THE DEFENCE OF FORTUNETELLING.

Otago Witness, Issue 3031, 17 April 1912, Page 87

THE DEFENCE OF FORTUNETELLING.

By Con-stance Clyde. It Ls generally assumed that fortunetelling is, if not dangerous, at least a trivial and useless amusement. The State, spasmodically, it is true, sets its face against the practice, every now and then, as coloniaJ history has shown us, sweeping the local Witches of Endor into oblivion. Few of us realise that this art, instead of being a relic of superstition, satisfies- a quite new need in humanity—that need is self-knowledge. There wa,s a time in previous ages when, however ignorant we might be of science, hygiene, and so forth, we did literally see ourselves as others saw us. For instance, up to the middle of the nineteenth century or thereabouts a woman could not think herself pretty if she happened to be ugly. The world enlightened her; plain speech was the rule. Sir Walter Besant, writing of England in the earlv nineteenth century, tells how a young lady was addressed in a place of public entertainment : " If you were pretty, I would offer you my seat 1 ; but a* you are not " "Such an incident would be impossible now. But in those days the- world was a Palace of Truth compared to what it is now. A man could scarcely think himself either good or wise if he were not; there were nicknames for all anel sundry—history is full of nicknames, and the open blazoning of defects. Candour was in the air. Pulpit, and press too, when it existed, belched forth personalities. The world was lildp a boys' school in other respects besides being rough and noisy. You really did know what everyone thought of* you! No one had any hesitation whatever in informing you. Now all this is over. We "do not tell our real thoughts of one another. The piess is muzzled, and the pulpit is mute. Consequently, while we know a great many more things than we once knew, in this respect we are more ignorant than formerly. The world is clearer to US, but out" own view of ourselves is dimmer. Robert Burns might well ask for the gift to see ourselves as others «ee us, for his age was the period when the gift was being withdrawn. Now it has completely vanished. We live, as it were, in a muffled world, hearing nothing of that which is supremely worthy of our at ten - 11,,n—ourselves. The candid friend is a relic of the past, and our relatives are sometimes as polite as Grangers, even as formerly strangers were often as rude as relatives! As a result of this comparatively new silence in the world, there ana quite a number of persons living, growing old, and dying with epiite a wrong impression of themselves." It is not that they always think themselves better than they are. On the contrary, sometimes they fancy themselves worse. But always they see themselves different from what they are. We observe this in all our friends, and there is no possible doubt but what our friends observe it in us. It is here that th? modern fortune-teller, instead of reanimating an old superstition, answers to a new need. She can enlighten us about our;elves. She can <lo more than we now permit pulpit or press, relative or friend, to do. for. observe, somehow or other, for some inscrutable psychological reason, we permit her to speak with frankness, and we feel that the fiankness does not hurt' If I say to my dearest friend : "You are much too impulsive, and harm will como of it," he or she may possibly be offended ; but if 1 take the hand and draw a lead pencil down some of itjt markings, and proclaim : "The line of head show* a marked degree of impulsiveness, and on the life line I see indications of disaster" ; then, instead of feeling anger, my friend is pleased. Even if she protests that she does not believe at all in palmistry, she fltill sees me, by this act Of holding her nan dand pencilling tho lines upon it, as put into some so.-t of official position, in which a candour as of the more primitive ages is permitted me. So she talks more confidentially than at any other time, and listens to what I have to say without e^

ptrrfehcing any wound to her amour proprei Perhaps more people have been biassed towards their future occupations by the word of physiognomist or phrenologist than is generally imagined. The fortuneteller is, maybe, quite wrong in his advice, and Bill have no such natural talent for business or the law as he has mentioned. Yet still the predilection dees good. Just as formerly we paid too little attention to a boy's individual preferences, so now we wait' on them a little too assiduously, when the truth is that many young persons have no special predilection whatever. The physiognomist and phrenologist, however, do their best to create a predilection, and so help to concentrnate needed energy in one direction. Even the humble fortune-teller may thus help in the creation of character and the avoidance of special dangers. Time was when the community believed that its "fortune," as foretold by omens, should be known to a child from its infancy. Even its name had some bearing on its fate. I have before ine a set of numbers, each of which corresponds to some letter in the alphabet. By~this invention, attributed to Pythagoras, one learns, after some adding and subtracting, that the name Mary Smith means "Strength, Tribunal, Judgment, Judge," and that John Brown signifies Irresolution, but also indicates, more hopefully, Science and the Graces. One wonders if this scheme rests mainly on several wellknown names, for Jean Jacques Rousseau, when worked out in numbers, shows ''Philosophy" and "Love of Virtue," which certainly hits off one accepted idea as to his character; while Napoleon Bonaparte works out to Empire, the Stars Marriage; and Mary Stuart to Destruction and Catastrophe. Would it be we/1 for these illustrious personages had they learnt early in life what weie to be the predominating factors in their life' Moralists would answer in the negative, yet Napoleon we know believed in his star, and thus was upheld when things were at their worst, while Mary Stuart might have been warned by the description of her fate to avoid it, illogical as it is to try and avoid that which we call fate, and so ended her life, who knows? in a different fashion.