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.
Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images.
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.”
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.”
