What Is Fortune Telling? Everything There Is to Know About Fortune Tellers

Fortune telling is the practice of predicting a person’s future or revealing hidden truths about their life through methods that fall outside conventional science — from reading tarot cards and palms to interpreting the stars.

People have been trying to peek around the corner of time for thousands of years, and the practice has never really gone away; it has simply changed shape, moving from royal courts and temple sanctuaries to app stores and video-call screens.

So what exactly is fortune telling, who practices it, and why does it still capture the attention of millions of people today? Here’s everything worth knowing.

What Is Fortune Telling?

Fortune telling is the attempt to gain insight into a person’s future — or into hidden aspects of their character, relationships, or circumstances — through means that are not based on logic, science, or verifiable evidence. It sits inside the broader category of divination, the general practice of seeking knowledge of the unknown through supernatural or symbolic means.

The distinction is one of tone and setting: divination is typically tied to formal religious ritual, invoking gods or spirits as part of an organized belief system, while fortune telling is a more personal, informal service, whether offered at a fairground booth, in a private consultation, or through a phone app.

A fortune teller is simply the person performing the service — also called a soothsayer, seer, oracle, clairvoyant, psychic, or diviner depending on culture and era. What unites them all is the underlying claim: that some object, symbol, ritual, or intuitive gift can reveal what an ordinary observer cannot see.

Fortune tellers typically address a fairly narrow set of concerns. According to common Western practice, fortune tellers typically attempt predictions on matters such as future romantic, financial, and childbearing prospects, and many also offer “character readings” using tools like numerology, graphology, palmistry, and astrology. Rather than predicting exact events, most modern readers frame their work as guidance, reflection, or “insight” rather than fixed prophecy.

Importantly, fortune telling is a pseudoscience. No peer-reviewed body of evidence supports the idea that tarot cards, palm lines, or planetary positions at the moment of birth can forecast future events. That has not stopped the practice from surviving — and thriving — for millennia, which is a large part of what makes it such a rich subject to explore.

The History of Fortune Telling

Fortune telling’s roots reach back further than most people expect — long before tarot decks or horoscope columns existed. And its history is stranger than most people expect too, full of gassed priestesses, emperors who executed their own astrologers, and hysterical teenagers whose fortune-telling games helped start a witch hunt.

Ancient Origins (c. 4000–2000 BCE)

Evidence indicates that forms of fortune-telling were practiced in ancient China, Egypt, Chaldea, and Babylonia as long ago as 4000 BCE. In Mesopotamia, around 3000 BCE, divination was a respected profession, with priests interpreting omens such as the flight patterns of birds or the appearance of sheep livers during sacrifices.

These readings were not treated as casual curiosities — they were believed to reveal the will of the gods for entire communities. The Babylonians are also credited with building one of the earliest known astrological systems, around 2000 BCE, using the positions of celestial bodies to try to predict earthly events.

In China, osteomancy — the reading of oracle bones — was practiced during the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BCE), when bones inscribed with questions about harvests, warfare, and royal affairs were heated until they cracked, and diviners interpreted the resulting patterns.

One of the stranger methods on record comes from Egypt, where the Egyptians reportedly practiced scatomancy — the process of finding details of the future in animal feces.

Classical Antiquity: Greece and the Gas-Huffing Oracle

Ancient Greece institutionalized fortune-telling through its oracles, most famously the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi. The Pythia was the priestess of Apollo’s temple at Delphi.

She was not a single person but a title held by different women over nearly a thousand years, from at least the eighth century BCE to the late fourth century CE. She had to give up all connections with her family once chosen, and visitors brought offerings of money and sacrificed animals in exchange for her guidance, which she delivered while seized by a kind of frenzy.

What actually caused that frenzy has become one of archaeology’s stranger detective stories. The Roman-era traveler Pausanias described a spring in the temple’s inner chamber that made the Pythia prophetic, and the biographer Plutarch, who personally served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, wrote of a vapor exhaled in that chamber that sent her into a trance. For most of the 20th century, scholars dismissed this as legend, since French excavators in the 1890s found no chasm or fissure at the site.

