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San Francisco spiritualists are feeling the TikTok effect

Local psychics, tarot card readers, and other sages are seeing more demand for their services from young people looking for solace IRL

11:30 AM PDT on May 2, 2024

Meredyth Masterson is calling from an Airstream trailer on the road somewhere in northern Arkansas, just hours after she just witnessed the once-in-a-generation total solar eclipse.

It’s an astronomical phenomenon that brings about all sorts of portents, if you subscribe to the metaphysical. The eclipse, according to spiritual practitioners, is a jettison for the flotsam of past hardship, a harbinger of ill or an impetus for a dramatic life change, good or bad. And it’s just one of many indicators — again, if you believe in that sort of thing — that 2024 is supposed to be a big year. 

Astrologists believe that Pluto entering Aquarius earlier this year indicates collective transformations. In the world of tarot, Masterson explained, 2024 is a year of strength and resilience amid upheaval.

“We come into this year one way and we go out another,” Masterson said. “We're gonna have an election this year. People, especially young people, are recognizing that it’s a raft of shit that you're going to be able to sacrifice and someday buy a house … people want to be happy now.”

Masterson is just one of the many San Francisco-based tarot readers, psychics, and healers that have seen a surge of interest, in large part due to a young generation discovering the spiritual arts as they doom-scroll about the world falling apart around them.

An entire ecosystem of practitioners have coalesced into a cottage industry on TikTok. You’ve got tarot card readers and sound bath musicians streaming their services live; astrological predictions warning why this week will be the best or worst of your life; “storytimes” about people whose lives were upended by a crystal; manifestation rituals that only work if you like, comment, and share to bolster engagement as if sending out wishes in code and digital text. 

Once you start seeing these videos enough, they become an irresistible balm. There’s a comfort in hearing, over and over again, that the stars or the cards are in your favor, even if it is mediated through an algorithm that exploits what its users want (and could very well be banned within a year).

It’s really not clear what came first: the interest in all things spiritual and metaphysical, or the folks on the video app trading in these practices for likes and followers. But more and more people are turning to these occult arts. The tarot card market was worth $1.2 billion in 2023, according to one estimate, while another has the astrology market pegged at an astonishing $12.8 billion

“I think spirituality is at an all-time high right now,” said Elijah Miller, a psychic and spiritualist who operates near the Embarcadero. “Especially now that you're seeing such a positive influence. If you go on TikTok, every minute that you scroll you're running into somebody reading tarot cards or somebody doing energy reading.” 

Within San Francisco, practitioners have noticed an uptick in business, especially from an increasingly younger crowd looking to them for their services and wisdom. 

“A lot of times, I say ‘What made you pick me?’” said Masterson, who added that she often pops up high when people are searching for tarot readers on Google. “And a lot of times, they say, 'Oh, I saw a TikTok or I saw a YouTube or I saw something on social media about tarot.’” 

San Francisco is a place ripe for this renewal of spiritual practices. Historically, the City has functioned as a mecca for bohemian counterculture. In the ‘60s, it was where modern understandings of New Age practices took shape, in the ‘70s where sound baths were invented. It had a long shadow, long after the counterculture kids grew up. The Reagan administration’s in-house astrologist was a San Francisco-based guide. Even as tech, with all of its hyper-rational skepticism, has become the dominant industry in the city, many of its major titans have also embraced psychedelia, sound baths, and tarot as a means of self-optimization.

Laura Perlin, a tarot reader and ritualist near the Outer Sunset, attributes the wealth of spirituality in San Francisco to its earthly qualities, long before it was colonized by outsiders.

“The land is actually creating this diversity before humans did anything,” she said. “There is the impact of the natural environment of our elders: the plants, the animals, the minerals.” 

These practitioners are deeply aware about the reputation of their beliefs, with most emphasizing that their work isn’t for everyone. A gender imbalance still exists, especially with men who Miller says “live in a logical world” and don’t often seek out spiritualists. Women tend to look for this guidance more than men, though the straight men who do come seeking services, Masterson noted, are “so ready to receive you.”

Masterson said that she’s not an oracle, even though some tarot readers use it as a future-telling device. “It's not what I do at all. There's no fortune-telling, there's no future prediction,” she said. “We live in the present, so giving us insight to what's happening in the present is far more valuable.”

Fiona Brandon, a therapist and astrologist, believes there are multiple roadmaps to figuring out your inner self. What may pass muster for one person may be BS for someone else, but all offer “ways to be curious outside of the parts that fear.” That curiosity, above all else, is what matters.

Much of her work, both in astrology and more formal therapy, focuses on regulating the nervous system. Uncertainty, she finds, inculcates a certain, evolutionary thought process that doesn’t lend to nuanced thinking — creating stressors and rash decision-making.

“People are reaching out for astrology, for psychotherapy to really learn how to hold complexity,” Brandon says. “I think a lot of folks here, their nervous systems are incredibly dysregulated because of what's going on. Folks really want a way to grapple with those fears, those apprehensions, the unknown — finding safe spaces to do that.”

A generation of young people, naturally, have latched onto these otherworldly practices at a time when their lives were upended by a global pandemic and a nationwide collegiate movement reckoning with administrators and police forces amid a geopolitical crisis that has left tens of thousands dead. Social and political turmoil is the norm.

“This is a moment when we're aware that the institutions are dying and that they failed us and that we've got to let them go,” said Perlin. “What do we have that we can actually count on, and it's ourselves.”

These practices constitute their own sort of devotion. When the powers that be feel like they’re on the brink of collapse, perhaps putting faith in the preternatural powers of the cosmos isn’t too much of a stretch. 

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