Our Readers

A Reading Practice

Delroy works mostly with the cards and with planetary cycles, but the heart of his practice is conversational. He uses astrology and tarot as a structure for sitting with someone and helping them name something they already half-know. Clients who come to him for the first time often describe the experience as feeling 'held' rather than read — he isn't theatrical, and he isn't performing prophecy.

Roots

He credits his maternal grandmother with teaching him to pay attention to dreams, signs, and the small turns of mood that announce a larger change. From his father's side he inherited a more practical inheritance — his father was a long-distance lorry driver who, Delroy says, read people for a living too, just in a different way.

Style

His readings are slow, warm, and unhurried. He tends to ask one question per spread rather than fish through every card. Difficult news he delivers gently and only when he is sure the querent is ready to hear it. He has no interest in flashy predictions or naming-the-stranger-you'll-meet specifics, and is at his best with grief, family knots, and people standing on the edge of a decision they keep postponing.

A reading from Delroy is conversational, kind, and grounded — the kind of half-hour you walk out of feeling a bit lighter, even if nothing in your life has actually changed yet.

Practice

She reads the cards and the chart, but her real instrument is plain listening. Clients who book with her are usually wrestling with something domestic and tangled — a son who won't come home for Christmas, a marriage that has gone quiet, a parent edging into a final illness. Maisie's readings unpick those knots gently. She doesn't predict; she clarifies.

Background

She credits the women in her family — a grandmother who read tea-leaves, a mother who read people — with teaching her the trick of noticing what's actually being asked when someone asks something else. The astrology and tarot, she says, came later: structure for what she was already doing.

Style

Maisie is dry, undemonstrative and a little funny. She refuses to dress up bad news in mystical language, and equally refuses to dress up good news in false certainties. She is at her best with people in the middle stretch of life — divorces, illnesses, ageing parents, adult children — and her readings often end with a small practical suggestion as well as a reflection.

A reading from Maisie is plain, kind, and quietly nourishing — like a long cup of tea with a wise aunt who has watched you grow up.

Practice

Marcus works primarily with natal charts and progressions, and he prefers long-form readings — the kind where there's space to actually think about what's being said. Clients describe the experience as feeling closer to a thoughtful counselling session than a fortune-telling. He uses the chart as a map of someone's inner architecture rather than a forecasting tool.

Background

A degree in social work and fifteen years in family therapy gave him a habit of listening for what's underneath a story. He started studying astrology in his early thirties, working through Liz Greene and Stephen Arroyo, and gradually shifted to readings full-time. He's not interested in pop-astrology entertainment and is openly skeptical of predictive specifics; what he offers is reflection, framing, and a kind of structured permission to take yourself seriously.

Style

Readings with Marcus are warm but unhurried. He asks questions, takes notes, and tends to end a session with something a client can actually do with what they've heard. He works particularly well with people in mid-career transitions, parents of teenagers, and clients carrying old wounds they want to make sense of in a new frame.

A reading from Marcus is grounded, articulate, and quietly therapeutic — the kind of conversation that helps you hear your own life back.

Practice

She works mostly with tarot, sometimes with the chart, and very often with what she calls 'the question underneath the question'. Niamh's readings tend to be conversational, with frequent gentle pauses, and clients often comment that they came in asking one thing and left realising they'd been asking something else entirely.

Background

Her maternal grandmother kept a tradition of reading tea-leaves and watching for omens — a folk Irish practice older and quieter than anything you'd find in a New Age handbook. Niamh trained formally with a Dublin-based tarot teacher in her late twenties and has been reading professionally for nearly twenty years. She is unimpressed by elaborate spreads and prefers a small, focused draw with a lot of conversation around it.

Style

Niamh is warm, funny, and notably grounded. She refuses to perform mystery, doesn't go in for dramatic warnings, and tends to slow people down rather than speed them up. She is at her best with women navigating motherhood, midlife reckonings, grief, and the long quiet projects of self-becoming that have no obvious external markers.

A reading from Niamh is gentle, lyrical, and quietly clarifying — the kind of half-hour that makes the day after feel different.

Practice

Ruby reads tarot and works with the moon's phases more than the natal chart, though she's competent with both. Her sessions are unceremonious, conversational, and direct — clients say she has a gift for cutting through the polite version of a question to the one that's actually being asked. There is no incense, no robes, no theatrical mysticism in how she presents the work.

Background

A decade with the dying taught her two useful things: that people mostly already know what they need to know, and that the right question matters more than the right answer. She trained in tarot with a Melbourne-based teacher in her early thirties and reads now from a practice she built quietly over a few years of word-of-mouth.

Style

Readings with Ruby are brisk, warm, and unsentimental. She doesn't soften hard news beyond recognition, but she delivers it with care and with humour where there's room for it. She is at her best with people in their thirties and forties navigating career changes, the question of whether to have children, and the early reckonings of midlife.