But a later geological study found that the temple sits directly above the intersection of two active earth faults, and that hydrocarbon gases — including ethylene, which produces a sweet-smelling, floating, narcotic euphoria — could rise through spring water at the site. Researchers proposed that roughly every hundred years, an earthquake would rattle the faults, vaporizing hydrocarbon deposits and releasing gas into the temple’s enclosed inner chamber.

The theory remains genuinely disputed: a rival team of geologists tested the site with a portable laser sensor, found no ethylene at all, and argued the trance was more likely caused by oxygen deprivation from carbon dioxide and methane building up in a poorly ventilated room.

Either way, ancient priests may have unknowingly been running Greece’s most influential fortune-telling operation out of what was essentially a leaking gas vent.

Rome: Astrologers Thrown Off Cliffs

Rome had its own divination traditions, including haruspicy (reading animal entrails) and augury (interpreting bird flight), and Pliny the Elder documented soothsayers using an early form of crystal ball, the “crystallum orbis,” as far back as the 1st century CE. But Roman emperors also had a habit of turning violently on the very astrologers they consulted.

Roman emperors issued thirteen documented decrees banning astrologers from the empire between 44 BCE and 180 CE. Some paid with their lives rather than simple exile: the astrologer Lucius Pituanius was hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, while another, Publius Marcius, was executed outside Rome’s Esquiline Gate by the consuls “according to ancient custom,” to the sound of trumpets.

The emperor Tiberius took a particularly theatrical approach to vetting his personal astrologers. According to legend, Tiberius tested astrologers by inviting them to his cliff-top villa on the island of Capri — and after they cast his horoscope, he would order a servant to throw them off the cliff if their predictions displeased him.

A later emperor, Septimius Severus, had his own birth chart painted on the ceiling of his palace, but deliberately left out the essential rising-sign detail so that no rival could use it to calculate — and perhaps hasten — the timing of his death.

In 69 CE, as the emperor Vitellius marched on Rome and astrologers openly predicted his imminent downfall, he responded by decreeing that all astrologers be banished from the city, effective October 1 of that year.

The Middle Ages and Renaissance

During the Middle Ages, organized Christianity in Europe largely viewed fortune-telling with suspicion, and practitioners often worked in secret. That changed with the Renaissance, when renewed interest in classical learning brought astrology back into fashion as both an art and a serious pursuit among researchers and rulers alike.

Court astrologers became fixtures of royal households: figures such as Luca Gaurico advised church and political leaders in the 16th century. At the same time, Cosimo Ruggeri served at the court of Catherine de’ Medici, queen mother of France.

Tarot’s Transformation

One of fortune-telling’s most long-lasting tools didn’t start mystical at all. Tarot cards were originally playing cards used for a game called Tarocchi in 15th-century Italy, and it wasn’t until the 18th century that they became associated with divination.

In 1781, French occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed the tarot had ancient Egyptian origins and held universal wisdom — a claim that wasn’t accurate, but that sparked a lasting wave of interest in using the cards for spiritual insight.

A Fortune-Telling Game That Helped Spark the Salem Witch Trials

One of the strangest chapters in the history of fortune-telling unfolded in colonial Massachusetts in the winter of 1691–92.

A group of adolescent girls in Salem Village had taken to gathering in the kitchen of the town minister, Samuel Parris, where they experimented with a fortune-telling ritual involving dropping an egg white into a glass of water and interpreting the shape it formed — a primitive form of scrying used to try to divine the professions of their future husbands. According to the traditional account, the girls scared themselves badly when one of them believed she saw the shape of a coffin instead.

Soon after, the same girls began having violent fits, and a local doctor concluded they had been bewitched. Under pressure to explain their affliction, the girls confessed to their fortune-telling activities, believing their symptoms were a divine punishment, and went on to name the first three women accused of witchcraft in Salem.

