologists and social workers, hotlines for suicide and domestic violence, and other emergency contacts. Pastor Denise’s protocol for readers and ministers states the following:

Don’t give advice, especially don’t give advice you’re not licensed to give such as financial or psychiatric or medical. You tell what you see/sense, you do not give advice. Keep a referral list (make one) for qualified therapists, ask for business cards of your favorites.

Similarly, spiritualist readers and healers are concerned with the legality of claiming the label “fortune-teller.” According to Pastor Denise, fortune-telling is still a class B misdemeanor in New York, punishable by a $500.00 fine or 90 days in jail. The law prohibits anyone from claiming an ability to predict the future, tell fortunes, exorcise demons, remove curses, or manipulate occult powers—except for entertainment or amusement.

Tarotists and other spiritualists attempt to carve out an identity as legitimate—if alternative—therapeutic healers, even as they try not to cross boundaries where they might end up giving medical advice. They want to be perceived as “real” healers, but when people treat them as equivalent to medical professionals, they equivocate to avoid potential litigation. Similarly, they want to avoid legal questions associated with psychic divination, for example, predicting outcomes or reading fortunes. While tarot readers and other new age practitioners contend with the ramifications of potential misassigned identity, they also face ethical challenges and work to maintain their boundaries.

Ethical Practice

Readers and mediums navigate power dynamics and ethical concerns inside their crafts, as do workers in (other) helping professions. Shrewd workers have the power to manipulate or extort vulnerable people in the largely unstandardized domains of their mystical practice. Signed paperwork and church seminars (as examples) are intended to serve as formal social control to deal with breaches of ethics. However, realistically, avoiding these breaches is the purview of individual “libertarian” spiritualists. Since metaphysicalists stand to gain monetarily by satisfying the requests of clients, even if the requests are unethical, this creates a conflict of interest between worker and client. This conflict of interest introduces conditions that are conducive to exploitation.

For example, I had a querent who insisted on asking me questions about her health during our paid session together at a psychic fair. This client was a disheveled looking woman who was making her way to every booth practitioner and spending hundreds of dollars. We had 15 minutes slotted for our reading. It was difficult for me to interpret the cards for her within that timeframe because she insisted on taking verbatim notes. Toward the end of our session, she asked me to divine about her health and the likely path of her liver disease—practitioners generally steer clear of answering questions about health on principle and instead encourage patients to see medical doctors. I tried to redirect her toward her original questions. She failed to respond to my “repair sequence” (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977), instead offering to pay me more money to tell her about the progress of her health. I refused again, more directly this time. I stated: “The universe wants you to go to the doctor.” She graciously moved to the next practitioner, resigned to my position, but visibly disappointed.

As seen in the aforementioned example, patrons often turn to “psychics” to gain clarity about problems in their life or because they are sick or suffering. Clients petition spiritualist practitioners to operate outside of ethical territory depending on the nature of their questions. While some clients mistake spiritualists as other kinds of help workers, many people pursue tarotists and psychics intentionally (instead of mainstream healers) because they seek the magical advantage of knowing the unknowable.

Since clients seek mystics to tap into cosmic realms, the supernatural component to spiritualists’ work is paramount to their successful claims-making about their skills and practices. Emphasizing the supernatural elements of their capabilities is also how they carve out a unique space for their healing services. This also presents opportunities for ethical breaches. Indeed, there are times when practitioners are called upon to expand or embellish their paranormal ability-claims.

There are times where I have been invited to expand my claims about my skills. For example, one woman at a psychic fair (2018) stopped at my booth to inquire about purchasing a reading from me. She asked: “Are you a psychic?” I replied: “I am not comfortable using that word for myself. I view myself as a tarotist rather than a psychic.” She ultimately did not purchase a reading from me because she was looking for someone “psychic.” In another example, this time coming “top-down” from show organizers and administrators, Psychic Barb invited me to “do astrology and numerology” at her gathering scheduled for the Fall of 2020. Similarly, an organizer at a psychic fair that I worked earlier that year, had asked me if I could do “past life regressions,” and when the scheduled numerologist didn’t show up, sent clients interested in numerology to my table. In short, readers (and events) stand to gain more business if workers call themselves psychic or claim to be able to read or heal whatever a client wants, regardless of the area. Once again, this causes temptation that strains ethical commitments.

