Are you a believer? Sue Hewitt meets the suburban mystics helping others see into the future.
Having a coffee with Emma Guvenis is more about the future than the flavour. The Turkish brew is bitter and leaves a rich, dark sediment that holds clues only the psychic can see.
Although, when she points to a shape saying it’s an arrow, my eyes focus hard and blow me down, there it is. It’s aimed to the right, which is good, she says, and there’s the letter Y, indicating a fork in the road and choices.
Guvenis should know, she’s been reading coffee grounds since she was a child. She gave up the public service in 1997 to take up psychic readings full-time and is booked a year in advance at $100 for a face-to- face reading and $35 a pop for reading a photograph.
Not everyone appreciates her talents. The Thomastown grandmother jokes that her own two children don’t ‘‘call me psychic, they call me psycho”.
Guvenis is one of many soothsayers in the northern suburbs, where the pundits use everything from crystals to tarot cards to tell the fortunes of believers.
They are among the targets of the Victorian Skeptics and its president Terry Kelly, who says the national association has had a $100,000 challenge to prove psychic powers that has stood unclaimed for decades.
‘‘Fortune telling appeals to people who don’t think things through; who want quick fixes and answers,” Kelly says.
He says psychics operate on “probability and chance” in “cold readings”, knowing people of a specific age, profession and demographic have or will experience certain things.
He claims others plant stooges in large audiences to elicit information from people to give to the stage psychic for “hot readings”.
“It’s preying on [the] vulnerable where the poverty is hidden behind big houses in areas with multicultural populations, and it can be easy to offer people false hope,” he says.
Guvenis disagrees, saying the European tradition of reading coffee grounds is embraced by local multicultural residents.
“The Turks, the Greeks, the Lebanese and more regard this as a very European custom and socially acceptable pastime,” she says.
Born psychic, Guvenis says she took after her grandmother who “had the gift”. But Guvenis feared her premonitions would see her called a “devil’s child” and ostracised, so kept her skills secret at school.
As an employment officer, she met a young male client and saw a dark future, but couldn’t tell him, she says. He died soon after in tragic circumstances.
After that, Guvenis threw off the shackles of normality for a new spiritual career where she could reveal her clairvoyance and give guidance.
The coffee is brewed in a traditional pot on the stove, so thick and rich many clients do not like its bitter fl avour.
Clients do not need to drink the black liquid, but hold the small cup to transfer their energy into it and the coffee is drained, Guvenis says.
The cup is turned three times and tipped upside down where the sediments form shapes inside the cup; all open to interpretation.
Guvenis “feels the energy” and looks into the clients’ eyes. The cup and the coffee grains are just “tools”.
“I see, feel and hear [things],” she says.
Do the seekers come looking for answers in love? Not really; most come wanting revelations about business and real estate deals.
“They are all very motivated in their lives, all keen to do something with their lives.”
But it was a fatal liaison that led one woman to Whittlesea psychic Jacquelene Close Moore.
Close Moore says Maria Korp, infamously known as the woman in the boot, called on her to make an urgent night-time house call three months before Korp was found barely alive in a car boot on February 13, 2005.
Korp died on August 5, 2005 – after her husband’s mistress Tania Herman was jailed for attempted murder.
Korp’s husband Joe Korp, also charged with her attempted murder, suicided on the day of Korp’s funeral.
Close Moore says Korp told her about a dream of darkness.
She says the case is still distressing and declines interviews when they focus on this topic.
But Close Moore is pleased when clients heed guidance, such as the downtrodden woman who visited her then several months later had “light in her eyes” and had changed into a Xena, Warrior Princess-type figure.
“It’s those who make use of what you have seen for them and transform their lives that make it worthwhile,” she says.
While some psychics are clairvoyant (seeing), clair-sentient (feeling), clair-audient (hearing) or use the senses of touch or smell, Close Moore is “clair-everything”, using all five senses.
The former recruitment manager transformed her own life in 1995 and took up the Celtic family tradition of psychic readings that she claims spans six generations.
She says she had the gift from birth and at the age of five, when she almost drowned, decided it was her life path.
“I was in a coma for two days, deciding whether to come back. I was told I had not yet fulfilled my purpose,” she says.
Back in the here and now, she learnt by her grandpa’s side; tea leaf readings, palmistry and more.
Her skills include astrology, numerology, tarot cards, fl ower readings, clairvoyance, aura reading, psychometry (reading objects) tea and coffee cup reading, crystal ball readings – and the list goes on.
She’s been on radio and television and recalls when Australia’s psychic community was like a family.
She’s met the well publicised British spiritualist Doris Stokes, and other newsworthy clairvoyants.
Close Moore says she has done more than 15,000 readings and despite dealing with people seeking answers to important questions, she has come across time wasters and psychic shoppers – like a young woman asking whether her date would like her in red or blue boots.
“Some people shop for answers.
I tell them that I see that they have had multiple readings and what those readings were and that they need to learn to listen to themselves,” she says.
Close Moore is the ethics officer for the Australian Psychics Association and says there are fraudsters in every profession, warning against clairvoyants whose readings are inaccurate and charge thousands of dollars.
She charges $175 an hour for predictive readings and $275 for mediumship at Whittlesea and South Yarra.
Are psychic powers real? “For sceptics no proof is possible, for true believers, no proof is necessary,” she says.
“You get proof for you when it rings true, no one can take that from you.” Her married surname is Hope, and that is what Toni-Anne offers at her Whittlesea home psychic practice.
She prefers the angel cards with positive messages than the “black and white” of the tarot cards which can serve up the tower card and its destructive forces, or the death card that can mean an end to all that is familiar.
“Some people put a lot of weight in the words that you come out with and I am always gentle and uplifting, so people feel they have a choice in the creation of their own lives,” Hope says.
She says she feels and hears the dead – sometimes with alarming consequences.
Hope was in the hills behind St Andrews and claims to have discovered a group of spirits of Aboriginals who had been slaughtered in the 1800s.
“Turning on the light [the supposed portal to the afterlife] was like [attracting] moths to a flame,” she says, explaining how she is mentally connected to the spirits.
“They [the spirits] were lining up.” She drove away with the spirits in tow.
“It sounds weird when you say it out loud about these disembodied people, but this is my life.” Her clearing ceremonies lead lost souls “to the light”, which means she rids houses of hauntings.
For the living, she claims to provide psychic development classes, numerology and spiritual guidance, as well as “hands-off” reiki, where she channels energy into a body to heal it without touching.
In reiki she uses her hands suspended above a body to empower the chakras or “wheels of energy” that supply the organs and body with power.
Hope looks like an ordinary woman – her dogs frolic at her feet, her garden grows lush and green behind a suburban house in Whittlesea.
She’s been a psychic for 25 years after giving up a career in administration and logistics, and she’s added a new bow to her venture as a funeral celebrant.
It seems to complete the circle of her psychic life.
