When life deals you a tough hand… read the cards?

“I knew what was coming,” Astrologer and psychic Jessica Adams told The Daily Mail last Sunday, describing her premonition of coronavirus, a year before the virus was recognised in Wuhan.

According to the newspaper, Adams spread the word to her 16,000 or so Twitter followers and packed up her life in London, moving to Tasmania to live out the pandemic with two dogs and a pet chicken. While the rest of us shrieked “unprecedented” and shook our heads in disbelief, she claims to have predicted Trump’s downfall in October (the month he was diagnosed with coronavirus) and the rift between Prince Harry and William. Though this is yet to come true, she believes Brexit will be complicated by Italy deciding to follow suit and leave the EU too.

The good news is, the psychic is certain things will get better a few days before Christmas Eve; her predictions suggest the festive season is full steam ahead, though this week’s news does little to support this premonition.

As we approach Halloween, a day where the border between the living and the dead is thought to be at its most liminal, once celebrated for the clarity it provided for fortune-telling Druids, Adams won’t be alone in turning to the supernatural as a guiding force to predict the future. And it is easy to see why. The facts are depressing, the statistics are never-ending, and the non-mystic authorities’ U-turn’s and inconsistencies don’t leave much room for trust. A recent survey by Ipsos Mori found only 60% of the UK public consider scientists trustworthy since the pandemic began.

For reasons perhaps clear only to someone with supernatural insight, upon googling “how many people in the UK went to a psychic in 2020” the top result is the government’s coronavirus updates page.

Resurging faith in astrology and the supernatural is something that has been commonly framed as a millennial preoccupation. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center found American millennials are less religious than other age groups, but 60% of them believe in New Age spirituality. Are horoscopes scriptures for the modern millennial?

Along with psychics and horoscopes, tarot cards have recently shuffled back into the mainstream. Tarot reading involves a 78-card tarot deck with four suits, not dissimilar to a normal deck of playing cards. But the tarot deck has the addition of the “Major Arcana”, an extra set depicting mythological archetypes such as Death and The Lovers. Each card has an individual meaning, and the way they are spread out and turned over can reveal truths about certain issues or worries. Tarot can be traced back to the 14th century, where the cards were used in games, with rich families commissioning intricately decorated personal decks: the use of tarot cards for divination was not widespread until the 18th century.

Even the most sceptical, logical person cannot deny the aesthetic of the cards. Colourful, intricate designs that are almost individual artworks in themselves. The artistic aesthetic of the decks is perhaps part of the attraction for the Instagram generation of today. Instagram account @themoontarot has 748,000 followers, offering daily “energy readings” for followers. At the time of writing, #tarot has 9.6m uses on Instagram and #tarotreading has 2.1m uses. High street store Urban Outfitters sells 25 tarot-themed products, including a RuPaul tarot card set.

For many, tarot readings not only give an insight into an uncertain future but they also function as a kind of therapy session. How you react to the reading can help you come to terms with certain thoughts and emotions that you might have otherwise struggle to label or understand. Psychic Reader Alison Rowanna, who offers tarot readings in the West Midlands, did not see a particular increase in customers over lockdown, but she did notice changing trends in what people were concerned about. In May and June, following lockdown, “there was an increase of people with concerns about their relationships,” she says. Then, two months later in August, as work slowly but surely began to resume, there was a sudden surge in people seeking clarity around their careers.

According to a 2019 report, millennials have higher rising rates of depression than older generations, and a BBC investigation last year found over half of struggling patients have to wait over 28 days for access to psychological therapies through the NHS. The average cost for a private counsellor in the UK is £35-50 per hour, whilst online tarot readings are available from £5, on sites as accessible as the independent retailer site Etsy. Whilst one is not comparable to the other, psychics and tarots provide a non-committal counselling of sorts, with little time, money or follow-through necessary. And as my generation has grown up airing our grievances on social media, is it surprising that we look for solutions to our problems on the internet?

There is a certain claustrophobic, uncomfortableness about sitting in the moment. Accepting our circumstance, the lack of control we have over it, and the ambiguous end date for the virus which has taken over our lives. It would be easy to write off astrology, tarot and psychics as symptoms of my generation’s snow-flakery; our inability to be as sincere and stiff upper lipped as those before us, but this misses the point. The pull to the supernatural has less to do with the psyche of the individual, and more to do with the uncertain state of the world around us. People need something to believe in, and pseudoscience carries fewer ramifications or terms and conditions than religion.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say, as nutty as she sounds, I have my fingers tightly crossed that Jessica Adams and The Daily Mail are somehow right about things looking up in December, and it’s the psychic that saves Christmas.