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News Blog

Psychic Susie Stevens Isn’t Worried About 12.21.12, But Predicts Big Changes

You’ve probably heard—maybe from someone with an unblinking stare—that this Friday, Dec. 21, marks the end of a 5,125-year cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar.

Some think it’ll be the day the Earth gets sucked into a black hole or collides with an imaginary planet called Nibiru. A sunnier, New Age spin makes it the beginning of a positive spiritual transformation propelling humanity into a new era.

Now, I’m a person of science and logic. Mostly. But there’s a sliver of mysticism embedded in the part of me that’s vaguely spiritual. It’s in there with my superstitions and obsessive-compulsions, with the kicks I get from horoscopes and fortune cookies.

A lot of people I know feel that way. When I mention a psychic coming to talk about the 12.21.12 phenomenon, most of my coworkers giggle—then admit they’d love a personal reading.

Walking into the Weekly’s conference room, Santa Cruz-based Susie Stevens, known as “Psychic Susie,” shudders and declares it haunted. Walking out, she looks at a framed photo of John Lennon and shudders again: “My God, he’s got no aura. That must have been taken just before he died.”

Despite the ghosts she feels all around her, she’s bubbly, often breaking into gleeful laughter at things that are only a little funny. And she’s strict, interrupting my personal reading several times to tell me to put down my pen (“too clinical”) or to stop smiling when asking a question (“Be serious”).

Believers in the 12.21.12 phenomenon point to catastrophic weather, earthquakes, political upheaval, economic instability and unusual astrological formations as signs the apocalypse is nigh. “I have gotten many calls per day the last couple of months with people really scared,” Stevens says. “I want to defuse that fear. I don’t see that.”

Astronomers say the 12.21.12 predictions are nonsense. Even Mayanist scholars have said the date’s not quite right, that the Maya never predicted a doomsday or that the end of the Long Count Calendar is a misinterpretation.

Stevens isn’t worried about Dec. 21, either. It’s not the end of the world, she says; it’s just when we’ll see a fateful “Finger of God” alignment.

Some astrology websites describe what’s called a “yod,” in which three planets line up like the corners of a slice of pizza. The configuration represents lessons, decisions and transformation. Interpretations vary widely from one website to the next, but most seem to agree Dec. 21’s got some serious yod—maybe two of them.

As Stevens (who says she doesn’t use computers) sees it, the Dec. 21 Finger of God lines up six planets at midday, which she says hasn’t happened in 600 years. As a result, she says, people will quit dreaming and start doing: changing jobs, getting married/divorced, recovering from addiction or falling into eternal denial.

“This is an alignment we don’t have much control over,” she says. “The ramifications will be felt immediately and forever more.”

Politically, Republicans and Dems will finally start cooperating, she says: “You’re going to see an almost Abraham Lincoln vibration from Obama, manifesting results."

With Saturn in Scorpio, she says, global warming—particularly flooding—will only get worse, particularly on the East Coast. But in four years, there will be a breakthrough in our understanding of it. “Scientists are starting to validate this concern not as a silly idea with two schools of thought, but they’ll give great credibility to this as a fact of the Earth,” she says.

Global terrorism will continue like a termite infestation, she says, but the forces of “goodness” will make gains. Likewise, she says, local gang violence will lessen. As police take budget cuts, the fed-up community will organize.

Regarding Monterey County’s beleaguered water supply, Stevens sees a fight coming in the spring, with opposing camps battling over the costs. In two years, however, the players will be savvier and more motivated to find a solution: “The people who really know what’s happening will override, because the community will back them.”

On Dec. 21, doomsday believers around the world will do their thing—maybe hunkering down in a backyard bunker, watching the sky or praying for the rapture. But Stevens?

“I’m just going to do the same thing that day,” she says. “Give readings, drink coffee and feed the feral cats. And play the lottery.”