Fortune-telling

What it is

Fortune-telling means telling a person what may lie ahead in their life. It overlaps with divination, the older word for predictions that belong to a religious rite and call on gods or spirits. The everyday term suggests something lighter: a reading in a parlour, at a fair, or over the phone, where suggestion, advice or simple affirmation may matter more than any belief in hidden forces. The person who does it is called a fortune teller, and also a reader, seer, soothsayer, clairvoyant, crystal-gazer or prophet. Sceptics class the whole thing as superstition and magical thinking.

Methods and tools

Readers rarely invent a method. They use one long established in their own culture, and so meet what their clients expect. In Europe and the Americas the common ones are astrology and horary astrology, pendulum reading, spirit boards, tea-leaf reading, card reading and tarot, crystal gazing and palmistry. Palmistry, tarot and the crystal ball are popularly linked with Roma and Sinti people. Some readers work with no object at all, saying their words arrive through spirits or visions. Other named methods read wax, cheese, flour, clouds, birds in flight, animal livers, flames, water, stones, numbers, names, dreams, moles or fingernails.

Origins and history

Pliny the Elder, writing in the 1st century CE, described soothsayers using a crystal ball, which Latin scribes later called an orbuculum. Today's Western picture of the fortune teller comes from folk readings of Renaissance magic, above all through the popular association with Romani people. In the 19th and 20th centuries, methods of divination from outside the West, among them the I Ching, were taken up as fortune-telling in Western popular culture. Once prized as advisers in ancient and premodern states such as Assyria, soothsayers lost standing during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Who consults a reader

Clients come from every sort of background, among them bankers, lawyers and company chiefs, according to readers interviewed in the 1990s. Western readers are usually asked about romance, money, children and work, and many also give a character reading built from numbers, handwriting, palms or a birth chart. Sources suggest that women consult readers more often than men, and that some keep the same reader for years. Telephone sessions spread in the 1990s, followed by email and video calls, though none of these have replaced meeting in person.

Money, licences and doubt

Most readers earn from the work. Some do it full time; others keep another job, often in counselling, social work, teaching or health care. A 1982 survey of North American diviners found that most were married with children, that a few held graduate degrees, and that their daily lives looked ordinary. Local and state laws in the United States may restrict the trade, require a licence or a bond, or ask readers to use titles such as spiritual advisor or psychic consultant. Christianity, Islam, Baháʼísm and Judaism forbid divination, and sceptics dismiss it as pseudoscience.

How Fortune-telling is kept

A client books a session with a reader, in person, by phone, by email or over video. The reader works with a familiar method: cards, palms, tea leaves, a crystal sphere, a pendulum, a spirit board, the stars or a name. Some instead say their words come from spirits or from visions. Many begin with a character reading and then turn to one question about love, money, work or children. A session may end with practical advice, sometimes with prayer or a spell. Long-standing clients often return to the same reader for years.

When and where

Fortune-telling has no fixed date. Consultations happen all year, whenever a client asks, and readers take bookings by appointment. A few methods do work with the calendar: chronomancy sorts lucky days from unlucky ones, while horary astrology sets a chart to the moment a question is put, and bazi works from the hour, day, month and year of a birth.

It is practised widely across Europe and the Americas. Much of what the sources describe comes from the United States and Canada, where readers keep offices and take telephone or online bookings. Methods from elsewhere, such as the I Ching from China or Kau cim with its numbered bamboo sticks, were adopted into Western popular culture. Several religious traditions forbid the practice outright.

What Fortune-telling means

Behind every reading lies a wish to know what is coming and to have some say over it. A 1982 explanation holds that people go to readers for self-understanding and for knowledge that leads to personal power or success. A later view, from 1995, is that we want to know what others will do, that we hope our plans will go as we wish, and that we look for a way to gain power over our own lives. Readers also describe their work as a form of spiritual freedom.

Questions people ask about Fortune-telling

See also

WampumShell beads woven into belts by Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands for record-keeping and ceremony.Jack-o'-lanternA carved pumpkin lantern lit with a candle to brighten and protect Halloween nightsFriday the 13thA Western folk superstition regarding the unluckiness of a Friday falling on the 13th.ChristmasA festival of Jesus's birth, kept on 25 December with gifts, lights and shared meals

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle
• Psychic crackdown on the cardsThe Guardian, Article
• Psychic crackdown on the cardsThe Guardian, Article

• Fortune-telling on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data

It may contain mistakes. Traditions differ from one family, village and community to the next, and the people who keep them know them best. If something is wrong, tell us. Last refreshed 2026-10-05.