A long time ago, I came into contact with a number of fortune-telling families. Sometimes I’d go into their little Tarot card reading shops and see what the future had in store for me.

My first experience with mystics occurred when I was a student in Baltimore. Strolling down East Baltimore Street one evening, I spotted a shop and decided to have my palm read for two dollars. The ablaze-with-neon, curtained-off room was no larger than a broom closet. The woman there held my palm and told me that I needed “instant karmic cleansing.”

She suggested that I take three coins and throw them into the Baltimore harbor, only I had to do this with my back to the water and throw the coins over my shoulder—as coins are thrown into Rome’s Trevi Fountain. I walked down to the dark and gloomy harbor and did as the fortuneteller advised.

The day after the “instant karmic cleansing,” my landlord told me that he was selling his house and that I needed to find another place to live.

One year later, in Boston, I was walking downtown when I passed another soothsayer. An old woman in a headscarf winked at me and asked if I wanted a life-reading for three dollars—it was a tremendously hot day, and the only thing I wanted to do was get out of the sun. I went inside the little, curtained-off room, sat down, and watched as she shuffled some cards. Behind yet another curtained-off area, I could hear children. In fact, I no sooner heard a child’s voice than I saw a little, round face with large, brown eyes peeking up at me from underneath another hanging curtain.

The woman there told me I had many obstacles in life: Many people were jealous of me and there was a curse on my family going back to the 14th Century. The 14th Century is a long time ago, so I asked her why I should be responsible for the antics of a diabolical ancestor.

The woman offered a solution: For an extra five dollars, she would burn a special candle in her secret temple. That candle would be lit in my honor and melt the wax walls of the family curse.

She lit the candle and then held her hand out for the money. This was followed by her husband’s appearance from behind another curtained off area; after this, a number of doe-eyed children flooded the room. What was happening? After questioning the family, I discovered that they needed eggs. They hadn’t had breakfast and they wanted scrambled eggs.

“I’ll get you eggs,” I said to the woman. I knew that eggs were cheaper than five dollars so I volunteered to walk to a nearby grocery store and buy them a dozen. They thought my offer was a con and didn’t expect me to return—but I got them the eggs, and we parted on a civil note.

I stayed away from fortunetellers for a long time after that, although one time in Center City I went undercover as a reporter and had my future read at a number of shops. In almost every case I was told that people were jealous of me and that there was a family curse that I had to “melt.”

“I thought that wall was melted,” I said.

“The walls come back, just like bedbugs,” the fortuneteller said.

An oracle on 11th Street told me that my father had had an affair with a young woman neighbor when I was a teenager (not true). Another one near the Italian Market frightened me when she put her hands over mine in a healing embrace, then told me to keep very still as a shock of electricity shot from her hands into mine. Was this witchcraft? How did she do it? Another mystic in the Italian Market told me to mark May 16th on my calendar. Mindful of the date, I was doing my laundry in the laundry room of the apartment where I was living and on that date met a guy who would later become my best friend. I still remind of him of this fortune today.

When I spent five days in Florence, Italy several years ago, I used to go out at night and hang around the Piazza del Dumo near the great cathedral, Santa Maria del Flore. The area was a melting pot of Moroccan and North African visitors and immigrants—some selling trinkets like wooden toy trains and leather goods, others sitting on the cathedral steps smoking their peculiar brand of tobacco.

Piazza del Dumo was a busy place. Lovers openly displayed their affection for one another on the cathedral steps, only these displays went a lot further than the conventional French kiss. People lingered in doorways, said hello to strangers, and drank wine in the moonlight. There were no surprise visits by police officers to tell people to “keep moving.”  Unlike Rittenhouse Square, Piazza del Dumo did not close after midnight.

In the middle of the night, an old woman was busy reading tarot cards. She was doing her readings in Italian and the line of people wanting readings was very long. She was obviously a famous local.

Watching her go from client to client, I had intense thoughts of Philadelphia writer Charles Godfrey Leland—a spiritual descendant of the infamous occultist, Aleister Crowley. Leland began to write books about Italian witches when he first visited Florence. In one book, Leland talks about meeting a famous local reader named  Maddalena. It occurred to me that perhaps Leland had met the queen of Italian witches in Piazza del Dumo.

Leland’s time with the Italian witches changed his life.

Born in 1824 to direct descendants of the first settlers of New England, Leland’s boyhood was a mixture of privileged wealth and an obsession with the mystical. He loved folk magic and walking in the woods—where he claimed that he heard words in the songs of birds, and even in the sound of running water. At 18, he wrote his first book, “Hermes Trismegistus: His Divine Pymander.” The book was later published and became an inspiration for a variety of hermetic writings.

Leland graduated from Princeton in 1845. After graduation he studied in Munich, Germany before traveling in Europe. In his book, “Memoirs,” he writes about the physical impression he made as a young man:

“At this time I was a trifle over six feet two in height, and had then and for some time after so fair a red and white complexion, that the young ladies in Philadelphia four years later teased me by spreading the report that I used rouge and white paint! I was not as yet ‘filled out,’ but held myself straightly, and was fairly proportioned.”

After Leland’s post-graduate European travels, he returned to Philadelphia to begin a career in journalism where he wrote for, and edited, a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, The Philadelphia Press and Vanity Fair. During the Civil War he enlisted in the Union Army but his experiences on the battlefield were limited.

He moved to England in 1870 where his mystic inclinations and fluency in several languages helped him to immerse himself in fortuneteller society, studying their culture to such an extent that in time he came to be accepted as one of their own. In Florence, his friendship with Maddalena led to his discovery of a number of witch cults with roots going back to ancient times.

From the time he was a toddler, Leland had been well schooled in the world of spirits. In “Memoirs” he writes about the haunted feeling many felt in Philadelphia’s Washington Square:

“…Washington Square, opposite our house, had been in the olden time a Potter’s Field, where all the victims of the yellow fever pestilence had been interred. Now it had become a beautiful little park, but there were legends of a myriad of white confused forms seen flitting over it in the night, for it was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can remember my mother gently reproving one of our pretty neighbours for repeating such tales…”

Leland wrote books like “The English Gypsies and Their Language” (1873), “The Gypsies” (1882), “Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling” (1891) and “Legends of Florence” (1895-6). In “Memoirs,” he even writes about witches in Philly.

“…As for the black witch, as there were still four Negro sorcerers in Philadelphia in 1883 (I have their addresses), it may be imagined to what an extent Voodoo still prevailed among our Ebony men and brothers. Of one of there my mother had a sad experience. We had a black cook named Ann Lloyd, of whom, to express it mildly, one must say that she was ‘no good.’ My mother dismissed her, but several who succeeded her left abruptly. Then it was found that Ann, who professed, had put a spell of death on all who should take her place. My mother learned this, and when the last black cook gave warning she received a good admonition as to a Christian being a slave to the evil one. I believe that this ended the enchantment….”

Before his death in Florence on March 20, 1903, Philly’s own Aleister Crowley wrote of his impressions of the city after a long time away in Europe.

“…Its inhabitants were all well-bathed, well-clad, well-behaved; all with exactly the same ideas and the same ideals…. And they were so fond of flowers that I once ascertained by careful inquiry that in most respectable families there was annually much more money expended for bouquets than for books.”

Unlike Piazza del Dumo, there are plenty of flowers in Rittenhouse Square.