by Julie Rieger
“My voices tell me I must go against the English,” Joan famously said, and then she did just that. These voices, which Joan said came from various archangels, compelled her to drive legions into battle against the English in the fifteenth century. Like countless women (and a couple of guys) who seriously messed with the rigid belief systems of their times, Joan ended up burned at the stake, though she was later canonized as a saint—and went on to become the subject of movies and countless books. Not surprisingly, modern science has suggested that her clairvoyance and clairaudience resulted from migraines, among other neurological afflictions. I don’t know about you, but the very idea of driving legions into battle against hairy, warring Anglo-Saxons is enough to give most people a migraine.
Joan of Arc, of course, is not alone in the constellation of stars who’ve gone down in history for their incredible clairvoyance. Nostradamus combined astrology with clairvoyance and is perhaps second to Joan of Arc in his enduring celebrity status. Also French, Nostradamus came on the scene roughly a century after Joan of Arc with his Les Prophéties—prophecies that foresaw major world events and are among the most hotly contested and passionately read documents of our time. (Nostradamus’s work continues to be published to this day.)
Twentieth-century American mystic clairvoyant Edgar Cayce is considered, more recently, a prophet and the founder of spiritualism and the New Age movement. Like Joan, Cayce discovered his gifts as a young boy when he heard voices and got in touch with both his amazing claircognizance and his clairvoyance. But there are other, lesser-known individuals who were also clairvoyant or precognizant. Mark Twain had a prophetic dream that foresaw the death of his brother; Abraham Lincoln was deeply involved in the spiritualist movement (his precognitive and clairvoyant abilities are well documented); and even George Washington and Ben Franklin experienced various clairs and/or were deeply interested in spiritualism, mysticism, and clairvoyance. Then there are the untold number of people today who experience various clairs (but haven’t come out of the spiritual closet), and all the celebs who see psychics on a regular basis, never mind political figures (think Winston Churchill, among others) and law enforcement officials who’ve consulted clairvoyants to help them unravel complicated cases.
As with anything in life, we excel at some things and aren’t so great at others. Throughout my life I’ve been a kickass golfer, basketball player, softball player (OMG, I’m such a lesbian), and bowler. But I’m a terrible gymnast and horseback rider—not my thing. The same principle holds true with the clairs. I’ve experienced a number of these different clairs, which I’ll explore as we move through these pages. For now, I think it’s worth addressing just a few.
Let’s start with what you may have seen on TV from one of the kindest souls on the planet: Tyler Henry, from the series Hollywood Medium. Tyler has the gift of clairvoyance and clairtangency (also known as psychometry), which is the ability to get information about a person from either an object they wear with regularity (a ring or a necklace, for example) or one that’s precious to them. Many psychics use this as a way to tap into the spiritual energy around an individual. Tyler Henry is quite gifted in this arena and has put it in the cultural spotlight through his TV presence. He and I met in one of the bungalows at the fancy Beverly Hills Hotel because I have a friend at E!. (That’s when it pays to work in Hollywood.)
After our polite greeting, I hand him one of my favorite bracelets that belonged to my mom. It has a thick chain with a tiny barrel charm that holds a pair of teeny dice inside. I spent countless hours with this bracelet as a kid lying on the floor of my mom’s closet, where she kept her jewelry box. Needless to say, that bracelet holds a tremendous amount of love to me, none of which was previously known to Tyler. Once he held it in his hand, he looked at me and right away said: “Your mom, Margaret, is funny and says she is the reason you started writing your book.”
To reiterate, I did not tell him anything in advance—including my mom’s name. I was totally blown away. Just that sentence alone was magical to me. For starters, her name is not terribly common these days, and how the hell did he know I was writing a book? I’m here to tell you that Tyler is really good. He’s the real deal and an utter sweetheart—a very kind and gentle being.
