Meet the Woman Who Claims to Predict the Future…With Asparagus
She calls herself an "asparamancer."
Fortune telling is either a bit of an art or a bit of a con, depending on your point of view. Regardless, trying to predict the future has been around about as long as human beings have. And throughout the years, mystics have relied on a wide variety of tools to help them with their forecasts: tea leaves, crystal balls, tarot cards, and palm lines. We thought we’d pretty much seen it all at this point.
How wrong we were.
Meet Jemima Packington, a 61-year-old mystic from England who uses asparagus to predict the future.
Wait, let’s try that again.
Meet Jemima Packington, a 61-year-old "asparamancer" from England who hurls asparagus onto a flat surface to predict the future.
Oh, you’re not familiar with the word “asparamancer?” Of course you wouldn’t be, considering Jemima Packington is the only one in the world. According to The Telegraph, the term was actually coined by a friend of Packington's to describe her unusual fortune telling method that, by the way, goes a little something like this:
1. Grab a handful of asparagus stalks.
2. Fling said asparagus in the air.
3. Predict the future based on the shapes they make when they land.
The asparamancer claims she began the practice of tossing stalks at the age of eight, a skill she says she inherited from her mystic aunt who was an avid reader of tea leaves. The Somerset native tried other vegetables, including broccoli, but found only asparagus provided the most accurate predictions. She now displays the skill publicly at the Asparagus Festival held near her home in the spring, where she makes her predictions for the coming months.
Now if all this is sounding a bit ridiculous (it should be) we would be remiss not to point out that Packington claims to have a pretty stellar track record with predictions. She, allegedly, correctly predicted Brexit along with several other world events last year by “reading the stalks.” But we would also be remiss not to point out that many of these predictions were either a) not shared publicly or b) a little vague (e.g. “a famous couple will get divorced in 2017.”)
More recently, The Daily Mail reports that the self-styled “Mystic Veg” put her skills on display when she stopped by the British show This Morning to demonstrate her ability. After tossing her veggies, Packington predicted that the H and N shapes created by the fallen asparagus stalks could mean a November wedding for Prince Harry.
Yes, really.
Needless to say, viewers were not impressed.
We think we’ll stick with tea leaves. Or tarot cards. Or anything else, really.
