Sunday, August 5, 2018

My Hero Miss Cleo


Ok, let's get the bad press out of the way first. If you look up this doyenne of 1990s US phone psychic lines you invariably find her name (or one of her many pseudonyms) attached to the word fraud.
People don't get that a high proportion of magic is theatre, creating the right environment for your subconscious to make the change. You might feel it necessary to dress u in turbans or speak patois, for example. It's unreal. That's the point.
But I've suspected for some time that Miss Cleo was the real deal. Witches recognise each other for one thing, and when she tells people suffering with psychic gunk to clean the house, I just knew she was real. That's some ancient magic right there, and you find that in the US and other places in the African diaspora, because slaves took their magic with them.
Of course as always the Hound's nose is not deceived:
And despite being dubbed clairvoyant, Harris also said she never claimed to be one, and instead studied voodoo under a Haitian mambo for 30 years.
“So they refer to me as psychic – because the word voodoo scares just about everybody. So they told me, ‘No, no, no, we can’t use that word; we’re going to call you a psychic.’ I said, ‘But I’m not a psychic!’” she told Vice.
“I’m more a shaman, an elder in a community who has visions and gives direction to people in their village. My clients and my students are my village. I take care of this community. If you sit down at my table, you have to take away a lesson and not just learn what is going to happen tomorrow. I also perform weddings – both gay and straight marriages – and house cleansings and blessings,” she said in an interview with Advocate magazine.
The link above should take you to an interview about her coming out as lesbian. I recognise a magical person when I see one, after all I'm a fraud myself. You didn't really think I was a dog, did you?


2 comments:

  1. You're not a dog? What the hells am I going to do with this mountain of dog biscuits, then?

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