Like other mediums, Tyler might also be somewhat claircognizant. The most dramatic experience I ever had with this clair was when Mona told me about her NDE. To recap, knowledge practically poured into her head while she was considered clinically dead; when she came back to life she was a walking encyclopedia about world religions and various aspects of mysticism that she knew zero about beforehand. After Mona’s passing I asked her sister Pam about the depth of Mona’s religious knowledge. “She didn’t know a thing before her NDE,” Pam replied. “And God knows she didn’t even read more than a menu before she passed away. I can’t explain how she knew everything she did.”
Pam’s not the only one who can’t explain it. Science can’t explain these accounts of extraordinary knowledge, many of which happen to people without having an NDE. Savants throughout history have possessed extraordinary knowledge and mental abilities that surpass even computers. Daniel Tammet is the subject of a documentary called The Boy with the Incredible Brain, in which scientists try to understand how Tammet, by the age of four, was able to perform extremely complicated mathematical calculations to the hundredth decimal in his head (often far surpassing a computer’s accuracy) and learn an entire language in a week. (In this case, the ridiculously difficult Icelandic language.)
In the documentary, scientists film Tammet computing crazy-complex equations in his head. While he does so he makes small movements with his fingers on the table as if he were tracing something invisible. When the scientist asks what he’s doing with his fingers, Tammet replies: “I’m seeing the numbers—but I’m not seeing them. It’s strange. I’m seeing pictures, shapes, and patterns.” He goes on to describe an almost psychedelic world made up of shapes, “like a square, the texture of water drops, ripples almost . . . like a bubble with a half-cloud . . . something metallic.” As Tammet continues to describe a clairvoyant world of images that symbolize complex knowledge, the narrator-scientist says of Tammet’s remarkable gift: “It sounds preposterous, but if it’s true, it blows away scientific theory.”
Yup. It sure does.
Some people, by the way, believe that claircognizance of this sort is linked to the “Akashic Records.” This is a theosophical term that describes a mystical compilation of all the world knowledge ever experienced or computed by human beings and throughout the history of the universe. Edgar Cayce was one of many clairvoyants who has referred to the Akashic Records in the context of various clairs. His enduring organization, Association for Research and Enlightenment, describes the Akashic Records on its website as a “Book of Life” that can “be equated to the universe’s super-computer system. It is this system that acts as the central storehouse of all information for every individual who has ever lived upon the earth. More than just a reservoir of events, the Akashic Records contain every deed, word, feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred at any time in the history of the world.” Maybe Tammet and similar savants are taping into this Etheric Encyclopedia of Everything.
My own experience of claircognizance was far more ordinary: It came through automatic writing. This is sometimes confused with “wild writing” and “stream of consciousness” writing, which, like automatic writing, is a form of writing that involves bypassing your critical mind and allowing something else to guide your hand. Sometimes that “something else” is a creative place that’s been hidden deep within; other times it is effectively a conduit for information from higher sources. This is what happened to me one day in the spring of 2017: I was sitting in our living room when, without any conscious foresight, I picked up a pen and paper and did I was “told,” so to speak. Here’s what my hand wrote:
I am in charge of my space, my soul, my body, my home base.
If you are not here for t
he highest good of these, you are cordially invited to leave.
You can go, go away from here.
Never come back, not even near.
If you do not, you will not be gainful.
As I am now calling on my guardian angel.
I looked back at what I wrote and thought: Where did this come from? What is this? A poem? A mantra? A prayer? It felt like a gift, this flash of words on the page. I recall thinking how powerful it would be if every kid around the world had these words for spiritual protection. The instant inspiration and flow of those words that came seemingly out of the blue reminds me of how Jeff Somers describes J. R. R. Tolkien’s experience writing The Hobbit in an article titled “The Fascinating Origin Stories of 7 Famous Novels” on barnesandnoble.com: “It sounds like a made-up story, but it’s true: Tolkien, a professor, was grading papers in his office when he happened on a blank sheet of paper and wrote down a sentence that came to him from out of nowhere: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ No one, apparently, was more amazed at the sudden presence of this sentence than Professor Tolkien himself—especially the word hobbit. That sort of inspiration and automatic writing is the sort of thing writers live for.”
