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On a recent acrimonious thread a terribly persistent sceptical gentleman from a ghastly place called Australia asked me a question about the tarot and palmistry. I was about to answer it before the thread got closed down on the grounds that the participants were about to kill each other.

I do not want to get into Randi or the wickedness of psychics here. Neither do I want particularly to get into Uri Geller or spoon bending. I do not want to discuss the ethical implications of psychic activity either.

I merely want to give a palmistry and tarot lesson. Bobby Cat asked a question but as I am typing here I have forgotten what the bloody hell it was. In fact I think he asked two questions. One about palmistry and one about the tarot.

No doubt he will remind me what they were.

Mark,
thank you for allowing my questions to survive the "lock down"...

OK, so to represent them in some sort of context:

my initial feelings about both palmistry and tarot were the same as my feelings about spoon bending with one's mind. absolute C**P!

however, i must admit, whislt i know quite something about physics, which gives me some understanding of what it would take to bend a spoon with one's mind. (hence, why i struggle to accept claims to the contrary, that accompany a refusal to substantiate them) on the other hand, and this will no doubt surprise some... i know next to nothing about palmistry and tarot. or perhaps i could say i have a "Hollywood" understanding of them.

then my universe was turned upside down because i read your post that defined what you thought "psychic ability" meant. i then read on, as you described your own abilities. this encouraged me to read on even more carefully because the psychic bretheren is oft prone to very defensive reactions when asked anything more than what day it is.

so i am getting my mind around your explaination, which i read to understand... does not involve any "magical powers" or "Hocus Pocus", but more so, involves a finely tuned heightend awarness. a special intuition that enables you to be more sensitive to signals people give off. this combined with many years of experience seeing all different walks of people with a somewhat common set of questions/problems/situations etc, enables you to arrive at things such as, what's bothering them, what they do for a living, etc.

so i am thinking, right... the palm, the tarot, they are vehicles by which you guaged reactions, gleaned information from responses... NOT so simple as "i turned over the death card so i see death in your family". please dont accept that comment like the last "pin pricking poster"... i mean it to demonstrate a gyst... in other words, i assumed based on what you had previously said about intuition, that the cards themselves... and infact the palm, were part of the process, but not the process percey.

so i am starting to come to terms with this. your post is making sense and i am getting my mind around what you mean, what this is all about and how perhaps i cant simply write it "all" off as "you know what". i am thinking about business strategies my dad had tought me in terms of assessing people and the common ground. i thought back further and mentioned by example how one's mother often has this kind of intuition with her children.

then you made a comment about the fact you felt my thumb i think it was, would be similar to that of Craig Browning's. ie. unflexible. and that tends to challenge what i thought you had meant. but then i thought perhaps there could well be physiological common ground that was consistant when certain dispositions where present. so once again, i am starting to make sense of this palm thing.

however, then i read your offer to Eckozero... a picture of a palm can be read. ie. just the picture... the person is NOT involved. and THEN your couragous proposal to read several member's palms without knowledge of their identity.

OK, so instantly i am thinking how i could put this together. ensure it's validity and integrety. and see what happens... this however met with some rather negative responses from the admins, concerned i guess that you, Craig and I would argue over the results. too bad.

so all that remains then are my questions put into context above so my simple mind can comprehend what you're saying:
(1) are you saying that when you read Eckozero's Palm picture, everything you will glean comes from the picture. everything??? i am not asking this because i think you will defer to go review every post he ever wrote before answering (although some would). i am asking this because you had previously given me the impression that the face to face intuition you possessed played the bigger part.

is the amount and type of information you can aquire at a face to face meeting different to that you will glean from the picture alone?

(2) similarly, with Tarot, are you gleaning infomation from the face of the card, or is the face of the card merely a vehicle that assist you with using your heightened levels of intuition to determine the information?

ie. you mentioned, as soon as you meet someone... you begin accumilating info. in many cases you know what they do for a living, why they have come to see you, shortly after they sit down. so do the cards add to this process OR are you saying the cards themselves and their faces very much part of the process?

sorry for the long winded reply.

on a seperate note, you should know that you have opened my mind a little because of your preparedness to discuss and substantiate things you say. that makes reasonable debate possible which i believe is healthy.

on the other hand, i still think you're a grumpy old so and so... albeit a learned grumpy old so and so...

