ABSTRACT
Every week in the United Kingdom, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, consult men and women with ostensibly extraordinary cognitive abilities: people who claim to communicate with the dead; or to be able to acquire information by psychic powers; or the ability to gain personal or intimate knowledge of people and events from the arrangement of Tarot cards, or the lines on the hand, or simply by holding personal belongings, and so on. People with extraordinary powers can be consulted individually, in private one-to-one sittings, or collectively, as part of an audience to a public demonstration of psychic or mediumistic powers. Psychics may even be consulted electronically: for example, telephone based psychic readings are advertised in numerous tabloid newspapers, and there are websites that offer online psychic readings. Undoubtedly the popularity and consumption of these kinds of psychic practices is not restricted to the UK, but is common to other European countries and North America, and reflects a more general popular interest in mystical, supernatural or paranormal phenomena.