Not only was Tolkien not consciously, logically, or strategically trying to conjure up The Hobbit, he didn’t even flipping know what the word “hobbit” meant. That word didn’t exist until it popped into his head and came to stand for the imaginary small humans with hairy feet we’ve all come to know and love.
Was Tolkien claircognizant? Are many artists claircognizant in their own ways? You decide. One thing is certain: It pays to listen carefully to your intuition, because it shares airspace with whatever inspires claircognizance—that sudden flash of insight or clarity, an “aha!” moment or that subtle feeling or “knowingness” about something or someone you can’t describe but know is right. Here’s what I have to say about your intuition and inner voice: Pay attention to them. Always, always pay attention.
Clairempathy is another clair that I’ve experienced—I was born into it because I’ve always been deeply sensitive. My crunchy exterior shields a marshmallowy inside. I have a hard time watching the news because the pain of watching suffering is often too much for me to handle. Just hearing about injured or mistreated animals brings me to the edge of rage. The same goes for hazing troubled kids (especially those with handicaps) or abusing the elderly. Every single time I am on the side of the abused, never the abuser, no matter who they are or what the circumstances. I learned later that this is a form of clairempathy, and it’s the only clair that culls its energy not from the Other Side, but from this side: from the living, striving, struggling human side of life.
Now let’s not confuse general empathy with clairempathy. Everyone is empathetic to one degree or another, but not all people are clairempathic or empaths. Author of The Empath’s Survival Guide, Dr. Judith Orloff is one of many experts on this subject that’s recently gotten the national attention it deserves.
In Psychology Today, Orloff, an empath herself, describes the difference between a highly sensitive person (sometimes referred to by the acronym HSP) and an actual empath. While HSPs have a low threshold for stimulation, need alone time, and tend to be introverts, bona fide empaths, according to Orloff, “take the experience of the highly sensitive person much further: We can sense subtle energy (called shakti or prana in Eastern healing traditions) and actually absorb it from other people and different environments into our own bodies. Highly sensitive people don’t typically do that. This capacity allows us to experience the energy around us, including emotions and physical sensations, in extremely deep ways. And so we energetically internalize the feelings and pain of others—and often have trouble distinguishing someone else’s discomfort from our own. Also, some empaths have profound spiritual and intuitive experiences—with animals, nature, or their inner guides—which aren’t usually associated with highly sensitive people.”
Many psychics struggle with those “feelings and pain of others” in their own bodies to the point of being debilitated by them. Until she mastered her own clairs, Theresa Caputo was so overwhelmed by anxiety from these sources that she sometimes wouldn’t leave her house. In my own case, I practice a number of rituals to keep me grounded and clear out any negative shit from my house or my own energetic body (see appendix four, “Daily Rituals and Spiritual Self-Care,” for more details).
I’ve always believed that words, of course, are only one form of communication for true empaths. We also communicate through touch, body language, and through nonverbal cues. I always know when I meet another empath, because they always, without fail, declare that I’m the best hugger they’ve ever met. That’s because hugging—and the power of touch—is my dominant humanness. I tend to feel communication from the unseen world in my body. These feelings and related emotions automatically translate into words in my head.
Moving onto stranger turf, I did experience clairtaction and clairolfaction when I physically felt the weight of a ghost on my body and, weirdly, smelled the scent of a woman from 150 years ago. Before I tell you about these experiences, I’d like to tip my hat to Anthon St Maarten, a psychic medium and intuitive coach who confirmed that the relatively unknown clair of clairolfaction is, in fact, common among psychics and ghost hunters.
