Soothsayers as Business Advisers; You Are Going to Go on a Long Trip . . .

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September 11, 1994, Section 4, Page 2Buy Reprints
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ZAP, zap, zap, sometimes it seems the same thing is on every channel. Whether it's 3 P.M. or 3 A.M., there's Dionne Warwick and her psychic friends selling advice on love, money and success. In a nation where the power of crystals and the likelihood that angels hover nearby prompt more contemplation than ridicule, it may not be surprising that one million people a year call Ms. Warwick's friends.

But couch potatoes aren't the only people seeking the counsel of psychics and astrologers. Clairvoyants have a booming business advising Philadelphia bankers, Hollywood lawyers and CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, whom they charge between $100 and $250 an hour.

"If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor," said Rosanna Rogers, a psychic from Cleveland who claims to have 4,000 names in her Rolodex. "But we know Nancy Reagan, she had an astrologer, and John Lennon and H. L. Hunt and J. P. Morgan used psychics. Morgan, you know, he said, 'Millionaires don't use psychics, billionaires do.' "


"My psychic tells me the truth as she sees it, as opposed to what I want to hear," said Denise Laine, who owns American Transitech, which refills toner cartridges in Mountain View, Calif. "She makes specific suggestions about what I should do."

When Judy McCutchan, who owns a direct mail service in Sunnyvale, Calif., showed her psychic photos of her employees, "she told me my sales manager was going to quit and move to Santa Fe," she recalled. "A few weeks later she quit and moved to Santa Fe."

Dr. Paul Kurtz, chairman of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, in Buffalo, N.Y., called such predictions "cheap carnival tricks." His committee, which includes several Nobel laureates, has investigated hundreds of clairvoyants and has yet to find a system or individual capable of telling the future. What it has found is that fortune tellers are experts at reading body language, listening closely and making general statements that seem specific. Many people, he added, are so suggestible they make their fortunes come true.

"At heart I think the problem is that Americans are so scientifically illiterate that they do not understand that these things are impossible," he said. "And they want to believe in it, so they will."

Clairvoyants say their art is so arcane that even they do not know precisely how it works. And psychics, astrologers and hybrid psychic-astrologers are quick to denounce one another as not completely legitimate.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, astrologers cling to the ancient belief that the planets affect people and their environment and that by examining planetary motions, they can tell the past, present and future. Psychics, on the other hand, act like human radios, tuning in to the clients' karmic wavelengths to divine their lives. They claim to "read" almost anything including financial markets, corporations and entire nations.

Arch Crawford, a New York City financial astrologer who predicted the 1987 crash in his newsletter, Crawford Perspectives, began using sunspot activity and astrology to chart the stock and commodities markets while working as an analyst at Merrill Lynch because he found traditional econometric models frustrating. "While markets have become extremely complex in recent years, statistical tools for tracking them have not become equally sophisticated," Mr. Crawford said. So why not try magic instead? "Astrology, along with a lot of technical analysis, gives me an edge over those people who simply rely on numbers."

Psychics and astrologers predict their growing popularity augurs the return of their once exalted position. Beginning with the Assyrians 5,000 years ago, soothsayers were prized advisers. For lack of anything better, their art was considered good science -- Plato and Aristotle were practicing astrologers as were Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. But the rise of Reason during the 17th and 18th centuries began the soothsayers' slide from reverence to ridicule.

Still, no amount of debunking is sufficient to extinguish these beliefs. "People have always known that there are other ways of being and knowing," said Dr. Glenn Perry, a psychotherapist from San Rafael, Calif., who publishes the Journal of Astropsychology, "and now it is becoming more acceptable to rediscover them."

For profit, when possible.