Researching Why Women Comprise the Majority of Psychic Advisers

I am a self-proclaimed feminist psychic living in British Columbia Canada. I’ve read in tea rooms, women’s shows, privately and online. Like everywhere else you find readers, most of the diviners offering Tarot readings online are women. This well known, yet little understood fact has sat at the centre of my research for more than 30 years. I’ve observed it in person and now with the advent of online readers, the evidence continues to mount.

Few are nonplussed by this fact. In itself, that’s as interesting to me as the fact that it’s so. Isn’t anyone else curious to know why this is so? When I ask people what they surmise by this curious phenomenon, they say things like, “oh women are more intuitive than men” (there are no studies to support this assumption by the way), or they say, “Well women accept alternative ways of knowing more easily than men”. Wow what does all this say about our educational, institutional, in fact our whole global infrastructure? You see I think the answer to, “what do women really want” (one of Freud’s purportedly famous conundrums) is right here in the study of divination practice. Geraldine Amaral in her wonderful book, Tarot Celebrations, quoted Freud saying that if he had his life to live over he would study divination, no doubt too late he realized that the answer to his life long question was here! But I digress…

Empowerment is the Goal

In my practice, the goal of a psychic consultation is to help women become empowered. I’ve been fascinated with how most women’s developmental patterns to divination practice can be so appropriately aligned with the Tarot Major Arcana, which has often been described as, “The Fool’s Journey to Enlightenment”.

In one of my advanced workshops the Tarot is explored as a teacher of feminine psychology, a guru-ess of sorts with particular emphasis on the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the Hierophant, Strength, Temperance, The Hermit, The Hanged Man, Death, The Devil, The Tower, and The World. For women as an example, the death of ego is not such as difficult a process as the giving up of the false self. This is one of the differences in how the Hanged One tarot card is interpreted for women.

Excitement is always elicited by my use of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ work (Women Who Run with the Wolves) to contextualize the World card as representative of the magical reader, the “medial woman”. Drawing parallels between Estes’ description of the medial woman who negotiates between the unseen world and the world of consensual reality, and the magical reader, I show women how the prescriptive growth stages in the Tarot can lead women to this powerful, natural centre of their power and agency. The medial woman, according to Estes, negotiates between the criatura, woman’s “creature,” that is the soul or the “true feminine,” and society. In Tarot, the concept of the criatura is linked to the reader herself. Women become clearer channels for information from the unseen world when they live authentically. Readers need to be authentic with themselves, need to be doing what has “heart and meaning for them” in their lives, or will be unable to hear when client is being inauthentic in her life, unable to help empower client to make decisions.

Tarot Supports Connections to the Inner Wild Woman

Many of the women to whom I teach Tarot are tentative about whether or not they are “actually psychic”. This tentative stance signifies one of the reasons women are inhibited when studying Tarot. Women’s creative force, something integral to Tarot, is often subverted by those around them and can even be repressed to the extent that there is never “enough time” for themselves. When internalized, this self-sacrifice is especially pernicious because a woman may neglect or sabotage her own vital inner work (Estés 1995). An awareness of the power women have established and maintained through cartomancy may aid in consciousness-raising about the validity of such an enterprise.

Tarot is a tool of synchronicity with great potential to connect women to the Wild Woman and the circle of women archetypes. Its effectiveness is attributable to a number of things, including the relationship of story, symbol, and craft, as well as intuition, psychic ability and magic.

Consider Your Own Assumptions

This rather short stream of consciousness excerpt is really a mid-stream in my lifelong pursuit to grasp why most readers are women. I continue to turn this multifaceted diamond over and over in my mind always discovering new doors. Before you jump to answer the question too offhandedly about why most diviners are women, I ask that you stop for a moment to turn your assumptions over a little more carefully in your mind. What are you assuming about all the women and men in your life? How about the planet and the divine? Does this explosion in the discipline of tarot over the past 30 years mean that as a human family, we are embracing women’s way of knowing? Are we integrating yin/yang or are they becoming increasingly more divided and contrary?

Why do you think there are more women diviners and more women who consult them? I’d love to read your thoughts on the subject.