I smell a rat here. Call it psychic vibes if you wish. It reminds me of the tale of Red Riding Hood. Wolf in sheeps clothing-that sort of thing.

No matter. When I have the energy I shall endeavour to explain things. I have been very tired lately. I may be communicating with you all from the spirit world soon.

Let me say that there is no such thing as supernatural. Anything in this line can only be NATURAL. Electricity is perfectly natural even though we don't fully understand why it works. However that doesn't stop us putting the light on and using its power.

Later...............

Can i just say if you are really unwell then i hope you get well soon. Please tell me i am not the only person who understands the character that has been created

Yes mark, if you are ill, please do get better soon.

I am always rather amused by your posts - not to mention they're normally helpful and informative.

Get well soon

mark lewis wrote:I smell a rat here. Call it psychic vibes if you wish. It reminds me of the tale of Red Riding Hood. Wolf in sheeps clothing-that sort of thing.

No matter. When I have the energy I shall endeavour to explain things. I have been very tired lately. I may be communicating with you all from the spirit world soon.

Let me say that there is no such thing as supernatural. Anything in this line can only be NATURAL. Electricity is perfectly natural even though we don't fully understand why it works. However that doesn't stop us putting the light on and using its power.

Later...............

Just remember you old hustler, I have first dibs on having you as my Spirit Guide after you croke (the mischief the two of us could get into then would amaze even our imaginations I fear).

Mark is 100% on the mark when he states that NONE OF IT is "Super-Natural" merely an expansion of what is natural. Even Cayce pointed this out; that being psychic only meant that you were more aware, there is nothing mystical or boogiemanish about any of it outside of our own perceptions, misunderstandings, superstitions and fantasies.

I've pointed this out time and again in these forums that even within the deeper aspects of Occult study... or should I say "especially" within said circles... the student is taught in very direct terms that "Magick" (including PSI ability) is all a blending of physics, chemistry, math and psychology... there is very little other that's legitimately connected to it. The lore of boogiemen and demons stems mostly from religious propaganda of the dark and middle ages more than even biblical inferrence.

As a Metaphysician I can understand some of the more subtle and elusive "physics" percieved and even used by the believer. As a "realist" I also know when to call a duck a duck (or, as my associate minister has pointed out, a rat as being a rat). It's such perspective however, that frustrates either side of the issue in that both hold a position of being right but for entirely different reasons.

When I was a child and I had a question my father would hand me a Dictionary or point me to the Encyclopedia and make me do the footwork required for LEARNING what it was I wanted to know. In my High School years I was disciplined in how to use the Dewey Dicimel sytems and thus, discovered how to exploit that phenomenal thing of ancient culture called a LIBRARY in which I found row after row of books and file and file of research materials known as "Microfilm Reserves" (or Microfish as some would term it). It was a most wonderful thing it's unfortunate so many in our world today aren't familiar with such resources and tools or how to properly go about using them... you can learn so much and gain such a wide sense of perspective on most any given topic.

I think the most magical of lessons I have known along these lines was when I started getting a hint savvy with computers and the internet and in so doing, discovered that I could actually access books and files in the Library of Congress as well as translations of ancient scriptures, scrolls, etc. from this and that museum... I could study and learn about the world from the comfort of my own home and if desired, take a real time virtual tour of places I'd read about and always wanted to see.

Perhaps, some day in the not so distant future, the young and angry individuals of our world will discover that it is better to do the footwork on their own so they can actually LEARN vs. asking questions for the sake of stirring tension and "debate" for the sake of a personal demonstration of arrogance and "pride" not justly earned.

I have sent a private message to Craig that he is my official medium once I have passed over to the other side. I am afraid that if Bobby Cat wants to ask me any questions he will have to do it via Reverend Browning.

There. That should be an interesting scenario.

