There are no beaded curtains, crystal balls or blinking neon signs at Barbara Schermer’s place of business.
Crisply professional in a skirted suit, Schermer, 45, presides in her tasteful, neat-as-a-pin office off the dining room of her North Side apartment. The surroundings bespeak a savvy business consultant or personal counselor, not someone who professes to divine the course of human events from the positions of planets and stars.
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“So many people feel lost in these hard economic times with so many businesses going bankrupt and huge corporations closing or downsizing,” says Schermer, a professional astrologer for 19 years. “They are afraid for their jobs, for their futures.
“The traditional institutions people used to turn to for support are themselves in turmoil. The government is cutting back on human services. Organized religion, for many people, doesn’t offer them the guideposts or solace they are seeking.”
While no official tally is taken, practitioners of the fortunetelling arts-astrology, palmistry, numerology, crystal gazing and tarot and psychic readings-appear to be proliferating throughout Chicago and the suburbs.
A few municipalities, such as Wheaton, have long-standing statutes prohibiting people from practicing occult arts professionally. But elsewhere, from city storefronts to collar-county office buildings, observers say business is booming.
“It is my understanding that there has been a tremendous increase of this sort of thing, but we don’t know for sure,” said John Holden, spokesman for Chicago’s Department of Revenue, which licenses all city businesses but does not keep a running tally of fortunetelling licenses. “Based on personal observation … these things are just popping up all over the place.”
Schermer, who practices out of her North Greenview Avenue apartment, said she has about 800 clients, a 20 percent increase in the last two years.
In 1989, she did a demographic breakdown of her clients: 76 percent were female, 36 to 46 years old, the majority of them college-educated and earning an average of $50,000 annually.
“Over the last three or four years, there seem to have been more men coming in,” Schermer said, “so that now the female-to-male ratio might be more like 65-35.”
Though she works from her home, Schermer doesn’t take walk-ins. There is no sign on her house advertising her services. She does advertise in a few specialty publications, such as Chicago’s New Age magazine, the Monthly Aspectarian. She offers a toll-free telephone number for out-of-state clients, along with a fax number.
“I first went to Barbara two years ago because a number of my friends were seeing her and thought she had helped them lead more effective lives,” said one of Schermer’s clients, a 48-year-old fundraising executive who preferred to remain anonymous-a bow to the cynicism with which many Americans view fortunetelling.
“She doesn’t predict actual events,” the client said, “but it’s almost spooky how she knows certain periods of the year are going to be positive for you and others not so good. She saw once something was going to happen to my chest, and a few days later I had a minor accident and cracked a rib. She’s 99 percent accurate.”
Schermer’s average client might seem rather well-heeled, and she patterns her business after that of a mental health therapist. She charges accordingly.
An interpretation of the astrological chart based on the time and place of the client’s birth costs $90. If the client opts for a second “current patterns” interpretation, that’s another $90.
Thereafter, she recommends that her clients see her twice a year and says more than 100 do. Because so many people seek advice on romantic entanglements, Schermer offers a “relationship analysis,” interpreting the birth, or “natal,” charts of both individuals in the romantic relationship. That costs $125.
While most scientists scoff at occult practices and the claims of New Age practitioners, some mental health professionals try to understand the allure.
Dr. Bertram Cohler, a psychologist and professor of behavioral sciences at the University of Chicago, does not believe in occult practitioners, but he said they may give solace to troubled clients.
“It doesn’t hurt to have a sympathetic ear listen to you for a half an hour or an hour,” Cohler said. “So long as nobody exploits your pain or otherwise misleads you, it might well help some people.
“We don’t even know why psychotherapy works. Anybody in (the mental health) business for a long time knows not to discount entirely something that seems to work.”
Even a harsh critic of occult practitioners such as Rev. Mitch Pacwa, a Jesuit priest and Loyola University religion professor, allows that some practitioners are astute observers of humanity.
“Some of them are pretty good street corner psychologists,” Pacwa said.
“They remind me of my father, who was a used-car salesman on the Northwest Side. He could size up most customers pretty well in the first couple of minutes. Just by eyeballing them and asking a couple of innocuous questions, he’d have a pretty accurate credit reading of them and know enough of what kind of people they were to make the right sales pitch.”
