Why should a middle-aged, British/Australian character-actor living in the USA, be involved with this kind of hocus-pocus?

I’ve had a couple of significant experiences with divinatory systems. Aged 15 I was at North Sydney Boys High School in Australia, and the maths teacher offered to do a palm reading for each of us in exchange for being allowed to keep a print of our hands. I accepted.

I’d been at the school for about 3 weeks and had never spoken with this man. He began the reading by saying, “The first thing that struck me about this was — an actor.” It hit me between the eyes. How did he know?

About 7 years later in London I went to a psychic. When I sat down he said, “There’s a big Australian flag above your head.” Later he told me, “Your life is Greek myths in the suburbs.” And so it has proved to be.

Again later, I became friendly with an elderly Scottish sculptress who used to read tea-leaves. To sit with her in positive, energized, creative presence was a lovely experience, and she was the sort of person who seemed to know “the mystery of things”.

From an early age, I knew that there were “more things in heaven and earth …”

I’m no more than ordinarily psychic, by which I mean that I believe we all are, to greater or lesser degree. But I reckon intuition to be an equal function with intellect. And I take the view that daily life is full of information that could be useful to us. If we knew how to read the clouds, the stars or the wind, we might be able to expand our ability to influence the path of our own lives.

Tarot and Astrology are compatible lenses through which we can view circumstance, and look for meaning.

At one point in my youth I had a job in a bookshop. One of my co-workers gave me a deck of tarot cards, saying, “Here, I think you might be interested in this.” This was a puzzling event. I left the bookshop soon after, and lost touch with the giver of the cards. I would pore over the deck (The Marseille Deck) wondering what any of it meant. I didn’t know it then, but in gifting the cards he was following a tradition.

There were other experiences which were also like pointers. Just before my first Saturn return I read Liz Greene’s book: Saturn, a New Look at an Old Devil. I admired the book as having a depth of scholarship, and some academic weight. I had similar feelings of relish and pleasure at finding a piece of code that explained a facet of mystery, as when previously reading Ouspensky.

And so on …

It was a while though before I began to study seriously. Presently, I have opposing but not contradictory experiences: on the one hand, the more I know and understand I’m aware of how endlessly much more there is to know and understand. On the other, every piece of understanding gained is like a signpost on a return journey.

What about you? Do the cards or the stars call to you too?