What does God say about going to psychics?
The Hebrew Bible warns against divination in Deuteronomy 18:10 to 12 and against consulting mediums in Leviticus 19:31. Other traditions read those passages narrowly, or not at all. We do not argue scripture at our table. If your faith says stay home, listen to it rather than to us.
Last updated: August 2026
This question comes up in the doorway, not at the table. Our room on Twiggs Street is about 10 feet by 12 feet with one door, so there is no way to stand half in and half out without us noticing. People do it anyway, usually after walking down the hill from the Whaley House, and they ask this before they will sit down.
We would rather answer it straight than talk anyone past it.
Where the warnings actually appear
| Passage | What the text says | How people read it now |
|---|---|---|
| Deuteronomy 18:10 to 12 | Lists divination, sorcery, and consulting the dead among forbidden practices | Read by many Christians and Jews as a standing prohibition |
| Leviticus 19:31 | Warns against turning to mediums and spiritists | Often read as a warning about where you place ultimate trust |
| 1 Corinthians 12 | Describes discernment and prophecy as gifts given within the church | Cited by people who separate spiritual gifts from paid divination |
Those are the three that get quoted most in our doorway. There are others, and the arguments around them are older than anything in California.
Why the answer is not the same in every tradition
Catholic teaching treats divination as a violation of the first commandment. Many evangelical churches hold the same line, sometimes harder. Plenty of Jewish readers treat the Deuteronomy passage as aimed at the specific Canaanite practices named around it rather than at every form of counsel.
Spiritualist churches built an entire denomination on the opposite reading. Folk Catholic practice across the border in Tijuana, and in half the neighborhoods north of it, has run alongside the official position for generations without much interest in resolving the tension.
We are not qualified to settle that. Nobody at a $90 tarot table is.
What we tell people who ask in the doorway
Go talk to your pastor, priest, or rabbi first. That is not a deflection.
Last spring a woman came in off San Diego Avenue on a Saturday afternoon, asked this exact question, and then stepped back onto the sidewalk to call her church. She was out there about 20 minutes. She came back, told us her pastor had said no, and we told her to keep the money and enjoy the rest of her day in Old Town. That is a normal outcome here, not a rare one. It happens a few times a month in the busy season.
Someone who sits down fighting their own conscience gets nothing out of the hour anyway. We would rather lose the booking than take money from a person who will feel sick about it that night.
And if you do sit down, know what you are buying. A reading is a structured conversation. We do not guarantee accuracy, we do not claim to know the future with certainty, and nothing said in this room substitutes for medical, legal, or financial advice.
What actually happens at the table
One person at a time, doors open daily from 9am to 9pm. The busiest stretch we get is between 6pm and 8pm in July and August, when the crowd comes back through from Presidio Park and the trolley stop.
Most sittings start with a plain question about work, a relationship, or a grief that has not moved. A tarot card reading is $90 for about 30 minutes and uses the full 78 card deck, all 22 major arcana and 56 minor. A psychic reading is $125 for about an hour and does not use cards at all. Neither one requires you to believe anything in particular walking in, and we take walk-ins when the chair is empty.
People also ask whether any of it works. We answered that one separately in does a psychic reading actually work, and the answer there is as honest as this one.
The people who leave happiest are usually the ones who settled the faith question before they got here, either way.