How Princess Diana’s
Fascination With the Occult Guided Her Choices in Real Life
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the late princess
relied on psychics, spiritualists, astrologers, energy healers, and more for
comfort and guidance as her marriage to Charles unravelled.
By Hadley Hall Meares
It was quite a sight. Inside her Kensington Palace apartment, Diana, Princess of Wales, lay on her
coffee table with her shoes off. Energy healer Simone Simmons stood
above the princess, hands outstretched, engaged in an impromptu spiritual session.
Simmons had just cleansed the apartment of bad energies. She was exhausted,
having spent 40 minutes alone, clearing all the negativity from the marital
bedroom of Diana and the then Prince Charles.
“Diana, on the other hand, was on a high,” Simmons writes in Diana: The Last Word. “She
said that…she could already feel a change in the atmosphere. She wanted to
capture more of that mood change and she said she wanted me to do some
healing.”
It was a typical day for Princess Diana, whose calendar was crowded with
appointments with psychics, spiritualists, astrologers, energy healers,
palmists, tarot readers, and dowsers. Desperate to solve her problems and
seeking comfort and guidance, Diana also indulged in frequent sessions with
alternative medical treatments, including colonic irrigation, reflexology,
aromatherapy, acupuncture, and hypnotherapy.
“In the late eighties and early nineties she was with every different
sort of person,” a former palace official told Sally Bedell Smith, author
of Diana in Search of Herself: Portrait
of a Troubled Princess. “They marched in and out, and I don’t know how they
got there, but once you get into that scene, it’s a cry for help.”
Bodyguard Ken Wharfe agreed. “Diana was in the thrall
of all these mad psychics,” he told Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles.
Princess Diana’s introduction to the mystical world seems to have been
facilitated by Prince Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of
York. In 1986, the couple referred a despondent Diana, tortured over
her failing marriage to Prince Charles and the pressures of royal life, to
astrologer Penny Thornton. “I just wanted to see,” she told
Thorton, “if there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Thorton read Diana’s chart, noting that she was a Cancer sun with Libra
rising and an Aquarius moon. “During our first meeting, my endeavor was to
provide her with the means to turn her situation around from being a passive
victim to an active member of the royal family who was equal to her husband,”
she recalled. “I suggested she used her suffering to relate to those who also
suffered. I think you could say it worked.”
With her best friend the Duchess of York often acting as her guide,
Diana would rely on Thorton and a succession of spiritualists, including the
grandmotherly psychic Betty Palko, naturopath Roderick Lane, celebrity
psychic Sally Morgan, astrologer Debbie Frank, clairvoyant
Vasso Kortesis (who would later write about Fergie with the publication
of Duchess of York: Uncensored),
medium Rita Rogers, and homeopathic dowser healer Jack Temple.
“Temple’s
contribution to princessly peace of mind,” Brown writes, “was to take Diana out
of the twentieth century and back in time through fossils taped to her body, or
make her sit and renew her energy in a stone circle.”
Diana had long been a spiritual seeker, much like her husband Prince Charles. “She was
one of the most spiritually attuned people I have known, and she had a profound
belief in God and good and evil, not merely as words but as powerful forces
that directly affect us all,” Simmons writes.
She also had a strong belief in the afterlife.
According to Bedell
Smith’s Diana: In Search of Herself, the Derbyshire-based
Rogers, a psychic of Romani origin, helped Diana believe she had communicated
with her alleged former boyfriend Barry Mannakee, her uncle Baron Fermoy, and
her grandmother Countess Cynthia Spencer, who she felt looked after her from
the spirit world.
Diana also frequently experienced déjà vu and believed that, in a past life,
she had been both a nun and an ancient Christian martyr.
Despite the loads of
money and time Diana spent on these esoteric endeavors, Bedell Smith notes that
she was also often ambivalent about their validity:
Diana said that she
would listen to astrological predictions, but added that she didn’t “believe
[astrology] totally. It’s a direction and a suggestion rather than it’s
definitely going to happen.” But she seemed to have greater faith in astrology
than she let on. “She was not ruled by every prophecy,” [Andrew] Morton wrote,
but “her belief at times [was] all-consuming.”
Diana also played down her engagement with such things. “She was heavily
involved in spirituality. Mediums, psychics, astrologers, etc.,” her
butler Paul Burrell recalled. “I watched
her, and she would giggle afterward and say, ‘You don’t believe, do you?’ and I
would say well I’m not sure.”Her public silence was the opposite of the Duchess
of York, who was open about her new age beliefs. Always savvier than her
earnest sister-in-law, Diana was, according to Smith, “Wary of telling people
about her ghostly encounters, because she was scared of being called ‘a nut.’”She
had reasons to be worried. The press caught on to her esoteric interests and
openly mocked her. But for Diana, always scared and wary of conventional
therapy, this roster of spiritualists occupied a valuable place in her
life—that of reassurance and friendship. “When she came to visit, she used to
throw her arms around me,” Rogers recalled. “She always
used to leave me a present... we had such laughs and such a fantastic
relationship.”Simmons concurred. “She was one of the closest friends I have
ever had, and we talked about everything and anything in an open, girlie way,
without secrets or subterfuge,” she writes. “I found that I was able to
unburden myself with Diana, who was also a good listener, and, because of her
own problems, had a ready understanding of other
According to Simmons, Diana not only wanted to know her own future but
that of those she loved. “She would ask about what the future held for Princes
William and Harry, and about Charles’s health, which
always caused her great concern,” Simmons says. “And she was always asking if
good things were going to happen to Fergie.”
