A. Marie Silver

A. Marie Silver

How Many Different Kinds of Psychics Are There?

For my work-in-progress I wanted to narrow my main character’s gifts down to three specific areas; so I embarked on a virtual quest to find out more about psychic specialties. I could write a book just on the information I found out.

The first website I landed on; The Tarot Lady, I found an article written by Theresa Reed.  She defines psychic as an individual who doesn’t use any tools.  Specifically she categorizes Psychic into three areas:

  1. Clairvoyant
  2. Clairaudient
  3. Clairsentient

Need more Clairification (okay, okay, bad joke. Sorry, I couldn’t help it.)

Ms. Reed breaks each down into very simple terms: Clairvoyant is the gift of sight, Clairaudient is the gift of hearing and Clairsentient is the gift of feeling. So basically, if you’re clairvoyant you can see into the future. If your clairaudient you can hear into the future and if your clairsentient you can touch something and get a psychic sense into the future.

Now here’s where it gets a little messy.  Within each of the three categories are subcategories.

Mrs. Reed mentions:

  1. Mediums
  2. Channels
  3. Pet Psychics
  4. Medical & Business intuitives
  5. Astrologers
  6. Numerologists
  7. Dream Interpreters
  8. Past Life Regressionists
  9. Tarot card & Palmer Readers.

I think Hollywood has done a pretty good job defining each of these so I’m only going to focus on a few. Channels are psychics who allow themselves to become possessed by a spirit guide who communicates through them. Medical Intuitives can foresee illnesses. Business Intuitives focus their gifts on helping clients make sound business decisions and investments.

Clair Berry wrote an article for the website Exploring Psychics in which she defines astrology, numerology, dream interpretation, tarot cards and palm readings as forms of Divination. All of these services require the use of tools to perform a reading but none of them actually require the person conducting the reading to be psychic.

For example, someone using tarot cards really just has to know what each of the pictures means and how to put them together to answer his clients questions.  So, if my main character uses Divination techniques, I’m going to have to step it up a notch to make her experiences more psychic in a sense. Lucky for me I write Fiction, because where reality fails me, I can rely on my overactive imagination to make life more interesting.

Ms. Berry continues in her article with including empaths to her list. Empaths are individuals who can tune into the emotion of others.  She also mentions dowsing as a psychic technique used to find lost people or objects.

The last two articles I read made my head spin because of all the information. I’m not going to define each one but I will list them.  The first is from www.successconsciousness.com and the article was written by Remez Sasson. This list of psychic abilities is as follows:

  1. Psychokinesis – Think Stephen King’s Carrie
  2. Telepathy – reading minds
  3. Auric Sight – the gift of seeing the color of another person’s aura. Wonder what color mine is?

The last is from www.thelostfound.com. The psychic abilities listed include:

  1. Astral projection – Think Prue Halliwell from Charmed
  2. Pyrokinesis – Think Drew Barrymore from Firestarter- another Stephen King movie, I believe.
  3. Precognition – a general term for knowing the future.
  4. Extra-Sensory Perception or ESP – an all encompassing term for general psychic abilities that are not gained from Divination.

Truthfully, the list goes on and on with different kinds of psychic abilities. But for my research, I’ve got plenty to work with from these websites alone.

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A. Marie Smith

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