Madame Tamar
I was thirteen, somewhere in the late 1970s, a teenager already lost in dystopian synth music and drawn to things most people my age weren't remotely interested in. Weston-super-Mare. A creaky staircase. A cosy room at the top of it. Worn playing cards on the table, a couple of dogs half-asleep in the corners. No crystal ball, no theatrical lighting, no mystical props of any kind.
Madame Tamar's playing cards had edges battered by the countless fates they had touched. She was a cartomancer of the old world. No theatrics, no unnecessary flourish. Just knowing. She spoke in riddles that unravelled long after you'd left the room, sometimes days later, sometimes weeks.
She taught me that sometimes the cards do the work for you, and other times you must be the bridge between the symbols and the seeker.
I kept going back. After I moved to London, I would still make pilgrimages south-west through Glastonbury, where my mother spent her final years, and on to Weston. I took friends with me. I took my mother. Madame Tamar wasn't just mine; she was someone I wanted the people I cared about to experience.
Her real name, apparently, was Peggy Livingstone, though I only ever knew her as Madame Tamar. She had a 50-year career in the town. A Christian psychic clairvoyant, a combination that raised eyebrows in some quarters but never in mine, having grown up in Ireland and Somerset where the sacred and the practical have always lived comfortably together. Her reputation was such that she was once asked by police to help solve cases. She gave a reading on the day before she died, aged 96.
Today, as I lay my card of the day, I feel her nod in approval from some unseen place.
She started my journey. Everything that followed: the study, the practice, the readings across many decades, different countries, the same pasteboards, different stories, the tarot deck whose cards I drew and redrew until they held something true. All of it traces back to that room, that staircase, those worn playing cards on the table.
What clairvoyance actually is
The word comes from the French: clair, clear, and voyance, seeing. The gift of clear sight, the ability to perceive information about people, places, or situations that falls outside ordinary sensory range. A clairvoyant may see images, symbols, impressions, or scenes, appearing internally as a vivid inner vision, or occasionally as something perceived externally.
It is the most widely recognised of the four clairs, and the one most subject to misunderstanding. Clairvoyance is not the same as prophecy. It is not primarily about predicting the future. A genuine clairvoyant reader is more often reading what is present, what is real, what is already in motion, and showing it back to you in a way you can work with.
Madame Tamar worked through playing cards, cartomancy, a tradition as old as the cards themselves. I moved to tarot. Different vehicles, the same underlying principle: the symbols are a language, and the reader is the translator. You learn the vocabulary over decades. You never stop learning it.
Is it real?
I have never made that claim on anyone else's behalf, and I am not going to start now. What I will say is that I have sat with readers over many decades, as a seeker, a student, as a researcher. There are things I have witnessed that I cannot explain by other means. Details too specific, too verifiable, too particular to be written off as generalisation or cold reading.
Madame Tamar knew things she should not have known. I saw it myself, and I watched others experience it. That is all I can honestly tell you. I leave the interpretation to you.