Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 17, 1994                   TAG: 9402160062
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

JUST LOOKING AT THEM, YOU'D NEVER GUESS THEY WERE SO

She sits you down on a couch, just across from the TV, a VCR and a "Buns of Steel" video.

Daniels doesn't even own a crystal ball.

And neither do her friends.

In fact, just looking at them, you'd never guess they were psychic. But for nearly two decades, Daniels, Trudi Mardian and the Rev. Don Battey have been practicing psychics - shuffling tarot cards and juggling their past lives in the Roanoke Valley.

Daniels and Mardian estimate that there are a dozen working psychics in the Roanoke area, and hundreds of people who go to them for readings.

"It's like our support group," Daniels says of the psychic community.

They say they're just normal people with a different outlook, but for fear of what they call Bible-belt attitudes, they've stayed underground.

"There are people who would stone us if they knew what we did," Mardian says.

What they do - besides teach fitness and raise children - squirms away from any kind of neat definition. It's about palmistry and numbers, past lives and reincarnation, even UFOs.

"It's all a field," according to Daniels. "Just like science, but then there's all these branches of it."

Mardian and Daniels say they can let you shuffle a deck of tarot cards, deal them out, and they'll read your past, present and future in the sometimes macabre illustrations. Daniels says the drawings are not satanic, just an artist's representation of the subconscious mind.

They say they can take the numbers in your birth date, wave some arithmetic over them and tell you what kind of a year to expect.

Battey bills himself as an ordained Spiritual Science minister and a psychometrist, who can lay a few fingers to your watch or even a photograph and get information about you from its vibrations.

No one would name a "going rate" for these services, but according to literature he provided, Battey charges $60 for psychometry readings by mail if you are willing to send him a personal possession to work with, and $1 per minute for phone readings, $3 if you want it recorded.

Battey's church is the Rainbow Chapel in Troutville, where he and his wife, the Rev. Astrid Battey, have regular informal Sunday meetings but "don't pass the plate and don't ask membership."

He and his wife also receive Social Security.

All three wince at being called psychics, fearful of being lumped in with the stereotypical gypsy fortuneteller in scarf and gold earrings working suckers at carnivals with talk of heartlines and lifelines.

"The term psychic has a lot of baggage to it," Daniels says.

She prefers the title "sensitive," and Battey calls himself a "metaphysician."

Recently, Battey is focusing more on public awareness than on readings, offering a series of lectures with titles like "Everything You Wanted to Know About ESP and the Paranormal Mind but Were Afraid to Ask."

Whatever you call them, for the most part, they're still just regular folks.

Daniels will make you shake your head in disbelief when you realize she's answered half the questions on your list before you even asked them. But she'll remind you that she's human, responding with a playful, "that's eery" sort of "ooooh."

She's a local fitness instructor raising two teen-age daughters by herself. She teaches yoga and tai chi during the week and shakes out her white-blond hair at dance clubs on the weekends. She even goes bowling once in a while.

Mardian, a wide-eyed, girlish and giggly mother of four in jeans and tennis shoes, is slowly renovating her Old Southwest Roanoke home and occasionally stopping to tell her oldest daughter how much spaghetti to put in the pot.

And Battey is a talkative retired newspaper editor and publisher. He'll just as gladly tell you stories about journalism in the Catskills as run his hands slowly around your head in search of rough spots in your aura.

He came to the area when a soft voice, which he believes was his guiding spirit, told him, "Go south, go south."

He ignored it until he realized it meant business. One day while reading in his living room, the voice boomed, "Go south . . . NOW!"

True, they have their quirks.

Conversational patterns are definitely different.

"When Trudi and I get together," Daniels says, "we don't have to say anything. We'll just say one word and die laughing."

And they won't tell you how old they are.

Battey says days and hours are only a way of marking time and have nothing to do with age.

"I can tell you what year I was born," Mardian said.

She never did, though.

Daniels jokes that when she walks into a room people react the way they do when a priest walks into a party. "The public is afraid I'll sit down next to them and read their minds."

She recalls one man who wouldn't date her because he said she would be able to tell when he was lying, "but what he didn't realize is that if I really am intuitive, I would know just what any man would like."

And then there's the question everybody asks: Why don't you use your power to win the lottery?

"I don't want to win the lottery," Daniels says. "Money's got too much stuff to it. I'd rather just earn mine and have my life in balance."

Daniels, Mardian and Battey will laugh at themselves all day long, but they take "psychism" seriously.

"It's the ground everything I do grows out of, even the fitness parts," Daniels says.

She sees herself as a healer and teacher, here to use her intuition to help people confront and overcome whatever pain befalls them, and to teach them how to see the truth on their own.

"In readings people will say the truth about themselves because it's the first time they've been comfortable enough to say it," she says.

Even physical problems as serious as cancer can be healed by psychic means, according to Battey.

Daniels, Mardian and Battey all come from traditional Christian backgrounds, which they have not forsaken, they say, only modified. They all agree that their abilities are God-given.

"I feel like more of a Christian now than ever," Daniels says.

Still, Mardian says she's had women withdraw from her yoga classes because they were told that yoga is of the occult.

And local laws aren't so friendly, either.

In Roanoke, what state law calls a "fortuneteller's" license is $1,200 annually, and not pro-rated. Roanoke County requires a similar fee.

Daniels believes the high fees are charged to "keep the circus elements out of town."

No one interviewed for this story would talk specifically about how they deal with these licenses, but according to Battey, most psychic readers become ordained ministers and establish churches to sidestep the legalities.

Meanwhile, the psychic view of things appears to be gaining acceptance nationwide, even taking the form of a 3 a.m. infomercial like Dionne Warwick's "Psychic Friends Network."

Mardian worked for a year and a half as a "phone psychic" for Warwick's network. While she admits it might seem silly, she says it "definitely has a service. If it's helping people, it's valid."

"People are opening up to [psychism] because they are afraid and lack the money to see [doctors and psychologists]," Battey says.

But there are still skeptics, naysayers and joke-makers.

Daniels says she doesn't bother to respond to them anymore. She says when it's time for them to believe, they'll come to it on their own.

But a good sense of humor is a must, she concedes.

"You have to be able to laugh at yourself. . . . When you can finally make jokes about psychics, then it's like we're accepted."

And that's a high priority for Daniels.

"I have such a normal life," she says. "I just want to be, like, the psychic next door."