Clairvoyants and visionaries are not just figures from old chronicles. The 20th century, too, had people who claimed to be able to glimpse the future and warn of events to come. How – by their own accounts – did they gain insight into what was yet to happen? Some of the predictions attributed to them were judged accurate; others never came true. Here are the stories of the two modern seers mentioned most often.
Jeane Dixon – the visionary from Washington
One of the most famous visionaries of the 20th century was the American Jeane Dixon. She claimed to learn of future events in several ways: through telepathy, revelations, meditation and prophetic dreams. What brought her renown in the United States and around the world was, above all, her prediction concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
A vision in St Matthew’s Cathedral
As she told it, in 1952, at the age of 34, she – a practising Catholic – walked into St Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. Suddenly she had a vision: she saw the White House with the numbers 1-9-6-0 above it. She also saw a tall young man with blue eyes and thick chestnut hair. A gentle voice told her that this young Democrat would become president in 1960 and would then be assassinated.
Eleven years later John F. Kennedy – a Democrat elected president in 1960 – was killed in Dallas, and his funeral Mass was held in none other than St Matthew’s Cathedral.
A gift foretold
According to Jeane Dixon’s biography, her extraordinary abilities were foretold in childhood. When she was eight, she went with her mother to see a fortune-teller. Having examined the girl’s hands, the woman said she had never seen lines like them – and predicted that the child would become famous throughout the world, because she had been given the gift of foreseeing the changes taking place in it. From her youth Dixon was interested in astrology and crystal-ball gazing.
Hits and misses
Many predictions that supposedly came true are attributed to Jeane Dixon. According to her followers, she told Winston Churchill he would lose the election after the Second World War, foresaw the partition of India (even giving the exact date, it is said), the death of Marilyn Monroe, and the launch by the USSR of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1.
Her visions were also said to concern the death of Martin Luther King. Long before his supporters’ planned march on Washington, Dixon claimed that the pastor would never reach the capital because he would be shot, and that the next victim would be Robert Kennedy. Both men were assassinated in 1968.
Dixon also made some spectacular mistakes, however – she predicted, for instance, that China would start a world war in 1958. She explained that in such cases she had received the right symbols but interpreted them wrongly. Sceptics point out that we tend to remember the hits and quickly forget the failed predictions – a phenomenon that has even been dubbed “the Jeane Dixon effect”.
Revelation or telepathy?
Dixon herself divided her predictions into two groups: those received through revelation and those obtained through telepathy. Revelations came to her very rarely and – so she claimed – concerned events whose course nothing could change. Telepathic visions, on the other hand, showed a future that could still be avoided. In her view, President Kennedy’s death was inevitable, but his brother’s tragedy could have been prevented.
Elizabeth Stegn and the prophecy for San Francisco
Another modern clairvoyant credited with accurate predictions was Elizabeth Stegn. According to accounts, she had earlier foreseen the death of Martin Luther King and a flood in her home town in the Netherlands. In 1964 she had a vision of San Francisco being destroyed by an earthquake. The disaster never happened – yet, as the story goes, on the very day she had named, the clairvoyant herself died.
How can clairvoyance be explained?
Clairvoyance has long been a subject of controversy. Some parapsychology researchers have put forward the hypothesis that, while memory reaches only into the past, some part of our thinking may operate outside the ordinary order of time. Sceptics, for their part, point out that many “fulfilled” prophecies are only matched to events after the fact. The stories of Jeane Dixon and Elizabeth Stegn remain a fascinating example of how deeply people long to know the future.
First published (Polish original): 26 June 2011. Written by astrologers and esoteric specialists working with our editorial team; edited and translated for HOROSCOP.SPACE. © All rights reserved.