However I am not dead yet. You will know when it happens because of all the great celebration in the magic world.

ok not sure if its relevant or old news but when i was doing readings in my youth the cards,ring, palm, crystal ball and other weird and wonderfull devices of divination were just used as a guide.

take a tarot deck as an example if you lay them out in a spread they will tell a story each card has several meenings depending on if its reversed or in reference to a question or even a statment.
the death card can symbolise change ie the end of one direction or job and the begining of a new one it also can meen "no" and not an advisable path to follow.

how you decypher this one card depends on its position in a spread and the person you are dealing with.

i have always told people that as a magician, cold reader and psychic i cannot nor choose to work out which of the skills i am using at that current time for there reading, most times in a reading i will percieve imfomation that i could not possibly have known but wether this is a combination of cold reading techniques and guess work or genuine preminision i cannot say.
its the same way with me at a party i know just when to do the right magic trick for the right kids / adult to obtain maximum effect, experience or divine guidence i do not know.

One thing that I have never quite understood is just exactly HOW the lines can tell someone so much about a person? Now, I'm not on about how people interpret them, i.e. such and such a shape of a line or whatever means this, but just exactly HOW such information about a person comes to be represented in their palm lines?

think for one second a finger print is unigue to you so is your palm print, your hands physicly develope according to your natural development and your social / work development you know that nature / nurture thing.

its not just the lines but the hand shape finger size and shape even the nails can tell you a lot.

a good example is if you have short stubby fingers but large spade shaped hands then a few things can be defined:-

medicaly your more likely to to suffer from resertory ailments especialy if you smoke also heart conditions are common.
bodily you will tend to be broarder than you are tall ie dawarf like rather than slender and tall.

you are less likely to be musical because your fingers don't have the practical length.
practicly you will be more labour intesnsive than mental based in work and will tend to be set in your ways and less flexible to new ideas and as such will prefer small groups of friends and expect loyalty from your friends.

Ah right ok then...

But then how can all of that be used to tell you how many children you will have? How long you will live for?

well knowing all you know about mr spadey handed one here how long against the average life expectancy do you think he should fall into more or less.

actualy studies have shown that the number of kids you are likely to produce for a given lifestyle is three so taking thet average and aplying it to some lines on the hand that are average to most people you can make a judgment as to how many they are likely to have.
palmestry is all statistics and like racing form is open to interpretation but basicly follows a set of rules, a two leged horse is less likely to get on the field than it is to win the race.

Mark,
unfortunately the nature of your banter, whilst most entertaining, makes it difficult to determine if you are truely ill or simply trying to facilitate a most unholy alliance (I'm not a psychic!). if you are infact unwell... get well soon!

Craig,
welcome to this new thread. and thank you for trying to inject some of the old venom and condecending rhetoric from that "other" thread into this one with your comments here. why? do you want this thread locked down as well?

Craig Browning wrote: Perhaps, some day in the not so distant future, the young and angry individuals of our world will discover that it is better to do the footwork on their own so they can actually LEARN vs. asking questions for the sake of stirring tension and "debate" for the sake of a personal demonstration of arrogance and "pride" not justly earned.

when the old thread was locked down, i decided to go back to the first post by "themagicwand". i read his first post, then every post in between culminating in Mandrake's "game over". if you can afford the time, perhaps consider doing this yourself. "if"... and ONLY "if" you can do it with a totally relaxed and open mind, i believe it will change your attitude towards me, and to a great degree towards yourself.

now Mark, you "old devil". so who's the skeptic now?

quoting Mark Lewis: I smell a rat here. Call it psychic vibes if you wish. It reminds me of the tale of Red Riding Hood. Wolf in sheeps clothing-that sort of thing.

i see the world must have come full circle...

some of Craig's comments in his earlier post within this thread tend to echo your's in that when we say "psychic" in this context, we are more talking about a heightened awarness than a fire and brimstone type thing.