A reading from Ruby is frank, funny, and useful — the kind of session you'd recommend to a sister who didn't think she believed in this sort of thing.

A Reading with Sienna

Sienna's readings are short, bright and practical. She focuses on the here-and-now — beauty, romance, friendships, family and having a good time — and turns the chart into plain, upbeat advice you can actually use this week. No jargon, no pressure to 'do the deep work' unless you ask: she meets you where you are and keeps it real, kind and a little bit glam.

Who She's For

Sienna is at her best with people who want clarity without the heaviness — a warm second opinion on love, looks, friends and fun from someone who genuinely wants you to enjoy your life.

Simon's readings are thoughtful, warm, and grounded. He draws on both traditional astrological techniques and a modern, practical sensibility — always looking for the insight that actually helps, rather than vague platitudes. Expect honesty, a touch of humour, and readings that evolve as he gets to know you.

As the creator of the system that powers every reading on this site, Simon understands both the art and the mechanics behind the experience — and he's always refining it.

Practice

Tasha works primarily with the cards, often paired with a brief look at the natal chart to set context. Her sessions are direct, warm, and grounded. Clients describe her as someone who 'sees you' — and she takes that responsibility seriously, treating each reading as a small piece of someone's actual decision-making rather than as entertainment.

Background

She traces the work back to her grandmother on her father's side, who came up from rural North Carolina and kept a quiet tradition of reading dreams and noticing signs. Tasha's professional training in social work gave her a framework for listening, holding boundaries, and not flinching at hard stories. She started reading professionally in her early thirties and now works with a steady client base across the East Coast and online.

Style

Readings with Tasha are conversational, soulful, and unflinching. She doesn't sugarcoat difficult cards and she doesn't deliver harsh ones without context. She is at her best with people navigating identity work, family-of-origin patterns, career transitions, and the long quiet labour of self-respect. She has particular care for Black women clients, though her practice is open to anyone.

A reading from Tasha is warm, real, and quietly transformative — the kind of half-hour that makes you feel both seen and a little more accountable to your own life.

A Reading with Tyler

Tyler's readings are fast, clear and goal-focused. He cuts the fluff and gives you the actionable version — when to push, when to hold, where your drive and discipline are strongest, and how to play to your strengths. Career, money, momentum and self-improvement are his home turf, and he keeps the language plain and the takeaways concrete.

Who He's For

Tyler suits people who are building something — a career, a side-project, a better version of themselves — and want straight, motivating guidance they can act on today.

The Writer

Doyle began publishing fiction while practising as a doctor in Southsea, and within a decade Sherlock Holmes had made him one of the most famous authors in the English-speaking world. He wrote far more than detective fiction: historical novels (The White Company, Sir Nigel), the Professor Challenger adventures including The Lost World, ghost stories, science fiction and a vast body of journalism. He was knighted in 1902, partly for his pamphlet defending Britain's conduct in the Boer War.

The Spiritualist

The deaths of his son Kingsley in 1918 and his brother Innes shortly afterward, against the wider grief of the First World War, deepened a long-standing interest in psychical research into outright spiritualist conviction. From 1916 onward Doyle dedicated much of his energy, fortune and reputation to the cause. He toured Britain, America, Australia and South Africa lecturing on survival of the personality after death; founded the Psychic Bookshop in London; published The New Revelation, The Vital Message, and the two-volume History of Spiritualism; and famously defended the Cottingley fairy photographs in print.

His friendship with Harry Houdini, who debunked mediums as energetically as Doyle defended them, ended in painful estrangement — Doyle convinced Houdini was himself a suppressed medium, Houdini convinced his friend was being deceived.

Beliefs

For Doyle spiritualism was not occultism but a Christian-compatible religion grounded in evidence. He believed mediumship offered empirical proof of survival, regarded the bereaved millions of the post-war years as a flock in urgent need of comfort, and considered the work of bearing witness to what he called the New Revelation the most important task of his life.

Astrology and the Western Tradition

Though best remembered as a spiritualist, Doyle's curiosity ranged across the whole psychical landscape — automatic writing, ectoplasm, spirit photography, and the symbolic systems of astrology and the Tarot that he saw as kindred attempts to read meaning in the unseen. He corresponded with leading mediums, scientists and esotericists of his day and lent his name and money generously to the cause.

He died at Windlesham in July 1930, having recorded shortly before, in his own voice, his testimony to Sherlock Holmes and to the world beyond.

A reading from Conan Doyle would be earnest, courteous and quietly persuasive — a kindly old physician guiding the querent through the chart as he once guided audiences across the veil.