By the time the Salem witch trials ended in 1693, nineteen people had been hanged, and one man had been pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea.

One of the eight people hanged in the trials’ final and largest mass execution, on September 22, 1692, was Alice Parker, who was accused largely based on her local reputation for practicing fortune telling. It remains one of the clearest historical examples of a fortune-telling parlor game feeding directly into a legal catastrophe.

The Affair of the Poisons: Fortune Tellers at the Court of the Sun King

Fortune tellers also found themselves at the center of one of the most sensational royal scandals in European history. Between 1679 and 1682, the French crown investigated more than 400 people, including some of the highest-ranking figures at the court of Louis XIV, in what became known as the Affair of the Poisons.

At the center of the scandal was La Voisin, a midwife and fortune-teller whose real name was Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin, whose clientele reportedly included the king’s own official mistress, the marquise de Montespan. La Voisin and others in her circle were accused of selling an array of services ranging from love magic to poisons known as “inheritance powders,” allegedly used to help clients dispose of unwanted relatives.

La Voisin was eventually burned at the stake as a poisoner and sorceress in 1680, and the scandal was significant enough that a special court, the chambre ardente (“burning court”), was created specifically to judge the resulting cases of poisoning and witchcraft.

The 19th and 20th Centuries

While divination existed among the earliest civilizations, a rise in fortune telling among the general populace during the 19th and 20th centuries led to increased employment in the field as a means of making a living.

The Victorian era brought fortune telling into the mainstream with a theatrical flair, as séances, Ouija boards, and tea leaf readings became fashionable pastimes for the middle and upper classes. This period also coincided with the rise of Spiritualism, a movement built around the belief that the living could communicate with the dead.

Fortune tellers also found their way into the highest levels of government in this era, with consequences far more serious than parlor entertainment. In imperial Russia, the royal court had a documented fascination with mystics well before Grigori Rasputin arrived — an aging fortune-teller known as Matrona the Barefooted was already a regular presence in the Romanov household by the early 1900s.

Rasputin himself first gained a foothold in St. Petersburg society as an occultist, fortune-teller, and faith healer before becoming an influential favorite of Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra because of his apparent ability to ease the suffering of their hemophiliac son. Historians widely regard Rasputin’s scandalous reputation as a factor that helped discredit the tsarist government in the years leading up to the 1917 revolution that ended the Romanov dynasty.

How Does Fortune Telling Work?

Fortune telling “works” on two very different levels: the level of the method itself (what the fortune teller claims to be doing) and the level of psychology (what is actually happening in the interaction).

The Claimed Mechanism

Each method has its own internal logic. Astrologers hold that the positions of celestial bodies at a specific moment — usually someone’s birth — shape their personality and future.

Tarot readers believe that the symbolism on shuffled cards, drawn in a specific order, reflects relevant truths about the person’s situation. Palm readers interpret the lines and shapes of the hand as markers of personality and destiny. None of these mechanisms has been demonstrated to work under controlled, scientific testing.

The Psychological Mechanism

What research does explain clearly is why fortune telling feels convincing, even when it has no predictive power. Two well-documented psychological effects are central to this.

The Barnum (or Forer) Effect. The Barnum effect is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that are supposedly tailored specifically to them, yet are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a broad range of people. It was originally studied by psychologist Bertram Forer in 1949 and later named after showman P.T. Barnum. A fortune teller’s statement such as “you’re a private person who doesn’t always show your true feelings” sounds personal, but it applies to nearly everyone.

Cold Reading. Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums to create the illusion of possessing detailed personal knowledge about someone they’ve never met by making calculated guesses based on general probabilities and subtle observation of appearance, behavior, and reactions.

Readers commonly rely on high-probability guesses, quickly reading a subject’s reactions to see whether their statements are landing, then emphasizing and reinforcing whatever seems accurate while glossing over the misses. Skeptic Ray Hyman produced one of the first systematic academic breakdowns of the technique in 1977.

