Nine sceptics walked into a bar...

I had the great pleasure of reading nine pairs of hands at Bizarre But True in Hastings, where I was booked for an event earlier in the month.

A couple came in with their adult children and all their partners for a birthday drink and to check out the strange exhibits at the museum, and when Alex the proprietor offered them a palm reading I said I’d tell them who was the bossiest and the most perverted. They were utterly sceptical, but decided to give it a go after a few drinks.

The first hand I read was mum’s, and she had an extremely long index finger - a sure sign of a person who won’t hesitate to tell people what to do. They all laughed, recognising her nature, and left me a cracking review that I recorded.

I was joking about the most perverted, but just as I was about to leave they asked me about it. I’m circumspect when I read, and always ask clients if they are sure they want their secrets shared if they bring along an audience, but they insisted and they had a lovely and easy camaraderie about them.

One chap had a composite print (a double loop) on each index finger, meaning that he wants to harmonise his personality with whatever situation he finds himself in. He also had a loop on his right ring finger but a peacock's eye (or pocket loop) on the left, meaning a strong enigmatic quirk in their creative output but only in more intimate realms; if they cook someone a meal, for example, it will have a strange ingredient like jackfruit or coconut vinegar in it, and if they grow a plant it might be a cactus. It also gives these people an experimental edge to their activities in their own safe spaces - so it was bound to be him.

I love my job, and people seem to love it too. Why not book me for your party?

Image credit: McKenna Phillips from Unsplash

Winchelsea and the Art of the Tarot

The Rider Waite Smith deck is the most iconic of tarot decks, and something of a gateway into the world of magic and the Devil's Uno. The artist Pamela Colman Smith was living in the small town of Winchelsea in East Sussex while painting the images, and much of the iconography was drawn from the world around her. Tower Cottage where she lived, for example, and the tower next door both feature on the 10 of Pentacles - a correspondence that is entirely appropriate for the card which alludes to the most concretised aspect of the suit of earth, the bricks of your house. The wall of the garden features in the Sun card, and the placement of the sun in the card is right where it would have risen as seen from over the road.

Tower Cottage and the Ten of Pentacles

The Sun and the wall of Tower Cottage

Last week I organised a trip to Winchelsea to explore the connections between the deck and the landscape, guided by local art historian Harriet Onslow Delaney of the Tadhg Mae Project in Hastings Old Town. Some of the history is documented in Marcus Katz's "Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot", such as the tomb effigy that found its way into the Four of Swords, but much is undocumented despite over 100 million RWS decks having being sold since 1909, and some of what we found may have gone completely unnoticed. The images are rarely direct copies of buildings and features of the town, but the influence on the artist’s work is clear.

The Four of Swords and a tomb effigy

Strength and the tomb effigy

The Nine of Pentacles with imagery from a stained glass window 

The Queen of Swords and the face of an angel

The Heroic Dead of Winchelsea

Winchelsea has a strange pull to it. My first visit was by mistake, because the previous station had a short platform and my twins and I ran too slowly down the train to get out in time - but then a strange thing happened. My daughters, who were 14 at the time, looked out over the fields by the station and immediately fell in love with the place, asking if they could come back for a picnic. I thought it was quaint and picturesque enough, but from the station you can't see much more than a few fields; I was more impressed by how strongly they felt about the place than the place itself. Some weeks later they packed rice balls and took their first solo (duo) train ride, and only when a friendly local asked them what they were doing there did they discover the spectacular church, with its ruin and the grave of Spike Milligan, the beautiful cottages and landscapes. The town museum tells the story of how the town was rebuilt at its current site at the end of the 13th century as Old Winchelsea succumbed to coastal erosion.

