…and maybe an apple of discord. 😆
Fortune Telling
Not so long ago – in the 80’s or 90’s? – somebody decided that people who do cold readings and candle burning scams were just “fortune tellers” and the ethical readers (such as themselves) were diviners. As in “The Divine”.
Which sounded good, in theory, but wore thin pretty quickly. People who were too “ethical” to do predictive readings (What? Isn’t that what the people are paying us to do, try to predict the future?) are doing psychological readings. With no training in psychology. The rule seems to be “Say ‘Jung’ a lot. You don’t have to read him or anything!”
Fortune telling doesn’t mean ripping people off, it just means telling people’s futures, whether they will have good fortune.
And now, the “diviners” are selling Prosperity Consciousness. They say that they can tell you how to weed out bad thought patterns and think yourself rich. All for a hefty price, of course.
There truly is a sucker born every minute. The Power of Positive Thinking got regurgitated as The Secret and made a bazillion dollars, but if it worked, don’t you think people in Third World countries would use it so they wouldn’t have to watch their kids starve? It’s actually offensive.
These people are just a variation of the kind of readers who tell you to “get all your money out of the bank and bring it to me so I can take the curse off of it”.
"fate keeps on happening" 
Great article, one tiny quibble and it may be a regional thing.
I have no problem with the word divination, use it myself quite a bit. Around where I live, those sorts of folks didn’t become diviners in the 80s and 90s. That might give them some perceived contact to religion – and that was too uncool, we’ve evolved past the idea of the divine, all our ‘wisdom’ comes from our ‘higher selves’. I’m still not too sure what a higher self (or a lower one?) is, but that’s the deal where I live.
They all became counselours and consultants locally. We even have a few life coaches, too. For the rich and the barmy.
But there’s a dearth of diviners. Save yours truly. I don’t deal in prosperity consciousness. But that seems to be one of the huge selling points of the counselours, consultants, and coaches (the three c’s? 😉 ), especially now that the economic disaster is really hitting.
Agreed, “diviner” is like “fortune teller” – the proper definition really isn’t “flim flam artist”. We do get the “higher self” people, but it’s a PC term for the same ol’ Calvinism. It kind of runs together with what Ralph Blum did to the runes – lots of psychobabble with the Odinism and some Jesus for good measure. Another one is Wayne Dyer. He doesn’t do readings, but the changes in him follow the same track. His stuff was useful back in 1980 or so, when he was writing about how to get a refunds out of nasty store clerks and not getting pushed around in general. I was young, I needed it, I used it, and it worked. Now he’s doing the same Prosperity Consciousness thing and saying how if your link with the divine (or higher self, or whatever term he used) is kept clean and shiny, the money pours in like crazy because the universe is an ocean of abundance. Then he trots his daughter out to sing “Make Me An Instrument Of Thy Peace” and everybody goes away thinking they have the pin code to the Cosmic ATM. All lies, of course, but he’s making waaay more money than he did when he was writing about stuff that actually worked. The Tarot posers seem to be modeling themselves on that kind of thing.