Nonetheless, Pacwa said he thinks occult practitioners often are sincere and believe in the supernatural powers they claim to possess. That sincerity, he said, makes them all the more dangerous as they peddle what he called rank superstition.
“What concerns me at the basic level,” he said, “is that they say, `Don’t think. Just feel this.’ That way, nobody can criticize or investigate them, and they exempt themselves from any examination.
“For a lot of people, this replaces religion. It attracts people who want a religious experience without the moral demands of religion. People who don’t have a grounding in Christian faith will go toward this sort of deception.”
Many occult practitioners are sensitive about the fraud factor and fly-by-night image of what they do.
“I don’t want people to start basing lives on my readings,” said Mel Doerr, a psychic who practices from an office in a Des Plaines mall. Doerr said he is called in often by police departments searching for clues or missing people and that he provides the service free. For clients, however, he charges $90 an hour.
“I will only see a client once a year or once every six months, depending on the issues that trouble them,” Doerr said. “I don’t want to foster dependence. Some people will lean on their psychic, doctor, psychiatrist or whatever to help make every decision in their lives.
“It’s like a client of mine who called me to ask if she should wear a red or green dress to a wedding she was attending. I told her that was asinine, that I don’t answer questions like that.”
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If a visit to Schermer or Doerr is a bit like a visit to a psychiatrist or a business consultant, a visit to Ella’s is more like a visit to the Twilight Zone.
Ella’s Tea Leaf Studio has a placard that directs customers to the seventh floor of the historic Reliance Building, 32 N. State St., where the studio has been since 1947.
The Reliance, a Burnham and Root-designed classic skyscraper built in 1890, has seen its better days. Ella has a small room and is one of the three or four remaining tenants in the building. To reach Ella’s, a customer must negotiate the building’s narrow, dark, dog-earred foyer and wait for an attendant-operated elevator.
As the elevator creaks upward, it passes floors of littered, abandoned offices and corridors. Ella’s office, at the end of the seventh-floor hall, is a spartan affair with half a dozen small, plain tables with two chairs each.
Dorothy Hudson, 69, says she is a psychic who began counseling clients at Ella’s in 1963 by reading regular decks of cards in a half-hour session costing $1.50. Now she charges $15.
There are three psychics: Hudson and another playing-card reader and a tarot card reader ($25 for half an hour). After a reading, the customer gets a complimentary tea reading from a cup splashed with a half-inch of water warmed on a hot plate. But the customer cannot drink the liquid because the city would insist Ella’s have a restaurant license.
“I’ve been sitting at this same table for 30 years,” Hudson said. “I’m here five days a week. Sometimes I’ll see maybe 100 people in a week.
“I see more women than men. Most still want to know about what to do about their love life, just like the old days. But times change. Before, women wanted a man to marry. Now some of them don’t want to be married. They want a man for an affair, but they don’t want the responsibility or commitment of marrying.”
Three national studies in 1987 showed widespread belief in the occult: 67 percent of American adults believed they had experienced psychic activity, such as ESP; the same percentage read astrology columns in newspapers and magazines; 36 percent believed astrology is scientific; and 42 percent believed they had been in contact with someone who had died.
And although anecdotal evidence suggests a rise in Chicago fortune-reading businesses of late, Ann Gunnell, 75, owner of Ella’s, said it seems to her that fewer readers are in the Loop. She recalled going to the Reliance building in the 1940s to have her fortune read.
“There were three tearooms with readers just in the Reliance Building alone,” Gunnell said. “People were lined up at the door waiting for them to open at 9 a.m., and sometimes you waited for three hours for your turn. There were three tearooms in the building across the street, and they were all busy.”
German-born Trudy Koch, 61, is a self-professed psychic who uses crystals when she reads for clients out of her shop, Lisa’s, 225 South Blvd., Oak Park.
Koch said she came by her psychic gifts from her mother and grandmother as a girl in Germany. She said her psychic abilities several times saved her family and friends during the intense Allied bombings over Germany during World War II.
“Every time the air raid siren went off,” Koch said, “everybody turned to me to ask if the bombs were going somewhere else or if we should go to the shelters.”
Koch said she will not be able to pass on her psychic abilities as her mother and grandmother did.
“I often considered having children,” Koch said, “but I know I had had so many children in my past lives I just decided to sit it out in this life and take it a little easier this time.