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.”

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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.”