A related but distinct practice is warm reading, in which a practitioner leans on well-known Barnum-style statistical statements (for example, that many people carry unresolved grief about a parent) rather than reacting to live cues — as opposed to hot reading, where a performer secretly gathers real information about a subject beforehand and presents it as psychically obtained.

How Popular Is Fortune Telling Today?

Fortune telling remains far more widespread than many assume. According to a Pew Research Center survey of 9,593 U.S. adults conducted in October 2024:

• 30% of U.S. adults say they consult astrology (or a horoscope), tarot cards, or a fortune teller at least once a year.
• 27% of U.S. adults say they believe in astrology, a number not a lot different from the 29% recorded in 2017.
• Only about 1% of U.S. adults say they rely “a lot” on these practices when making major life decisions, while about 20% engage in them “just for fun” and 10% for “helpful insights.”
• Women ages 18 to 49 are far more likely to believe in astrology than other groups — about 4 in 10 do, compared with roughly 3 in 10 women 50 and older and about 2 in 10 men under 50.
• About half of LGBTQ+ adults consult astrology or horoscopes at least once a year, roughly twice the share of U.S. adults overall.
• The psychic services industry — spanning astrology, palm reading, and fortune telling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and used 105,000 people, with revenue growing more than 4% annually since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These numbers suggest that fortune telling today functions less as a literal belief system for most participants and more as a blend of entertainment, self-reflection, and occasional guidance.

Methods and Types of Fortune Telling

Fortune tellers draw on a wide toolkit of techniques, many with centuries of tradition behind them. Common methods used in Europe and the Americas include astromancy, horary astrology, pendulum reading, spirit board reading, tasseography, cartomancy, tarot card reading, crystallomancy, and chiromancy (palmistry). Below is a closer look at how each actually works in practice.

Astrology

Astrology interprets the positions of the sun, moon, and planets at a specific moment — usually a person’s birth — to conclude personality and future events. A practitioner builds a “natal chart” or “birth chart”: a map of where every major celestial body sat in the sky at the exact date, time, and location of someone’s birth, divided into twelve houses that are each said to govern a different area of life (career, relationships, health, and so on).

Readings then interpret how planets moving through the sky in the present — a process called “transits” — activate or stress different parts of that original chart. Newspaper horoscopes are a stripped-down version of this system, using only a person’s sun sign (based on birth month) rather than a full chart.

Tarot Reading (Taromancy)

Tarot uses a 78-card deck split into two parts: the 22-card Major Arcana, which represents significant life themes and turning points (cards like The Tower, The Fool, or Death), and the 56-card Minor Arcana, divided into four suits (Cups, Wands, Swords, and Pentacles) that address everyday matters like relationships, ambition, conflict, and finances.

A reader shuffles the deck and lays cards into a “spread” — a fixed pattern of positions, each assigned a meaning such as “past,” “present,” “obstacle,” or “outcome” — then interprets the cards drawn into each position, both individually and in combination with their neighbors.

Cartomancy

Cartomancy is the broader practice of fortune telling with any deck of cards, not just tarot. It also includes standard 52-card playing-card divination and dedicated “oracle decks,” which are less structured than tarot and often built around a single theme, such as angels or animal totems, with each card offering a more direct, less symbolic message than a Major or Minor Arcana card would.

Palmistry (Chiromancy)

Palmistry reads the lines, mounts (the fleshy pads at the base of each finger), and overall shape of the hand. Readers typically focus on three major lines: the heart line, said to reveal emotions and relationships; the head line, associated with intellect and thought processes; and the life line, linked to vitality and life energy.

Some systems also read a fourth “fate line” running vertically up the palm, said to indicate career direction and major life turning points. Both hands are usually examined, since many practitioners hold that one hand reflects innate potential and the other reflects how that potential has actually been lived out.