Craig Browning wrote: Mark is 100% on the mark when he states that NONE OF IT is "Super-Natural" merely an expansion of what is natural. Even Cayce pointed this out; that being psychic only meant that you were more aware, there is nothing mystical or boogiemanish about any of it outside of our own perceptions, misunderstandings, superstitions and fantasies.

it is interesting in that i read often from you Mark, that you are NOT really aware of what you are doing to "activate" this awareness, nor are you 100% sure where it comes from. Magicdiscoman seems to make similar points in his post. in other words, i find it quite amusing, even ironic (if i understand you correctly) that there is little awareness of how one is able to exhibit heightened awareness.

reading Magic discoman's other comments about hand shape, to some extent addresses the questions i have asked of you. quite logical really (to take a simple and somewhat extreme view) that a professional basketball player would have larger more athletic looking hands than a market gardener from Southern Italy. he is likely to be taller, have a greater degree of fast twitch muscle fibre and (in around 70% of cases in the NBA) be African American in background. therefore in looking at one's hands... whether the person is present or not, i can start to understand how you can make at least some kind of assessment. i guess, and look forward to your thoughts on this, that there may also be some consistancy between one's physiological attributes and one's mental disposition. therefore, i would suspect... with a heightened level of awareness, and some many years of experience... palms can be genuinely read. of course this would make it far more about awareness, intuition, probability and mathmatics than hocus pocus... i hope that's not exposure???

this was all starting to make sense... then you have to go and stuff it all up again by suggesting (in Eckozero's can i have a reading thread) that a line on one's hand can indicate such details as the recent loss of a loved one... ARGH!!! OK, so let me think this through... is it a Pall Bearer's crease??? that should help you even determine the size of the departed. do white knuckles therefore indicate a fear of flying??? please explain...

here's a thought, apart from the last bit... lines on the hand indicating a lost loved one... for which i await your explaination, i can see i may need to re-think my attitude (in part) as to why James Randi's challenge has never been won. lets leave spoon bending with one's mind (Uri Geller style) out of this discussion... and just discuss the 2 points of this thread. the palm and the tarot.

if what you say is correct (except for that last bit you still need to explain) then the million dollars can never be won because the type of phenomena that Randi is trying to prove doesn't exist, is not actually what is being used in the first place. therefore anyone trying to win the million, may well be doing something that when explained fully and properly, doesn't fit into the guidelines to begin with... or put more simply... how can you "prove impossible" what i am NOT attempting to "possible"??? how can you prove me wrong, when i am not attempting to prove me right...? of course that only applies to the genuine (if that is a good word to use... i dont know yet).

this would then mean, and i apologise in advance to those who are offended by this... that the learned psychic and James Randi, are not as different (at least in some ways) as we would have once thought...

just so no one thinks i have gone soft here... i am refering specifically to your comments about tarot and palmistry, and the understanding i have gleaned. if what i have gleaned is wrong, if i have mis-understood, then i am afraid, I'm back to square one. my comments dont necessarily relate to other forms of paranornal phenomena.

anyway, look forward to your comments when you are ready.

Yes, I am ignoring the above post but I am addressing the conversation discoman and Cardza were having... at least it's halfway intelligent.

I'm far from being a learned adept at Palmistry but I can answer some of the questions that have been brought out in that you have line patterns that do tend to be common place as well as a "geography" or "topography" as it were, to the hand that gives us keys for understanding what, for an example, the squared marking on the outer ridge of you hand might mean vs. a similar pattern being found on that fleshy part right below the thumb.

The most interesting study into palmistry I've ever done actually came from Medical Text books from a Nursing course a friend of mine was taking, it's amazing how much the human hand can tell a doctor or nurse when it comes to dealing with diagnosis, etc. But there are other indicators in the hand that literally stem from that old gypsy understanding of the physical shape of the hand, fingers, nails, etc. Far too much of the "old wives tales" seem to be founded on factual discoveries or "commonalities" not only with the hand but as Sheldon pointed out, the morphic designs of the body and of course the ancient insights gained through "Asian Face Reading" which has more recenlty graduated into the science of FACS (Ekman, Friesen & Hagar research on the subtle characteristics and twitches of the human face in communications presently employed by various law enforcement agencies include the FBI and CIA) Wow! And yet there is no definitive proof that all this divination stuff is real... amazing!

