Gov’t repeals ban on readings
Ashley Branton has earned a living as a psychic medium for seven years, helping a growing number of people with heavy choices about toxic relationships, home purchases and cross-country moves.
And while the tarot cards are never wrong, she said, they didn’t see this one coming.
The City Council in Norfolk, Virginia, repealed a 45-year-old ban this week on “the practice of palmistry, palm reading, phrenology or clairvoyance, for monetary or other compensation”.
Soothsaying, it turned out, had been a firstdegree misdemeanour and carried up to a year in jail.
“I had no idea that was even a thing,” Branton said with a laugh on Thursday among the crystals in her Norfolk shop, Velvet Witch, where she also performs tarot readings and psychic healings. “I’m glad it’s never come down on me.”
It’s unclear exactly why this city of 230,000 people on the Chesapeake Bay, home to the nation’s largest Navy base, nullified the 1979 ordinance. Versions of the ban had existed for decades before.
Norfolk spokeswoman Kelly Straub said in an email that it was repealed “because it is no longer used”.
City Council members said little during their vote last Tuesday, although one joked that “somebody out there predicted that this was going to pass”.
Jokes aside, the city’s repeal comes as the psychic services industry is growing in the US, generating an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue last year and employing 97,000 people, according to a 2023 report from market research firm IBIS World.
In late 2017, a Pew Research Center survey found that most American adults identify as Christians. But many also hold New Age beliefs, with four in 10 believing in the power of psychics. A 2009 survey for the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project found about one in seven Americans had consulted a psychic.
Branton, 42, who previously worked as a makeup artist, said the market is expanding for psychic mediums because social media has fuelled awareness. An aversion to organised religion also plays a role, along with the nation’s divisive politics and a growing sense of uncertainty, particularly among millennials and younger generations.