Jan Murphy (2023) The Psychic Fairy Queen.

I’m blessed enough to have a roof over my head. Blessed enough to have light and warmth on Christmas Eve. Blessed enough to be able to sit and read The Psychic Fairy Queen from start to finish without interruption, other than the necessary gallons of tea.

I used to love books like this. I was brought up in a big Catholic family. There’s a joke in there about a small Catholic family not being Catholic enough. Not much call for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. Vaginal, jade, eggs with its alleged health- giving properties.  Mass on Sunday and Holy Days. Catholic schools. Grace before meals. Grace after meals. And murder committed during meals to decide who got the best bit. Supernatural events were kept for Sunday. And they weren’t very super and kept to a minimum diet. Swallow the body and blood of Christ and shut up about it.

Grimm’s fairy tales were good for what to do with witches. Cut their heads off before they got the jump on you. Kahlil Gibran The Prophet had me thinking I knew something which I didn’t. Carlos Castaneda The Teachings of Don Yuan was like Bruce Lee for psychics. I wasn’t very psychic. I couldn’t even bend a spoon when Uri Geller came along and hadn’t been on a spaceship with him either.

‘I shat it,’ as my mates Cammy, Jim and Summy would say when they were in Summy’s house playing with an Ouija board. I also shat it when sleeping in a church hall and heard ghostly steps clunking up the stairs, which happened several times. But there were other people there and it didn’t keep us awake.

I imagine most of the people Jan Murphy meets are open-and-closed books like me. Insensitive but not entirely ignorant. When my partner Mary went to our local pub with her pal, Trisha, to get a reading done by a psychic for £30 or £40, it amused me that one of the psychics had given much the same reading to another friend, using much the same stock phrases and probing for information. Confirmation bias. I didn’t need to be Derren Brown to believe it was staged, but I felt a bit sorry for the psychic. She was going through the motions like the Whiskey Priest in Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory also titled The Labyrinthine Ways.      

No need to feel sorry for Jan Murphy, her labyrinth way, and the publication of her memoir by the aptly named Spellbound Books. I’d be interested in sitting in with a meeting between her and Derren Brown. Most of the things she relates matter-of-factly, you’d find implausible in a Stephen King novel.

She explains in her introduction:

‘For many years I have been asked by clients and friends to write a book about all the amazing happenings and experiences I had in my life.’

If my partner had told me she’d been in our local and met this amazing medium, Jan Murphy, and she was able to tell her…

I’d have got my jacket, put it on and went to see for myself and listened to her in the same way beat-cops did after her car was stolen by a lodger. The problem here is of demand and supply. If everybody that wanted to get a reading from Jan Murphy (including me) turned up at her doorstep and queued to see her, how many lifetimes would it take? Would it cost more than a Gloop egg?

Jan Murphy, in writing a book, has channelled her thoughts in a way accessible to millions simultaneously. Her insights are on par with the nineties bestselling spiritual novel titled The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. We are moving in a deterministic way towards a more spiritually evolved world. She is part of the vanguard of change. Amen to that, I’d say, but I don’t believe it. I hope she’s right, but neither of us will be here to measure progress in this lifetime.  

The Sixth Celestine Insight: Clearing the Past: It discusses the importance of dealing with unresolved emotional issues from the past to achieve personal growth and spiritual advancement.

I had to add a few words to this post because the word number came out at 666. With a second name, Damien, of course, that sat uneasily with me. I wouldn’t do that for any other blog post. But I probably would. Once a Catholic…Measure us by our insecurities?