She worried about her eldest son’s destiny, continually asking Sally
Morgan if William would indeed become king.
So distrustful of many in her life, Diana often turned to these paid
confidants when faced with major life decisions. According to Brown, when Diana
was debating whether to collaborate with Morton on 1992’s explosive Diana: Her True Story, she held a
two-hour session with astrologer Felix Lyle for guidance. Brown writes:
I said, “Well,
there’s scandal here,” Lyle [said]. “Neptune was playing a devious game and
also Pluto was playing a very strong role … and so there was complete
transformation in a way. She felt if this is what’s happening anyhow, I might as
well facilitate it. And we smiled and said, ‘Well, that’s it, then. The book is
going ahead.’”
In the last four
years of her life, Diana would grow particularly close to the chain-smoking
Simone Simmons, who lived above a Hendon supermarket. Simone was so close to
Diana that she was there the first time Martin Bashir called
Diana asking for an interview. She would later testify in the inquiry
into Bashir’s manipulation of Diana that led to her infamous 1995 Panorama interview:
She came in very
excited and said “Simone, he is going to do a programme about my charities,
isn’t that wonderful?” I thought it was brilliant…. But as time went on nothing
transpired and we all know what happened. He lied to her…He was an out and out
bastard. He destroyed her psychologically and made her paranoid — saying the
royals wanted to bump her off and to distrust her loyal staff and friends.
The spiritualists who
worked with Diana all noted how childlike and vulnerable she was, desperately
trying to fill an inner void stemming from childhood trauma. Some believed it
was written in the stars. “The two biggest problems in her chart were a Mars-Pluto
conjunction, which supplied a reason for her self-destructive tendencies and
was active at the time of her death,” Thorton said, “and Saturn’s
placement at the base of the life-direction axis, which echoed her deep sense
of being unloved and unlovable.”
But even some of these healers believed that Diana had become a “psychic
junkie,” who was being taken advantage of by false prophets. “Diana was one of
the most insecure people I had ever met,” Simmons writes. “That inner pain
drove her to seek relief and comfort in some very odd ways, and there was
hardly a therapy that, at some time or other, she hadn’t tried. Some were of
undoubted benefit. Others were pure quackery. A few were downright harmful.”
With her deep empathy for others’ suffering, Diana asked Simmons for
help in learning to heal the people she met. She also occasionally turned the
table on Simmons and attempted to heal her healer:
She had a collection
of rune stones with symbols inscribed on them which she kept in a small cloth
bag. She would sit on the floor, ask me to relax and to think of what was all
around me. Then she would pick out the rune stones herself, spread them out on
the carpet (which she insisted on doing herself), tell me to close my eyes and
concentrate, and then she would do a reading. She was very pleased when her
predictions came true, which I have to confess, they always did.
She also started to
believe she could recognize sickness in others. “She decided that Nelson
Mandela had something wrong with his spleen and his kidneys and told him so
during her visit to South Africa in 1997 when he had a swollen elbow,” Simmons
writes. “Mandela was very fond of Diana, but goodness knows what he thought of
her diagnosis.”
Like so many in her short life, several of these healers would
capitalize on having worked with Diana—sitting down for paid tabloid
interviews, appearing on TV, and after her death, writing tell-all books. They
also were at a loss over their inability to foretell or prevent her death.
Rogers would claim to have prophesied Diana’s doomed romance with Dodi
Fayed. “I’d told her she would meet a man of foreign descent with the initial
‘D’ on water—and that the man would be connected with the film industry,” Rogers said. “Not long
after, she rang me one day and said, ‘Rita, guess where I am? I’m on a boat
with a man I’ve just met called Dodi Fayed.’”
According to Rogers,
Diana was so impressed she took Fayed to receive a reading. Rogers claims she
told Fayed that he would be in a car accident in a tunnel, but did not see
Diana in the vision.
Thorton would also claim to have dreamed of Diana’s untimely death years
before. “Diana had often told me that she would never make old bones,” Simmons
recalls, “and was certain that she would ‘die young in unnatural
circumstances.’”
Whatever the insights or truth gleaned from her years exploring the
unknown, there is no doubt Diana had a certain kind of otherworldly gift. Brown
writes:
“It was an
indefinable quality, something very rare and rather beautiful,” one of her
relatives said. “I was not surprised years later when she emerged as a great
communicator. Even as a young child she had a strange way of getting through to
people.” Diana’s gift as Princess of Wales was that she was able to “channel”
ordinary people while actually having less and less real exposure to them.
Since her death in 1997, Princess Diana has become a kind of occult
figure herself. Her erstwhile butler Burrell, now a believer, claims to have
been visited by her spirit, and she was portrayed as a ghost on the TV
show The Crown. In his memoir Spare, Prince
Harry recalls going to visit a woman with “spiritual powers,” who told him:
“You’re living the life she couldn’t. You’re living the life she wanted for
you.”
Even from beyond, it seems Diana’s playful spirit came through. The
woman mentioned to Harry an ornament of Queen Elizabeth’s that his son Archie had
accidentally broken. “Your mother,” the medium said, “says she had a bit of a
giggle about that.”