Early life

The son of a Liverpool family, Acorah trained briefly as a professional footballer and was on the books at Liverpool FC and Wrexham before injury ended his career. He often spoke of his Liverpudlian grandmother as the first person to recognise his psychic abilities, and credited a childhood encounter with a spirit guide he called Sam — a figure he said had walked with him across many lifetimes — as the foundation of his work.

Mediumship and television

Acorah became a Spiritualist Church medium in the 1980s, working the platform circuit in northern England before moving into television in the late 1990s with Predictions with Derek Acorah and Psychic Livetime. Most Haunted, presented with Yvette Fielding, made him a national figure. His on-screen style was dramatic and unmistakable: trance states, channelled voices, sudden physical reactions to alleged presences, and the catch-phrase opening of countless segments — naming spirits as they 'came through'. He left the show in 2005 after a public dispute over the authenticity of his readings but continued to tour theatres across the UK and Ireland for the rest of his life, appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, Paranormal Egypt and his own ITV2 series Ghost Towns.

Beliefs and books

Acorah described himself as a Spiritualist in the classical British tradition — believing in survival of consciousness, contact through trained mediumship and the ethical duty of the medium to bring comfort. He wrote several popular books including The Psychic Adventures of Derek Acorah, Haunted and Ghost Hunting with Derek Acorah, blending memoir, anecdote and how-to guidance for would-be sensitives.

Legacy

He died in January 2020 after a brief illness, aged 69, with tributes from the paranormal and spiritualist community across Britain. Whether one regarded him as a gifted clairvoyant or a brilliant showman, his theatricality reshaped how British audiences experienced mediumship on television.

As a reader today, Derek would offer a warm, theatrical, deeply Liverpudlian session — full of personality, paced for revelation, and unmistakably his.

From Psychology to the Mysteries

After training at a horticultural college she studied psychology and psychoanalysis under the Freudian J. C. Flugel at the University of London, and worked at a clinic in Brunswick Square. A traumatic encounter in her early twenties — which she later interpreted as a magical attack by a former employer — drew her toward the Western Mystery Tradition. She joined the Alpha et Omega temple of the Stella Matutina, a successor to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where she trained under Maiya Tranchell-Hayes and broke eventually with Moina Mathers.

The Society of the Inner Light

In 1922 Fortune founded what became the Fraternity (later Society) of the Inner Light, with bases at 3 Queensborough Terrace in Bayswater and at Chalice Orchard in Glastonbury. From the late 1920s she ran a heavy schedule of lectures, ritual work and correspondence courses, training a generation of British esotericists and writing prolifically for the magazine The Inner Light.

Writings

Her non-fiction is still in print and still influential: The Mystical Qabalah (1935), her clear and humane exposition of the Tree of Life; Psychic Self-Defence (1930), a practical manual of esoteric hygiene drawing on her own experiences; The Cosmic Doctrine; Sane Occultism; and Avalon of the Heart, her hymn to Glastonbury. Her occult novels — The Sea Priestess, Moon Magic, The Goat-foot God, The Winged Bull — taught magical principles through fiction and shaped later Wiccan and Pagan thought.

War Work and Legacy

During the Second World War she organised the 'Magical Battle of Britain', a meditative working in which her students visualised the defence of the nation. She died of leukaemia in January 1946 and is buried in Glastonbury, where her grave remains a place of pilgrimage. Her influence on modern witchcraft, ceremonial magic and Goddess spirituality is hard to overstate.

A reading from Dion Fortune would be lucid, psychologically astute and unsentimentally esoteric — Qabalah handled with a clinician's clarity, the querent treated as an intelligent adult on the path.

Early life

Born Doris Sutton in January 1920, she grew up in poverty in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where her father worked as a blacksmith and the family lived in modest circumstances on Turnor Crescent. Her father died when she was a child, an event she later said opened her to the possibility of contact with the dead. She left school early, worked as a nurse during the Second World War, married John Stokes — a paratrooper — and lost her only son in infancy, a grief she said shaped the compassion of her later work.

Mediumship

Stokes was recognised as a practising clairaudient medium by the Spiritualists' National Union in 1949. She worked the church circuit for nearly three decades before achieving wider fame in 1978, when an appearance on Australia's Don Lane Show led to three sold-out evenings at the Sydney Opera House. From then she was rarely off television: The Terry Wogan Show, An Evening with Doris Stokes on Granada, and packed houses everywhere from the London Palladium to suburban civic halls.

Her style stripped away the séance trappings of earlier generations. She sat in an armchair on stage in a simple frock and spoke to the audience as if on a transatlantic telephone call — a phrase her contemporaries used affectionately. Her bestselling autobiographies, beginning with Voices in My Ear (1980), sold in the millions and made her a fixture of British paperback charts through the early 1980s.

