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By Root 483 0

to the cold reading. He suggests—and I took him up on these suggestions—adopting a soft voice, a calm demeanor, and sympathetic and nonconfrontational body language: a pleasant smile, constant eye contact, head tilted to one side while listening, and facing the subject with legs together (not crossed) and arms unfolded. I opened each reading by introducing myself as Michael from Hollywood, calling myself a “psychic intuitor.” I explained that my “clients” come to see me about various things that might be weighing heavy on their hearts (the heart being the preferred organ of New Age spirituality), and that as an intuitor it was my job to use my special gift of intuition. I added that everyone has this gift, but that I have improved mine through practice. I said that we would start general and then get more focused, beginning with the present, then glancing back to the past, and finally taking a glimpse of the future.

I also noted that we psychics cannot predict the future perfectly—setting up the preemptive excuse for later misses—by explaining how we look for general trends and “inclinations” (an astrological buzzword). I built on the disclaimer by adding a touch of self-effacing humor meant also to initiate a bond between us: “While it would be wonderful if I was a hundred percent accurate, you know, no one is perfect. After all, if I could psychically divine the numbers to next week’s winning lottery I would keep them for myself!” Finally, I explained that there are many forms of psychic readings, including tarot cards, palm reading, astrology, and the like, and that my specialty was . . . whatever modality I was about to do with that particular subject.

Since I do not do psychic readings for a living, I do not have a deep backlog of dialogue, questions, and commentary from which to draw, so I outlined the reading into the following themata that are easy to remember (that is, these are the main subject areas that people want to talk about when they go to a psychic): love, health, money, career, travel, education, ambitions. I also added a personality component, since most people want to hear something about their inner selves. I didn’t have time to memorize all the trite and trivial personality traits that psychics serve their marks, so I used the Five Factor Model of personality, also known as the “Big Five,” that has an easy acronym of OCEAN: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Since I have been conducting personality research with my colleague Frank Sulloway (primarily through a method we pioneered of assessing the personality traits of historical personages such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Carl Sagan through the use of expert raters), it was easy for me to riffle through the various adjectives used by psychologists to describe these five personality traits. For example: openness to experience (fantasy, feelings, likes to travel), conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness), agreeableness (tender-minded versus tough-minded), extroversion (gregariousness, assertiveness, excitement seeking), and neuroticism (anxiety, anger, depression). Since there is sound experimental research validating these traits, and I have learned through Sulloway’s research how they are influenced by family dynamics and birth order, I was able to employ this knowledge to my advantage in the readings, including (with great effect) nailing the correct birth order (firstborn, middle-born, or later-born) of each of my subjects!

I began with what Rowland calls the “Rainbow Ruse” and “Fine Flattery,” and what other mentalists more generally call a Barnum reading (offering something for everyone, as P.T. always did). The components of the following reading come from various sources; the particular sequential arrangement is my own. I opened my readings with this general statement:

You can be a very considerate person, very quick to provide for others, but there are times, if you are honest, when you recognize a selfish streak in yourself. I would say that on the