Numerology

Numerology assigns numerical values to a person’s birth date and the letters of their full name, then reduces those numbers through addition until they reach a single digit (or one of a few special “master numbers”).

The resulting number— often called a “life path number” — is treated as a key to personality traits, natural talents, and the general themes a person’s life is likely to follow. Most Western systems trace their numeric letter-values back to a method associated with the Chaldeans of ancient Babylon and later popularized by the Greek mathematician Pythagoras.

Tasseography (Tasseomancy)

Tasseography reads tea leaves left in a cup after the beverage is consumed, sometimes extended to coffee grounds or wine sediment. The querent drinks a cup of loose-leaf tea (tea bags produce leaves too fine to read), swirls the remaining liquid and leaves, and then turns the cup upside down onto a saucer to drain.

The reader interprets the shapes formed by the settled leaves — animals, letters, numbers, or objects — often assigning different meanings depending on where in the cup a given shape appears, with the rim generally read as “near future” and the bottom as more distant events.

Crystallomancy (Scrying)

Scrying involves gazing into a crystal ball or other reflective or translucent surface — a still pool of water, a dark mirror, even a flame — in search of visions, shapes, or symbols that surface in the practitioner’s mind while looking.

Historically, it was among the oldest and most geographically widespread fortune-telling methods, as it required no specialized equipment other than a reflective object.

The I Ching

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text consulted by tossing coins or manipulating yarrow stalks to generate a hexagram — a stack of six broken or unbroken lines.

Each of the 64 possible hexagrams corresponds to a specific passage in the text, which is then interpreted as guidance relevant to the question asked. Unlike many Western methods, the I Ching is typically framed less as literal prophecy and more as philosophical counsel on how to act wisely in the present circumstances.

Rune Casting

Rune casting draws on an ancient Germanic alphabet of symbols, each tied to a concept such as fate, luck, or challenge, and from Norse mythology. A reader either draws a small number of runes blindly from a pouch or casts the full set onto a cloth and interprets the symbols that land face-up, along with their position and orientation.

Physiognomy

Physiognomy assesses character based on facial features rather than the hand or cards — the shape of the nose, eyes, mouth, and jawline is read as an indicator of temperament and destiny. It has ancient roots (Aristotle wrote about it) but fell into particular disrepute in the 19th and 20th centuries after being misused to support racist and pseudoscientific theories of criminality.

Other Notable Methods

Beyond the major systems above, historical and regional divination has included astragalomancy, a form of divination using dice marked with letters and numbers, oneiromancy (dream interpretation), augury (reading the flight and behavior of birds), and spirit board or Ouija board reading, in which a group rests their fingers on a moving pointer believed to spell out messages from the deceased.

Beyond these structured systems, some practitioners perform what is often called a “reading” or “spiritual consultation” — a form of fortune telling that does not rely on a specific device or method but instead offers advice and predictions said to come from spirits or visions. This is the basis for mediumship, in which a practitioner claims to communicate with the deceased on a client’s behalf.

Famous Fortune Tellers in History

Across cultures and centuries, certain fortune tellers have achieved lasting fame — some for the scale of their influence, others for the specificity, or ambiguity, of their predictions, and a surprising number for legal trouble that followed them almost as closely as their clients did.

The Pythia (Oracle of Delphi)

The most influential fortune teller of the ancient Western world was not one woman but a role. The Pythia was a title held by different priestesses of Apollo’s temple at Delphi over nearly a thousand years, from at least the 8th century BCE to the late 4th century CE.

She had to sever all ties with her family after being chosen, and visitors would bring offerings of money and sacrificial animals in exchange for her guidance, which was delivered during trance-like states. Researchers now debate whether her trances were induced by intoxicating gases rising through geological fault lines beneath the temple — see the History section above for the details of that ongoing dispute.

Nostradamus (1503–1566)

Born Michel de Nostredame in 1503, Nostradamus worked as an apothecary treating plague victims in 16th-century France before turning to prophecy.