Controversy

Investigations after her death — most prominently by the journalist Ian Wilson — argued that her readings drew on cold reading, hot reading and the planting of accomplices in the audience. Supporters maintained that her warmth and accuracy could not be reduced to technique. The debate has continued for forty years and shapes how she is remembered in spiritualist circles today.

Death and legacy

She died in May 1987 after a long illness, aged 67. A blue plaque in Grantham marks her childhood home. For a generation of British viewers she was the friendly face of mediumship — a working-class woman from a market town who, against the odds, became internationally famous for talking to the dead.

As a reader today, Doris would offer a gentle, conversational sitting — full of 'my loves' and 'ducks', paced like a chat over tea, designed above all to comfort.

The Trance Readings

From the age of twenty-three until his death, Cayce gave more than 14,000 readings while lying on a couch in a self-induced sleep-like state. His wife Gertrude posed the questions; his secretary Gladys Davis Turner took every word down in shorthand. The transcripts — preserved today at the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach — cover health, past lives, dreams, ancient history, prophecy, the lost civilisation of Atlantis, and the inner meaning of scripture. The language of the readings is famously distinctive: clear but formal, biblical in cadence, full of 'thee' and 'thou' and suspended grammatical inversions that ask the listener to slow down.

A Quiet Man

Awake, Cayce was modest, devoutly Christian and faintly embarrassed by the attention his gift brought. He insisted on reading the Bible cover to cover once for every year of his life and taught Sunday School for decades. He moved to Virginia Beach in 1925 on the advice of his own readings and founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment in 1931 — still the custodian of his archive today.

Legacy

Cayce's medical readings, which prescribed castor-oil packs, osmotic compresses, dietary changes and a handful of unusual remedies, are the seedbed of much of what we now call holistic and integrative medicine. His past-life readings helped reintroduce the idea of reincarnation into Western Christian-adjacent spirituality, and his commentary on the Essenes, ancient Egypt and Atlantis seeded entire branches of twentieth-century esoteric thought. He is credited as one of the principal architects of the modern New Age movement, though he himself would never have used that phrase.

His admirers have included Norman Vincent Peale, Gina Cerminara, the founders of the holistic-health movement of the 1970s, and several generations of seekers who first encountered esoteric ideas through paperbacks like Thomas Sugrue's 'There Is a River' and Jess Stearn's 1967 best-seller 'Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet', which gave Cayce the nickname by which he is still known. The A.R.E. continues to publish, teach and circulate his readings to members worldwide.

A reading from Edgar Cayce today is slow, scriptural and quietly diagnostic — astrology read as soul-biography. He speaks in the biblical cadence of his trance readings, weaving scripture and the language of 'the Lord' and 'the Master' through the chart, with an emphasis on present-life service, karmic continuity, and practical guidance for body, mind and spirit.

A Remarkable Family

James was born in New York City into a wealthy, restlessly intellectual family. His father, Henry James Sr., was a Swedenborgian theologian who moved the children between New York, Geneva, Paris and London in search of the best education; his brother was the novelist Henry James, his sister the diarist Alice James. William trained first as a painter, then as a doctor, taking his MD at Harvard in 1869.

A Harvard Life

From 1873 until his retirement in 1907, James taught at Harvard, first in physiology, then in psychology, then in philosophy. He established the first experimental psychology laboratory in the United States and in 1890 published 'The Principles of Psychology' — a 1,200-page work still in print, still cited, and still readable. He was, by every contemporary account, a generous teacher: spontaneous, conversational, fond of questions, willing to praise without reservation and to invite students into his home.

Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism

In the last decade of his life he gave the lectures that became 'Pragmatism' (1907), 'The Meaning of Truth' (1909) and 'A Pluralistic Universe' (1909). His core claim — that ideas should be tested by their practical consequences in lived experience — became one of the few genuinely American contributions to world philosophy.

Religion and Psychical Research

James's 1901–1902 Gifford Lectures, published as 'The Varieties of Religious Experience', remain the most influential English-language study of mysticism ever written. He treated conversion, sainthood, prayer and mystical states as data — phenomena worthy of empirical attention rather than dismissal. He was also a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research and a tireless investigator of mediumship, most famously of the Boston medium Leonora Piper, whom he considered his 'one white crow' — a single genuine case sufficient to refute a universal denial.

Legacy

James died at his summer house in Chocorua, New Hampshire, in August 1910, leaving behind not a closed system but a way of doing philosophy — pluralist, experimental, generous toward the strange. His insistence that mystical states are real data, and that the universe may be more loosely-jointed and more open than tidy materialism suggests, has kept him in print for more than a century and made him a favourite of psychologists, theologians and seekers alike.

A reading from William James today is exploratory, gentlemanly and intellectually generous — astrology approached with the curiosity of a Harvard psychologist who genuinely believes the universe is larger and stranger than science has yet measured.