Three of Pentacles and St. Michael's Church

The tarot connection was news to me, though I have studied tarot since my early twenties. For one thing I tend to use and teach from the Thoth deck, but it turns out that there is a Winchelsea connection with that deck too as its artist Lady Frieda Harris also spent time there in the same period. The RWS is a little more approachable than the Thoth deck, as one might expect given that its designer Arthur Waite was a manager of Horlick's (whereas the Thoth deck was designed by the notorious Aleister Crowley). The town should be a Mecca for tarot readers but there is very little mentioned in the museum and Tower Cottage doesn't even have a plaque to honour its resident whose impact on the world is hard to overstate. I like to think that my daughters, who have been pickled in witchcraft since before they were born, were drawn to the heroic ghosts of this sleepy little town without any of us knowing why.

Weird Hastings

Fast forward a few years to a project called Weird Hastings, which began as a publicity film for the local bureau of tourism but quickly morphed into a psychogeographical hypersigil and romp through the abundant weirdness of the area. Crowley famously died in Hastings, having spent some years growing up here and attending a school in the neighbourhood I used to live in (they say he cursed his schoolmaster and others who suffered misfortune immediately afterwards, but they also say he cursed the whole town of Hastings and that's clearly nonsense). Other local mystics had a similarly profound influence on the 20th century, such as Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin who developed his idea of the noosphere, or collective sphere of thought, informed by what he found in the fossil record at Pett Level just down the coast. John Logie Baird, the inventor of television, lived three minutes from my flat and conducted some of the experiments at his home; according to this Spiritualist inventor he was helped by Thomas Edison who advised him from beyond the grave.

There is also a superbly magical spring in St. Helen's Wood, rediscovered after being buried and forgotten for generations by a man wandering around the forest on acid wrestling with suicidal urges, and as he cleared the debris and revealed the ancient brickwork of the well his son recovered from an intractable lung condition. That story was told to me by someone who attended a hypno-magic workshop I was running at the White Rock Hotel, and he then told me another story of a woman digging cursed glass out of the ground of an Amazonian community after being guided to the site in a dream. He had heard this remarkable story at Occupy London, but more remarkable still was that he must have heard it from me when I was living there 12 years earlier since it was my ex-wife who did the digging, though neither of us could remember meeting (more on that story here).

That guy was brought along to the session by Michael Smith, director of the Weird Hastings film, and that was just one of the elements of high weirdness that attended that day. Things got weirder at every step and soon enough he and I were doing hypnotic spirit evocation in Hastings Museum before I was dressed up as the magician of the RWS deck and snapped by the photographer of Le Monde.

This was a surprise

There was another shoot straight after mine, capturing the High Priestess as incarnated into the body of Harriet, and during the brief chat we had I learned that she had been on the trail of Pamela Colman Smith in Winchelsea, so we decided to organise a trip together. Harriet printed out a map and came along with her husband and their chihuahua Akhenaten to meet a few tarot and pyschogeography geeks at Spike Milligan's grave outside St. Thomas's Church. We paid our respects by reciting a series of ludicrous poems, and then she lead us into the church to search for imagery of the cards in the masonry and the stained glass windows. We also visited some other places found in the cards, and finished our tour at the beacon looking over a landscape that would be familiar to anyone who knows the deck.

The Two of Cups and the view from the beacon

The town is rich with RWS imagery and we're only just scratching the surface but there's plenty more to be discovered. Marcus Katz' work in this area is impressive but we came up with an alternative suggestion for the inspiration for the building in the background of the Six of Cups. Katz proposed that it is based on Smallhythe Palace but it looks more like the Winchelsea court house, and there are several reasons why this seems more likely story.

The Six of Cups and the court house

Plaque on the court house

For one thing, the Six of Cups is a perfect card to represent the enjoyment of having cheery drinks with your friends, and the court house is directly opposite the only pub in town - the New Inn with a charming beer garden where our group stopped to look through antique decks and do some divination together. The other reason is that Ellen Terry ran a stage school there according to the plaque on the wall, and that the card depicts a rather theatrical scene of children playing as adults. Terry was the woman who brought Smith to Winchelsea in the first place, and the owner of Tower Cottage. Their friendship was clearly very close; the Queen of Wands features Terry's daughter Edith Craig and her cat Snuffles.