It is easy to see how unscrupulous readers can prey upon people who are desperate, vulnerable, or neuro-atypical. Accounts of predatory fortune-tellers and fraudulent psychics are not new and have even been in the news recently (e.g., Oliver 2019). John Oliver’s comedic depiction of psychics was addressed critically by well-known tarot card readers and spiritualists online (e.g., Jessi Huntenburg 2019). Practitioners may face informal sanctions for egregious ethical violations but there are no reliable penalties. As stated, “libertarian spiritualists” find and enforce their own ethical standards. They also enforce their own boundaries.

Boundaries

“Ethics” refers to the barriers that are put in place to protect vulnerable others—in this case, clients. Practitioners enforcing “boundaries” with clients define and facilitate the ethical treatment of self. Spiritualist workers grapple with how much to give to/withhold from patrons, and for how much money. Sometimes querents will tax the boundaries of readers, asking hyper-specific or strange questions. Most commonly, they push boundaries by attempting to take more time than they have purchased.

The ability to control when a paid exchange begins and ends is a form of power, and readers usually direct this. Readers express their boundaries visually by placing timers or hourglasses on the table for querents to see. They also dismiss one when another stands in cue. However, if time management becomes a “tug of war” between readers and clients, kinder or more submissive readers end up deferring their power to patrons. When patrons assume the power to direct the exchange, they do not respond to cues that the reading has concluded. They fail to stop talking or asking questions after the end of the session.

For example, I “threw some cards” for a white man in his early 70s at a psychic fair recently. He introduced himself to me as having a military background in the navy. He took the first 5–7 minutes of our 15-minute session to tell me his backstory, his various experiences getting his tarot cards read, and to present himself as knowledgeable. When I tried to conclude his reading at the end of the allotted 15 minutes, he complained that I had not analyzed all the cards that I had laid out for him. I showed patience, but also protected my time, by offering a mixed response to his complaint; I gave him an extra minute and then told him that he must buy 15 more minutes if he wanted to proceed. He stood up, said thank you, and left the table.

Pastor Denise offered me advice for dealing with clients when they flout my boundaries, time-related or otherwise, or when there is a fundamental incompatibility in the exchange. She calls our work to create and maintain boundaries “protecting our empathic energy.” She advises us to say to ourselves: “Let the spirit being in me recognize the spirit being in you” to encourage patience and mercy when dealing with offensive or repellant clients, or ultimately, to cancel the reading and return the money.

In the end, tarotists and other mystical workers draw no firm space from their mutable and intricate identities. They are not health care workers, nor counselors and life coaches, nor magical workers alone. Ultimately, they are spiritual seekers and entertainers in the service industry.

Conclusion

In this article, I discuss how tarot readers and other metaphysical practitioners are “libertarian spiritualists” who labor from the periphery, positioned outside of the “plausibility structure” (Berger [1967] 1990) of the hegemonic realms of science and religion. I add to the academic literature on tarot card reading the important insight that tarotists and other metaphysicalists draw upon therapeutic and spiritualist discourses to frame themselves as uniquely qualified healing professionals, sometimes pursuing and signaling training or certification to promote their work. I note that such practitioners position themselves next to white-collar experts, in this case health and wellness workers, to (try to) elevate the status of their spiritualist work. It is rhetorically significant that the church has the word “Institute” in its name. Such a designator petitions for a scientific affiliation (refer to Eaton 2015; Sagan 1995). Some “light workers” even call themselves “metaphysicians,” which is clear scientific language.

Since the use of science as a claims-making activity is not objective (Villanueva-Russell 2009), nor uncontested, people who practice a stigmatized science (refer to Villanueva-Russell 2009) can lay claim to scientific discourse. This is the case for spiritualist healing as it is for other therapies, such as chiropractic care, acupuncture, yoga, or other kinds of holistic healing, that sit at the margins (refer to Villanueva-Russell 2009). When “deviant” beliefs or practices move from the margins to the center, as happened with the field of psychiatry, they are re-purposed as conventional science, politics, or law (Foucault [1974-5] 2004).

Metaphysicalists are also self-identified “psychics,” and as such, sometimes “predict the future,” despite formal rules against making divine claims. They are supernaturalists who adhere to practices outside of organized religion (refer to Waskul and Eaton 2018). These practices call them to present a “supernatural self” while simultaneously distancing themselves from delegitimizing, stigmatizing caricatures, including racist and xenophobic stereotypes associated with fortune-telling (Muzzatti and Smith 2018). Overall, mystics actively identify with higher-status fields and distance themselves from lower-status ones.