“For a long time scientists proposed that our sense of smell is based on the shape of the air-borne molecules that make up different odors,” St Maarten says on his website www.anthonstmaarten.com. “However, scientist Dr. Luca Turin proposes that our ability to smell may instead be based on how these molecules ‘quiver and shake.’ Luca believes that the vibrational spectrum of a molecule is the actual property that is detected by the nose, and then interpreted by the brain. In other words, it is possible that our sense of smell is based on vibration, in the same way our ability to see or hear or sense is made possible by our brain’s interpretation of different vibrations.”
If our sense of smell vibrates like our sight and our hearing, then why wouldn’t our nose be psychic, too? Our psychic nose is called “clairolfaction.” I met this clair in the fall of 2016 when Ima (the psychic from the Crystal Matrix) thought it would be a good idea to test my psychic abilities in the wild and go on a field trip to a few haunted locations in Los Angeles. She wanted me to learn how to tap into my clairs in the world.
We went to the Banning Residence Museum, a giant house that used to be the home of General Phineas Banning. (Banning was a Civil War veteran, state senator, and known as “The Father of the Port of Los Angeles” for his efforts behind the scenes getting a breakwater and lighthouse built in the area.) After his service in the Civil War, he moved to Los Angeles and built a twenty-three-room house in 1864, where he had five children with two different wives.
The home fell into disrepair over the decades until Phineas’s great-granddaughter, Nancy, restored the mansion to its original Victorian glory, with all the antebellum details of the era (ornate hand-carved furniture, gas lamps, and preplumbing chamber pots). It opened to the public as a museum in 1938.
For five bucks each we joined a small tour group led by a lovely woman who volunteers at the historic landmark. As we were walking toward the front doors of this big-ass plantation house, Ima said to me: “Keep grounded and pay attention to what you see, hear, and feel.” (She never said to pay attention to what I smell.)
We walked through a number of rooms: a baby’s nursery filled with typical baby stuff that’s foreign to a childless lesbian like myself (crib, rocking chair, etc.); a young boy’s bedroom decked in plaid with wooden toys; and finally to Phineas’s bedroom with its four-poster bed, armoire, and chest of drawers. Standing in the corner near the door while other guests followed the guide, I thought they really could use a few mountain-fresh Glade plug-ins. (The place just smelled old.) As that snarky thought crossed my mind, I suddenly smelled something—something familiar: You know that shitty old-lady perfume that makes you gag on an airplane? That pungent, floral odor t
hat makes you want to breathe out of your mouth? Well, that’s what I smelled. I started taking big whiffs of each female guest in the crowd like a complete psychopath (I looked like my dog Homer sniffing the air). Unable to identify the odor on anyone, I went back to that corner and there it was again, that awful perfume smell.
That smell kept following me around rooms: upstairs to a ladies’ changing room adorned with lace curtains and an ornate vanity, then out to the stagecoach barn. Finally Ima, who also smelled the odor, said, “Julie, clearly this spirit wants to tell you something, so ask it.”
After making sure that I was grounded, I did just that. The spirit told me that her name was Rebecca and said she loved her home and didn’t want to leave. Of course I’m thinking Who the fuck is Rebecca? When I tell Ima her name and what she said, she says that Rebecca was the name of Phineas’s first wife, who died in childbirth.
“Holy crap, that’s crazy,” I replied. “Well, she seems perfectly happy keeping an eye on the place. She must have loved it here.”
On the way back to the main house, Ima and I asked our guide if anyone had ever experienced ghosts in the house. She glances from side to side to see if anyone was looking. “Yes, but we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“Huh. Well, Rebecca wore some strong fragrance, didn’t she?”
The guide froze. “Did you see her?”
“No. I smelled her, though.”
“One of our other guides said that she smelled a strong perfume in the house yesterday,” she replied, all wide-eyed and surprised. “She said it followed her around.”
Ima turned to me and nodded with confidence at her pupil. I didn’t know about clairolfaction at the time, so I just called this “the smelly clair.”