The magical and art history of Winchelsea is deep and fascinating, and we'll be mining this seam for a while yet. If you'd like to join a trip to uncover more secrets, to throw some cards at the birthplace of the deck and do some path-working in the landscapes featured in its backgrounds, get in touch so we can let you know when we're planning our next visit.

Palm Pride

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You read palms do you?

Out and proud, loud and most certainly allowed, we are living in a time of tolerance. There is still plenty of prejudice, but in terms of what you can get away with in public discourse, this is a golden age. Your sexuality is your business, and everybody else's business if you want to share it on telly. Everyone else is expected to tolerate it, or at least keep their bigotry to themselves - and this is fantastic! We can be what we are. You can be a man who cries in films, who wears tights, or who stays at home looking after the kids. These are not things to be ashamed of in the 21st century, rather they are matters of pride.

Not so for divination.

When you admit to being into palmistry in polite company, people tend to look at you like you are an idiot or a charlatan. It is better than being thought of as a witch, perhaps - though at least witches inspired fear rather than pity. There are plenty of peer-reviewed studies to cite, if I wanted to argue it, on dermatoglyphics as markers for congenital disease and schizophrenia, on whorl fingerprints and blood pressure problems, on palmar creases and Downs Syndrome, on the ratio of the index and ring finger lengths as a marker for testosterone levels and associated character traits. But it is a boring argument to get into, so I tend to be quite secretive about my job, which looks like this:

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On the way home the other day I was waiting at Embankment station at 4am, and a friendly drunk began talking to me. I like friendly drunks, so when he asked what I had been doing that evening I faced a dilemma. I had been reading palms at a masquerade ball, blowing people's minds underground in the vaults at Waterloo. I was buzzing, and this guy could put a downer on my night. I wasn't minded to come out of the closet to pity or derision. He was also of middle eastern descent, and some people from those lands have a thing against messing with the jinn. Then again, he was also sloshed, so we would both be haram together. I liked him, and since other readers have encouraged me to own what I do, I let him in on my dirty secret.

"Oh you read palms, do you?" he said, producing his own from where they had been hidden. "Read these then."

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While I may be a most scientific palmist, I also know what an omen looks like. His hands were incredible, the strangest I'd ever seen, let alone been invited to read. He had been born with only two fingers, suggesting that his talents are channeled in very specific directions - in his case Mercury and Apollo. On the one hand (the left, more intimate side), it would be in the service of communication and transaction. On the other, (the right, more external side), it would be about creative expression, though that finger was bent over and maybe less well directed. They were both whorl fingerprints, though, the print of fire, the most focused dermatoglyph. His arms were like laser cannons, the left firing cleanly through a Mercury filter, so I told him he was an excellent communicator, especially good at talking to closer friends, capable of making things happen and getting people motivated. With a heart line that was completely without damage, which is very rare, he would also be the kind of person that doesn't really suffer emotional pain.

Spot on so far.

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The stigmata under the little finger are associated with healing capacities, so I told him people must feel better when they talk to him. He agreed - people told him that often. He thought it was because they felt that if he was always cheerful regardless of what happens, and regardless of his disability, then they should cheer up too.

I couldn't identify all the lines, but the fate line branched under the head line, and one of the branches went to a really funky swirl of skin patternation, so I told him he had changed careers in a major way at 31, and it had opened his mind to new things. He had moved to England at 31. His friend wanted me to read his boring old digito-typicals. I gave him a card because I was busy with an angel of cheiromancy, and he promptly went to sleep.

I warned him about allowing himself to get isolated - he had another, tighter swirl on the mount of the moon, two-thirds of the way down the outside of the palm, and people with that marking can cut themselves off. He does, for weeks at a time, though he didn't think it was a problem. Maybe he is right - the heart line suggests that it isn't taxing his emotional wellbeing.

I was only supposed to go two stops, but I stayed on the Jubilee Line all the way to Swiss Cottage to explore his hands. My twentieth pair of hands that night were things of wonder, and I did another eight the following day at a flea market. It was a good weekend. I'm going to own what I do, and write a blog about hands.

My name is Danny Dee, and I'm a palmist.