Divination

Fortune-tellers, mediums and spiritual healers marched on Downing Street on Friday to protest against new laws they fear will lead to them being "persecuted and prosecuted". Organisers say that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection rules will remove key legal protection for "genuine" mediums. They think sceptics might bring malicious prosecutions to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead. Psychics also fear they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientificexperiments with unpredictable results.

"If I'm giving a healing to someone, I don't want to have to stand there and say I don't believe in what I'm doing," said Carole McEntee-Taylor, a healer who co-founded the Spiritual Workers Association. The group delivered a petition with 5,000 names to the prime minister's office, although Gordon Brown is away in the United States. With the changes expected to come into force next month, spiritualists have faced a barrage of headlines gleefully suggesting that they should have seen it coming.But many don't see the funny side. They say the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from prosecutors and ontothem."By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine," McEntee-Taylor told Reuters. "No other religion has to do that."The government said the new regulations form part of a European Union directive that is meant to harmonise unfair trading laws across the EU. It will introduce a ban on traders "treating consumers unfairly".To view the rest of this article, please visit the source

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Deep in the basement of a dusty old library in Edinburgh lies a small black box that churns out random numbers. At first glance the box looks profoundly dull, but it is, in fact, the ‘eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future. The machine apparently sensed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened, and appeared to forewarn of the Asian Tsunami. "It's Earth shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, Emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the USA. "But unfortunately we don't have a box for predicting the future that we can sell to the CIA. We'revery early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here.

At the moment we're stabbing in the dark." Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realising it. Some might refer to it as the mind of God. But the machine has also thrown up another tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future. Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, Holland, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest running investigation ever into the paranormal."Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough," says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. "But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means." The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. Professor Jahn was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormalphenomena. ...

Interest in knowing one’s future has always been part of human nature. But such fore knowledge has always been elusive. And therefore man has either discovered or devised means of somehow predicting what is to come. And those who are able to see the future have always been regarded with awe, if not with fear, by certain people.One of the earliest and most mysterious of these devices for telling the future is a deck of tarot cards, whose real origin or history is almost completely unknown. The earliest mention of it is in the 14th century, but other commentators consider it to be of more ancient origin.I agree with those who say that knowing how theTarot card originated and who discovered or invented it is not so important as knowing how to use it.

In the same way that it is not so important to know who discovered fire or invented the wheel as knowing how to use it. Interest in the tarot card waxes and wanes with time, like the phases of the moon. In times of great economic hardships and uncertainties, interest in knowing the future becomes almost an obsession for many people. In times of great prosperity and economic growth, interest in it wanes. Now, people’s interest in knowing what the future will bring seems to be on the rise. Fortune tellers, clairvoyants and tarot card readers are in great demand. And I’ve been receiving calls if I knew any good card reader from even the most highly educated and intelligent people. This is not surprising,for even heads of states, from King Saul of ancient Israel to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France and Abraham Lincoln of the United States have been known to consult seers and fortune tellers during their reign.

Most popular device The tarot deck composed of 56 minor arcana and 22 major arcana cards (total of 78) has become the most popular fortune-telling device in the West. There are at least 300 different tarot cards and the number of new designs grows every year. But they all follow the same basic pattern and divinatory meaning. Unfortunately, interest in the tarot card has been confined mainly to its uncanny ability to tell the future. But the tarot is much more than that. It is also a device to unravel the deepest mysteries of the universe. One author referred to the tarot cards as “78steps......

British spies hired an astrologer during World War Two, although many thought he was a fraud, and even sent him to the United States on a propaganda mission, secret documents released on Tuesday revealed. The documents -- the latest in a trickle of British spy agency files being released over the past decade -- provide both a cloak-and-dagger story worthy of a Hollywood script and serious insights into World War Two spycraft, said the security service's official historian, Christopher Andrew.The files show that many spy handlers had nothing but contempt for Louis de Wohl, a German-speaking novelist and astrologer who claimed to be descended from Hungariannobility and called himself "The Modern Nostradamus". "I have never liked Louis de Wohl.

He strikes me as a charlatan and an imposter," one of his handlers wrote. "He at one time exercised some influence upon highly placed British intelligence officers through his star-gazing profession."Another handler called him a "complete scoundrel" and another a "dangerous charlatan and confidence-trick merchant". "He claims in his books to have travelled widely in the East in Arab disguise and to have often frequented cafés in Berlin in feminine attire," wrote another. Several wrote that they thought he was a former Nazi. Yet he managed to set himself up in a British government apartment in west London, which he called the PsychologicalResearch Bureau. There, he read horoscopes for wealthy clients including senior British officials, French resistance commanders and the Romanian ambassador, whom he claimed to have persuaded to resign and defect.

Propaganda tour of U.S. British spy bosses sent de Wohl on a propaganda tour of America in 1941, when Britain was at war with Germany but Washington was still officially neutral. De Wohl gave U.S. newspapers a letter he claimed was from Hitler's own astrologer predicting the Nazi leader would "disappear" within a year. U.S. newspapers lapped up his lectures predicting doom for the Nazis, like one to the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers in Cleveland. "His propaganda visit to America was considered highlys......