"When Maggie talked about palmistry and the tarot we were all fascinated and very keen to have our hands read but personally I was very reticent about the tarot cards; they frightened the s*** out of me. In fact, ever since I could remember I have steered well clear of anything relating to what I thought of as the occult, black magic or death. To my mind the tarot fitted into the heavier side of the occult, and as such, commanded a lot of respect. I didn't realize then that the term "occult" meant virtually anything esoteric that was not connected to the Christian dogma-including Gnosticism, which was one of the earliest forms of Christianity.
The real question, in my opinion, is down to the motives behind the use of these tools: whether the practitioner is using them to empower, in that they are helping an individual to access unique information about themselves (like a modern computer database), which might enable that person to prepare for oncoming challenges-information they have every right to. Or whether those practices are being used to have power over another person or group.
Without a doubt it is the latter that causes me concern-even more so now. The same goes for ritual. There are both positive and negative rituals, which either serve to celebrate a higher purpose or to have power over others. My fear of black magic was a healthy fear and remains so. By the same token, I am equally fearful of extremism within any established religion. There is not a lot of difference.
With Maggie I felt no such threat. She revelled in our attention and would often keep us sitting up half the night with the promise of a reading. When we finally did strike lucky, at about six o' clock one morning, Maggie read my hands first and then Bambs'. The other two tenants had given up and gone to bed. For some reason she seemed totally uninterested in doing theirs yet very keen to do ours.
I had tremendous feelings of apprehension as we sat in Maggie's semi-darkened living room and she reached across the dark velvet-covered table for my hands. One thing I always loved about Maggie was her wonderful sense of the theatrical but I also noticed that her personality changed quite dramatically when she was working. She lost her normal disorganized and affected nature and took on a persona which was both serious and quite formidable. She had already explained that anybody could learn to read hands or the tarot but that she used them only as a focus to tune in, clairvoyantly, to her subject.
