PSA Profiles
The Ethical Medium: Katharine Hargreaves on Divination, Ethics, and Healing
Source: Katharine Hargreaves
Katharine Hargreaves is a professional psychic medium, shamanic practitioner, psychedelic minister, and initiated medicine woman whose practice is deeply rooted in West African divination traditions. Blending a background in user experience design and technology education with her spiritual work, Hargreaves approaches mediumship as a form of systems thinking designed to guide people toward soulful, transformational, and healing outcomes.
Hargreaves was a highly sensitive child, experiencing what she describes as claircognizance (just knowing things) and clairsentience (just feeling things). These abilities, which manifested as an awareness of others' emotions and intentions, were initially overwhelming and terrifying, leading her to suppress them.
Spiritual Awakening and Lineage
A significant spiritual awakening occurred around 2016 when Hargreaves began receiving information that she recognized as "not of me." She identified these as "inviolate truths"—information with a "different texture" of reality, distinct from personal bias or lived experience. This channeling of external information signaled the activation of her mediumship.
In 2019, while on a nine-month "walkabout," Hargreaves encountered her lineage at a gathering in Oakland, California. She was immediately and intuitively drawn to a form of West African divination involving a stick that communicates with the spirit realm. This connection led her to work with the medicine immediately, leading to miraculous healings and a complete remaking of her life within a year. Hargreaves was formally initiated into the tradition of the Dagbara people in April 2021 and has since been initiated a total of three times. She now works with the three main beings in this cosmology, offering three forms of divination: stick divination, voice divination, and Jina divination (working with jinn spirits).
Hargreaves emphasizes a set of rigorous ethical protocols designed to maintain integrity, remove personal bias, and empower the client.
Removing Bias and Ensuring Client Empowerment
To mitigate human bias, Hargreaves' clients speak their questions or prayers into a quarter (a coin) before entering the session. This practice ensures she has no prior knowledge of their specific questions, allowing the channeled information to come purely from the spirits. She is also scrupulous about clearly labeling the source of the guidance:
Spirit Information: What comes through her channeling.
Personal Commentary: Any additions based on her personal experience or understanding, which she explicitly calls out.
Hargreaves is extremely cautious when addressing life-altering decisions, such as those concerning birth, death, or romantic love (e.g., breaking up or marriage). She operates from the understanding that there is no single, fixed future, but rather multiple timelines and doorways of possibility.
She offers an example of a client who was told by another medium that her husband would die in three months. Hargreaves chose not to confirm this possibility, realizing that affirming it could influence the reality by fixing the client's belief. Instead, she explored less fixed possibilities, which opened a door to a more optimistic future (the husband did not die). Her goal is to empower clients by presenting possibilities that are hopeful and life-giving, rather than making them dependent on a fixed prediction.
Handling Complex and Sensitive Subjects
Health, Financial, and Legal Advice
Hargreaves is clear about the boundaries of her professional scope. The divination she practices is a "way-opening medicine," best used to identify and address the root of a blockage or a stuck situation.
Legal/Financial: She cannot offer legal or traditional financial advice, stating, "This is not my lane." Instead, she focuses on the deeper, energetic blockages that are manifesting as symptoms in their legal or financial life.
Health: Hargreaves is not medically intuitive or a curandera (healer). She can address illness only if it's an energetic block in its early stages. If an ailment has progressed to the point where it requires medical attention (e.g., a client in their mid-40s asking about IVF-level fertility), the spirits direct her to advise the client to consult a doctor. She is committed to being transparent when an issue is outside the scope of a ritual and requires conventional medicine.
Readings on Third Parties
Hargreaves’ personal policy is to never look outside the energetic system of the client present in the session. As this is a free-will universe, she cannot ethically speak to the needs or issues of a non-consenting person, such as a partner or family member.
She will advise the client on "their side of the equation" and what they can do to address the problem.
For issues concerning a relationship, she strongly suggests a couples divination, where both individuals consent to have their shared system examined. If the third party is unwilling, she is only able to look at half the picture.
Client Vulnerability and Accountability
Protecting Clients from Emotional Harm
Clients often seek her out during periods of intense grief. Hargreaves uses her deep empathy and background as a writer to be precise with her language. She does not "shield" clients from difficult truths but delivers them with illumination and clarity, recognizing that difficult messages can bring relief. Sessions are treated as a shamanic process, where she holds space for clients to process and move through intense emotions.
A key protective measure is the provision of healing ritual prescriptions from the spirits and ancestors. No client is left with a "bomb of information" without a tangible way to deal with that truth—a path to move anger, work with grief, or clear deep ancestral curses. She stays connected with clients after the session, inviting them to check in as they embark on these ceremonial processes, viewing the inevitable internal resistance as a necessary part of the ritual's work.
Transparency and Accountability
Hargreaves' divination practice has a built-in system of checks and balances:
The Stick: The main communication device with the spirits.
The Cowrie Shells: A different group of spirits—the grandmothers—that serve as a check on the stick's message, ensuring the reading is complete and accurate.
She will check multiple times with the shells to confirm she has the full picture, especially when dealing with vulnerable topics or intense rituals. She is transparent with clients about the intensity of the required rituals, often speaking with the spirits to make slight adjustments if a client genuinely feels a ritual is beyond their capacity. She stresses that the client is paying for her to hold the space and bring the information forward, not for guaranteed results. The spirits show where the client is stuck and give them the way out, but the client must do the work.
Building Trust in a Scrutinized Industry
To maintain trust and avoid the "scare tactics" common in the industry (e.g., claiming a curse needs removal for a large fee), Hargreaves adheres to the simple code of ethics: "Do no harm." Her work must be healing, not misleading, disempowering, or exploitative.
She is transparent about the need for reciprocity in the exchange, explaining that she operates within a capitalistic society and must charge for her service to avoid it becoming a form of extraction on the healer. This exchange, however, is overseen by a strong code of conduct:
No Black Magic/Sorcery: She will not participate in manipulative rituals, such as those intended to make someone fall in love.
Accountability: Hargreaves is accountable to a clan of diviners on "Turtle Island" (North America) and adheres to their community protocols. She stresses that any healer working without a teacher, mentor, or peer group lacks the necessary oversight for ethical accountability.
Message for Skeptics
Hargreaves encourages skeptics to "try it and see for yourself." She points out that the form of divination she practices predates religion and science by thousands of years and is a communion with the intelligence of nature.
She uses a powerful analogy: The rational mind processes information at 40 bits a second, while the body-mind processes it at 40 million bits a second. By insisting on rational logic, skeptics narrow their aperture of information. Her practice offers a 360-degree view that is embodied and creates new pathways of possibility. While belief isn't required, an open mind and curiosity are necessary for the valuable guidance to be received and acted upon. The "proof is in the pudding," as many skeptics who sit with her are "blown away" by the precision of the information.
Learn more about Katharine and her work at www.wildalive.co
