Which is simply explanatory, so far as regards the book,
but
in which the author takes occasion to pay himself
several merited compliments, on the
score of honesty, ability, etc.
CHAPTER I.
WHICH IS MERELY EXPLANATORY.
The first undertaking of the author of these pages will
be to convince his readers that he has not set about making a
merely funny book, and that the subject of which he writes is one
that challenges their serious and earnest attention. Whatever of
humorous description may be found in the succeeding chapters, is
that which grows legitimately out of certain features of the theme;
for there has been no overstrained effort to
make fun where none naturally
existed.
The Witches of New York exert an influence too powerful and
too wide-spread to be treated with such light regard as has been
too long manifested by the community they have swindled for so many
years; and it is to be desired that the day may come when they will
be no longer classed with harmless mountebanks, but with dangerous
criminals.
People, curious in advertisements, have often read the
“Astrological” announcements of the newspapers, and have turned up
their critical noses at the ungrammatical style thereof, and
indulged the while in a sort of innocent wonder as to whether these
transparent nets ever catch any gulls. These matter-of-fact
individuals have no doubt often queried in a vague, purposeless
way, if there really can be in enlightened New York any
considerable number of persons who have faith in charms and
love-powders, and who put their trust in the prophetic
infallibility of a pack of greasy playing-cards. It may open the
eyes of these innocent querists to the popularity of modern
witchcraft to learn that the nineteen she-prophets who advertise in
the daily journals of this city are visited every week by an
average of sixteen hundred people
, or at the rate of more than a dozen customers a day for
each one; and of this immense number probably two-thirds place
implicit confidence in the miserable stuff they hear and pay
for.
It is also true that although a part of these visitors are
ignorant servants, unfortunate girls of the town, or uneducated
overgrown boys, still there are among them not a few men engaged in
respectable and influential professions, and many merchants of good
credit and repute, who periodically consult these women, and are
actually governed by their advice in business affairs of great
moment.
Carriages, attended by liveried servants, not unfrequently
stop at the nearest respectable corner adjoining the abode of a
notorious Fortune-Teller, while some richly-dressed but
closely-veiled woman stealthily glides into the habitation of the
Witch. Many ladies of wealth and social position, led by curiosity,
or other motives, enter these places for the purpose of hearing
their “fortunes told.” When these ladies are informed of the true
character of the houses they have thus entered, and the real
business of many of these women whose fortune-telling is but a
screen to intercept the public gaze from it, it is not likely that
any one of them will ever compromise her reputation by another
visit.
People who do not know anything about the subject will
perhaps be surprised to hear that most of these humbug sorceresses
are now, or have been in more youthful and attractive days, women
of the town, and that several of their present dens are vile
assignation houses; and that a number of them are professed
abortionists, who do as much perhaps in the way of child-murder as
others whose names have been more prominently before the world; and
they will be astonished to learn that these chaste sibyls have an
understood partnership with the keepers of houses of prostitution,
and that the opportunities for a lucrative playing into each
other’s hands are constantly occurring.
The most terrible truth connected with this whole subject is
the fact that the greater number of these female fortune-tellers
are but doing their allotted part in a scheme by which, in this
city, the wholesale seduction of ignorant, simple-hearted girls, in
the lower walks of life, has been thoroughly
systematized.
The fortune-teller is the only one of the organization whose
operations may be known to the public; the other workers—the
masculine go-betweens who lead the victims over the space
intervening between her house and those of deeper shame—are kept
out of sight and are unheard of. There is a straight path between
these two points which is travelled every year by hundreds of
betrayed young girls, who, but for the superstitious snares of the
one, would never know the horrible realities of the other. The
exact mode of proceeding adopted by these conspirators against
virtue, the details of their plans, the various stratagems by which
their victims are snared and led on to certain ruin, are not fit
subjects for the present chapter; but any individual who is
disposed to prosecute the inquiry for himself will find in the
various police records much matter for his serious cogitation, and
may there discover the exact direction in which to continue his
investigations with the certainty of demonstrating these facts to
his perfect satisfaction.
A few months ago, at the suggestion of the editor of one of
the leading daily newspapers of America, a series of articles was
written about the fortune-tellers of New York city, and these
articles were in due time published in that journal, and attracted
no little attention from its readers. These chapters, with such
alterations as were requisite, and with many additions, form the
bulk of this present volume.
The work has been conscientiously done. Every one of the
fortune-tellers described herein was personally visited by the
“Individual,” and the predictions were carefully noted down at the
time, word for word; the descriptions of the necromantic ladies and
their surroundings are accurate, and can be corroborated by the
hundreds who have gone over the same ground before and since. They
were treated in the most fair and frank manner; the same data as to
time and date of birth, age, nationality, etc., were given in all
cases, and the same questions were put to all, so that the absurd
differences in their statements and predictions result from the
unmitigated humbug of their pretended art, and from no
misinformation or misrepresentation on the part of the seeker after
mystic knowledge.
This latter person was perfectly unknown to the worthy ladies
of the black art profession; he was to them simply an individual,
one of the many-headed public, a cash customer, who paid liberally
for all he required, and who, by reason of the dollars he
disbursed, was entitled to the very best witchcraft in the
market.
And he got it.
He undertook a few short journeys in search of the
marvellous; he went on a couple of dozen voyages of discovery
without going out of sight of home; he penetrated to the
out-of-the-way regions, where the two-and-sixpenny witches of our
own time grow. He got his fill of the cheap prophecy of the day,
and procured of the oracles in person their oracularest sayings, at
the very highest market price. For the business-like seers of this
age are easily moved to prophesy by the sight of current moneys of
the land, no matter who presents the same; whereas the oracles of
the olden time dealt only with kings and princes, and nothing less
than the affairs of an entire nation, or a whole territory, served
to get their slow prophetic apparatus into working trim. To the
necromancers of early days the anxieties of private individuals
were as naught, and from the shekels of humble life they turned
them contemptuously away.
It is probably a thorough conviction of the necessity of
eating and drinking, and a constant contemplation from a
Penitentiary point of view of the consequences of so doing without
paying therefor, that induces our modern witches to charge a
specific sum for the exercise of their art, and to demand the
inevitable dollar in advance.
Whatever there is of Sorcery, Astrology, Necromancy,
Prophecy, Fortune-telling, and the Black Art generally, practised
at this time by the professional Witches of New York, is here
honestly set down.
Should any other individual become particularly interested in
the subject, and desire to go back of the present record and make
his exploration personally among the Fortune-tellers, he will find
their present addresses in the newspapers of the day, and can
easily verify what is herein written.
With these remarks as to the intention of this book, the
reader is referred by the Cash Customer to the succeeding chapters
for further information. And the public will find in the
advertisements, appended to the name and number of each
mysteriously gifted lady, the pleasing assurance that she will be
happy to see, not only the Cash Customer of the present writing,
but also any and all other customers, equally cash, who are willing
to pay the customary cash tribute.