The Rainbow Oracle

Back in 1989, I co-authored a book on color divination with Tony Grosso, a psychic who typically asked his clients to quickly–without thinking about it–name five colors. From their choices, he was able to give them a detailed reading. Tony was short in stature, barely five-feet tall, but a head above many psychics in talent. Clients came back again and again.

At some point, he put together a booklet, called Color Me Psychic, that described his personalized definition of various colors. The problem that developed, though, was that the repeat clients who had bought his booklet learned the meanings of the colors and came to readings prepared with the colors that they thought were right for what they wanted. Tony was able to work around that problem by using other psychic talents, including his own method of handwriting analysis in which he asked clients to sign their names. He would rub the fingernails of his thumb and index finger over the signatures and read the person’s life. He always looked dazed when he gave readings, as if he were in a trance.

And these readings were weirdly accurate.

When I met Tony, he had moved away from his color readings, but he’d given me a copy of his booklet and showed me how it worked. From there, I came up with the idea of creating a divination system in which anyone could use his color scheme for readings. He liked the idea and we settled on using the concept of five colored cubes.  The cubes overcame the problem of pre-selecting the colors you wanted. I wrote the proposal and it sold to Ballantine Books. The Rainbow Oracle was published in 1989 as a hardcover book in a box with the cubes along with a velvet drawstring bag.

For the rest of Tony’s life, The Oracle served as a platform for him in his seminars and workshops. He personally sold a lot of books. Meanwhile, I moved on to other projects.

The reason I’m recounting this story is that twenty-four years after it was initially published,  The Rainbow Oracle is out again as an e-book with Crossroad Press. Of course, an e-book doesn’t come with colored cubes, so I’ve revised the book slightly, providing readers with methods for creating their own colored cubes. In fact, the You Tube video below shows how one reader created her own cubes.

Katrina Joyner actually formatted the book when I was considering bringing it out with Smashwords. She was fascinated with the oracle and started sharing color readings with a group of friends who get together regularly. Her enthusiasm shows in the video and she carries on for quite a while before getting into the nitty gritty of readings and creating colored cubes. Near the end, she finally holds up a copy of the original book in its box that we had sent her after finding out how much she liked it.

Besides the video, you can find a detailed description of the book here on the Kindle site.

When we e-mailed her to let her know the post would be going up on 9/12, she replied that the date was an interesting synchro: My blog is set to advertise  the book on the 12th. I’d actually changed the date a few times.