Mark can support the fact that our good friend Fred Crouter, a retired psycho-therapist who now works as a full-time Reader in a Casino near his home, can look at a personality description and give you a fairly accurate sketch as to what the person described looks like, age, etc. or, he can look at their photo and give you a damned accurate profile. This is a demonstration of learned knowledge but likewise a demonstration of personal intuition, not "guess work" or worse a "Lucky Guess" as some have intimated. Intuition is 100% natural but it can be enhanced and even "trained" so to speak, via years of study and practice, which is the case people like Fred, Mark, Myself and others that have worked in this field for decades.

The other thing that you need to understand, especially when it comes to things like Palmistry or the Tarot, is that what we do with such devices is "Divination" NOT (and this important) "Prophecy"... Divination is based on the here and now and present focus and mind-set. It is not restrictive or carved in stone e.g. the client retains their free will and too, via their actions or change of action, the things "foreseen" can be altered e.g. they will not turn out to be 100% on the mark but, there will generally be an accuracy factor that is above the percentages of mere chance.

Prophecy is an entirely different bird and in itself, seems to be more of a myth that a truesm. According most "Prophecy is given by God or the Divine Spirit and cannot be changed; it is God's will, end of story." Unfortuantely most of the material that is heralded as Prophecy and proof of God's divinity and that of his prophets, is that everything foretold in the old testament came true. In other words, hindsight is readily 20/20 as we've seen in the contentions toward Nostradamous and other famed Seers of history. What's frightening is the present day antics of certain extremists to insure that Armageddon comes to flourition and this world is taken to hell in a handbasket quickly. Even the whole "Earth destroyed by fire" idea found in the Revelation seems to be taking root, given the Global Warming issue is this self-fulfilling prophesy?

Anywho, I hope I've managed to clear up or validate or whatever it is the two of you needed.

He does go on doesn't he....................

In order to answer your post I have to study it first. That may take me a couple of centuries or so. I am not sure I have the energy. One thing however I would say is that you should not provoke Reverend Browning into great agitation otherwise this thread will go down the drain again. Let us keep things on a friendly basis. After all when I pass into spirit the only way you can communicate with me is through Craig. I have already explained that he is my official medium. I could use that old bitch Sylvia Browne but I do not approve of her.

Now where the "heightened awareness" comes from I DO know and I thought that my friend Svengali explained it. However even if I didn't know where it came from it doesn't matter anyway as long as I am making money out of it. Besides where I get it from is more of a problem for you than it is for me. Frankly I don't give a toss. I am far more concerned where the $100 (my fee) is coming from than where the power which enables me to procure the $100 emanates from.

Not that I would wish you to think I have a mercenary disposition of course. It is well known that I am a terribly spiritual person. And the more $100 bills I see the more spiritual I get.

I did NOT say that the line on Eckozero's hand indicated a loved one passing away. I said that it was a protection line. It might indicate someone passed away. It might indicate a spirit guide or it might mean that God is looking after the person. I don't know what it means but it is good that the young seeker of knowledge from Cambridgeshire has it. However from experience I find that it usually means someone passed away. It is often recent but not necessarily.

I must admonish you that this thread was supposed to be a palmistry lesson not an exhibition of your scepticism which has already been established.

As to why Randi's challenge has not been won that is because the old b***** is as bloody crooked as he claims the psychics are. I don't think all the psychics that take his challenge are crooked. If they were they wouldn't be daft enough to take the challenge in the first place. I would only take the challenge if I were the only person allowed to judge it. I don't see why Randi should have all the fun.

Now let us get back to business. You asked two questions about palmistry and the tarot. You still haven't told me what they are and I can't be bothered revisiting that old thread which was closed down.

I am a terribly busy man and very important indeed. You really must get to the point old chap. Now what was it you wanted to know about palmistry and the tarot? Please consider your questions as an exercise in brevity, there's a good chap. I would be happy to act as a role model in this regard.