FORTUNE-TELLERS’ HARVEST.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18848, 10 April 1931, Page 2

FORTUNE-TELLERS’ HARVEST.

MILLIONS SPENT IN AMERICA. ARMY OF ABOUT 100,000. Victims of a wave of superstition such as the world has not seen since the Middle Ages, the people of the United States are paying £25,000,000 a year to an army of about 100,000 for-tune-tellers of all kinds, including cry-stal-gazers, astrologers, numerologists, palmists, phrenologists, card manipulators, tea-leaf readers, and others, who infest the country from one end to the other.

In New York City alone more than £5,000,000 is spent annually by gullible persons for the privilege of listening to vague, valueless, and often vicious predictions of between 15,000 and 20,000 sooth-sayers who are active there in defiance of the law. The yearly harvest in Chicago is about £2,500,000, half of which is contributed by local “believers” and the other half by mail-order customers.

These are a few of the amazing facts brought to light by Mr John Mulholland, vice-president of the Society of American Magicians, in an investigation of the fortune-telling racket he recently conducted, and reprinted in the course of an article contributed by Michel Mok to Popular Science. Compared with the present-day dealers in “fake” prophecies, he found the bearded, cone-hatted diviners of medieval times were a lot of bungling amateurs The modern Merlin’s business methods are as efficient as his forecasts are spurious. A „ For example, one woman astrologer, doing a thriving business in New York, Mulholland told Mr Mok, that she charges her clients according to a sliding scale of fees, ranging from £5 to £2O for a "reading.” Her income from mail orders alone is £2OOO a month Another star-gazer, a man, with headquarters in Chicago, has 100 customers, all of them substantial business men, who pay him £2OO a year each for a monthly business horoscope. Men as well as women in all classes of society are among the devotees of the soothsayer’s art, and an astonishing number of names of bank presidents, stock brokers, attorneys, college professors, society women, and, Senators and Congressmen appear upon his list.

In the Wall Street section of New York there are many fortune-tellers’ offices furnished as luxuriously as those of the traders in the district, hundreds of whom seek advice from the diviners every day.