Tarot (and other) readers’ marginality, and the attendant lack of systematic oversight, allows this motley of help workers (e.g., healers, therapists, life coaches, clergy, psychics. . .) to craft their own rules and practices. This miscellany of belief and practice is a permeable, Christian-influenced paganism, more inclusive and open-at-the-edges than orthodox science or religion, and with fewer mandates. Actors who hold less collective power and status, including but not limited to queer people (refer to Sumerau, Mathers, and Lampe 2019), gravitate toward new age spirituality due to these aspects of its character. Mark, a self-identified “warlock” at a shop in Connecticut that sells occultist wares, says that “witchcraft” (i.e., tarot-adjacent practices) is the second-largest growing religion in the world after Islam. He asserts that people like it because (according to him, a white man) there is limited racism, sexism, and homophobia. “We accept everyone.” He says firmly. “We take them for who or what they are, no judgment.” Nonetheless, healing and divining through the tarot and the metaphysical has its own shadow side.

Spiritualized labor is a type of “supernatural manifestation” (Waskul and Eaton 2018), the likes of which symbolize our “worst fears in an age of terrorism, global warming, and other large-scale changes that threaten to destabilize or destroy life as we know it” (Waskul and Eaton 2018, 3). Spiritualized labor is also linked to social, economic, cultural, and political structures in ways not readily apparent to workers and clients. This is especially evident in the areas of work and occupation, and health and illness.

Hybridized or underdefined labor roles, while freeing in the ways that I have discussed, can also contribute to exploiting workers. This is not only the case in the low-status work of tarotists or (other) mystical healers. A nebulous framework of roles and responsibilities can contribute to exploitative labor conditions for white-collar work also. Take the example of higher education. In many ways, professors are “front line workers” from the point of view of students. We are often the blanket receptacle of questions and problems not meant for our role location. This clouding of roles and responsibilities gets reinforced by administrators who (for example) ask professors, many of whom are contingent laborers/independent contractors, to help students move into dorms, or to serve as de facto guidance counselors. Such are not the formal roles of scholars or teachers yet comprise our working conditions due to the behaviors of students and administrators.

The widespread use of tarot readers and other healers also underscores gaping deficits in the accessibility and affordability of health care in the contemporary United States. In the United States, responsibility for health care is privatized and individualized. As I previously mentioned, there were structural causes to my own venture into tarot card reading—I initially sought traditional mental health resources in a rural area. Even though I have good health insurance (unlike a significant portion of the U.S. residents), there are often not enough (mental) health care providers in rural areas. If my entrance into unconventional realms was a makeshift replacement for this lack of services, this is likely the case for other consumers and practitioners of psychic services.

A structural analysis also brings to bear on metaphysical spiritualists directly. While there are recent examples of “mixing politics and the occult” to “cast spells” against societal problems like police violence or climate change (refer to Horvat II 2020), most spiritualists inadvertently “blame the victim” (Ryan 1971) for their struggles by emphasizing individual solutions to issues and illnesses. These well-meaning workers want to help or inspire their clients, but because they do not have a sociological imagination (Mills 1959), they mistake public issues for personal troubles (Mills 1959). Moreover, spiritualist communities in rural areas may partially absorb the health care needs of those populations, thereby reducing the visibility of the local need for services. This, in effect, produces consent for unjust societal arrangements like insufficient employment conditions or health care.

In sum, tarot readers and other metaphysical spiritualists labor in a framework that is complex and of mixed origin. They are empowered to declare multi-headed identities in the self-help and supernatural realms—identities that are “multiple and in flux” (Collins 2000, 2019). Mystics are spiritualists and laborers; medicalists and believers; practitioners and clients; healers and survivors. They carve and walk many paths in the “spiritual bricolage” (Bruce 2002; Eaton 2015; Ghidina 2019; Heelas and Woodhead 2005), the hodgepodge of new-age labor.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Kirstie Kemmerer, Kate Moss, Rev. Kristen D. Niles, Christine Zozula, and anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Melissa F. Lavin

Notes

Author Biography

Melissa F. Lavin is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Oneonta. She received her BA in 2003 from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her PhD in 2011 from the University of Connecticut. Her areas include deviance and crime, medicalization, qualitative research methods, gender, and social psychology. She serves on the editorial board for the journal Deviant Behavior.

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