He never completed a medical degree: his studies at the University of Avignon were cut short after just one year when the school closed due to the plague, and a later attempt at the University of Montpellier ended when he was expelled after the university discovered his past work as an apothecary, a trade it looked down on.

In 1555, he published Les Prophéties, a collection of nearly 1,000 short, cryptic verses claimed to describe events far into the future. His most cited “hit” involves King Henry II of France: Nostradamus wrote of a “young lion” defeating an older one in combat and piercing him through the eye, and in 1559, Henry II was fatally wounded when a lance splinter pierced his eye during a jousting tournament.

A lesser-known detail is where his method reportedly came from: Nostradamus attributed the source of his visions to simply gazing into a bowl of water mixed with herbs. His predictions were put to unusual wartime use centuries later. During the Second World War, the Allies dropped propaganda leaflets over German-occupied territory claiming that Nostradamus had predicted the demise of Nazi Germany.

Believers have retroactively linked other verses to events such as the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution. However, historians and skeptics note that the verses’ deliberately vague, symbolic language allows for interpretation to fit almost any major historical event after the fact.

Marie Anne Lenormand (1772–1843)

Born in Alençon, Normandy, in 1772 and orphaned by age five, Marie Anne Lenormand became a French bookseller, fortune-teller, and cartomancer of considerable fame during the Napoleonic era. She ran away from her convent school at 14 and taught herself cartomancy after arriving in Paris alone.

Fortune telling was illegal in France at the time, and she had several run-ins with the law over the course of her roughly 50-year career — she was arrested and accused of treason in both 1803 and 1809, and later accused of espionage and witchcraft after emigrating to Brussels in 1820, though those charges were dropped.

Her most famous client relationship began before fame found either of them: Lenormand read for a young aristocrat named Joséphine de Beauharnais, assuring her she would survive the French Revolution and marry a successful soldier — two years later, Joséphine married Napoleon Bonaparte and eventually became Empress of France.

Lenormand is also said to have later predicted the couple’s divorce and Napoleon’s ultimate downfall, reportedly much to the emperor’s displeasure. She died in Paris in 1843, leaving a fortune of 500,000 francs to a nephew who, being a devout Catholic, burned all of her occult belongings but kept the money.

A deck of cards still used in divination today, the Petit Lenormand, was named in her honor after her death, even though she never actually used that particular deck herself.

Cheiro (William John Warner, 1866–1936)

Born in Ireland, William John Warner — known professionally as Cheiro, a name derived from “cheiromancy,” the formal term for palmistry — became one of the most famous palm readers, astrologers, and numerologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He claimed to have studied hand-reading for two years in India under the guidance of a Brahmin guru before returning to London to launch his career. His client list eventually included Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Mata Hari, Thomas Edison, King Edward VII, and General Kitchener, among many other prominent figures of the era.

Even skeptics were rattled: Mark Twain, who doubted palmistry, wrote in Cheiro’s visitor book that Cheiro “has exposed my character to me with humiliating accuracy,” adding, “I ought not to confess this accuracy, still I am moved to do so.” Cheiro also claimed to have foreseen major world events years in advance, including the outbreak of the First World War and the eventual creation of the state of Israel.

His life wasn’t without scandal, however: in 1910, French courts convicted Cheiro of fraud related to a failed banking venture in Paris, and he was sentenced to roughly a year in jail. He later relocated to Hollywood, where he reportedly saw as many as 20 clients a day until his death in 1936.

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945)

Edgar Cayce was an American self-proclaimed faith healer and psychic, born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877. Cayce unusually delivered his readings: he would lie on a couch with his eyes closed and arms crossed on his chest, enter a self-induced trance, and answer questions about a person’s health, character, or future — then wake with no memory of what he had said. This earned him the nickname “the Sleeping Prophet.”

Over his lifetime, Cayce gave more than 14,000 documented readings to a wide range of people, including celebrities such as Harry Houdini, Thomas Edison, and Woodrow Wilson. He also ran into direct legal trouble over his practice: in November 1931, Cayce, his wife, and his secretary were arrested in New York City on a charge of “pretending to tell fortunes,” which was illegal in some U.S. states at the time — the charges were eventually dismissed.

He was arrested again in 1935, this time in Detroit, for practicing medicine without a license, and was sentenced to probation. Perhaps the most surprising fact about Cayce is one of motive rather than method: unlike most professional fortune tellers, Cayce refused to charge for readings for most of his career, well into his late 40s, largely because of his strong personal Christian faith.

Jeane Dixon (1904–1997)

An American astrologer and psychic, Jeane Dixon became a household name through a syndicated newspaper column and is best remembered for her well-publicized prediction of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

She is also credited with having predicted the success of Oprah Winfrey’s career. Dixon’s fame was significant enough that psychologists later proposed the term “the Jeane Dixon effect” to describe the tendency of the public and media to remember a psychic’s rare correct predictions while quietly forgetting the much larger number of incorrect ones.

Baba Vanga (1911–1996)

Born Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova on October 3, 1911, in Strumica (in what was then the Ottoman Empire, later North Macedonia), Baba Vanga was a Bulgarian mystic and healer who claimed to foresee the future and was blind from her teenage years onward.

According to her biography, a whirlwind lifted her into the air at age 13 and threw her into a nearby field; she was found hours later covered in dirt and sand, and two unsuccessful eye surgeries and a third, only partially completed operation left her permanently blind.

She spent most of her life in the Rupite area of Bulgaria’s Belasica mountains and became widely known across parts of Eastern Europe during the Cold War for her claimed clairvoyant abilities, with people visiting to ask about missing relatives during the Second World War.

She is nicknamed “the Nostradamus of the Balkans,” and her legend has continued to grow online since her death, though — as with Nostradamus — claims about her supposed predictions are typically applied retroactively and are not independently verifiable.

Is Fortune Telling Real?

There is no scientific evidence that any fortune-telling method can reliably predict future events. Controlled studies of astrology, in particular, have failed to find a connection between celestial positions and personality traits or life outcomes.

What researchers can measure and explain is the psychological experience of a reading — why it feels accurate, why people return to it, and why it has persisted across so many civilizations for so long.

For most people who consult a fortune teller today, the value lies less in literal prediction and more in reflection, comfort, or entertainment, which may be the most long-lasting “prediction” fortune telling has ever made about human nature itself.

Sources

• Cheiro (William John Warner). Cheiro’s Memoirs: The Reminiscences of a Society Palmist. Kessinger Publishing, 1912.
• De Boer, J. Z., and J. R. Hale. The Geological Origins of the Oracle at Delphi, Greece. Geological Society, Special Publications, vol. 171, 2000, pp. 399–412.
• Forer, Bertram R. The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility.Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 44, no. 1, 1949, pp. 118–23.
• Hale, John. A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft. Printed by B. Green, and J. Allen, for Benjamin Eliot under the Town House, 1702.
• Lawson, Deodat. A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village. Benjamin Harris, 1692.
• Lenormand, Marie Anne. Mémoires historiques et secrets de l’impératrice Joséphine, Marie-Rose Tascher-de-la-Pagerie, première épouse de Napoléon Bonaparte. Paris, 1820.
• Nostradamus. Les Prophéties. Macé Bonhomme, 1555.
• Pew Research Center. 3 in 10 Americans Consult Astrology, Tarot Cards or Fortune Tellers. Pew Research Center, 21 May 2025.
• Plutarch. De Defectu Oraculorum. Moralia, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, 1936.
• Sugrue, Thomas. There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce. Henry Holt, 1942.
• Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Fonds Nostradamus et Lenormand, Réserve des Livres Rares. BnF, Paris, gallica.bnf.fr.