Cleo had an interest in the occult before she began working with PRN. She knew how to read cards--which is an acquired skill--and she was familiar with magick and other forms of divination, also known as fortune-telling. Everyone she knew--people who saw her on a regular basis for years--believed that she did not set out to con anyone, and she may not have. By all accounts, she was a real practitioner. That might not make sense. A psychic is a psychic, right? They're all seen as scam artists. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference between someone obvious like Sylvia Browne and John Edwards and the ladies who flip cards over on a table.
Whether psychism is real or not, Sylvia Browne and John Edwards used stereotypical, modern techniques devised specifically by cheaters to fool the audience. They'd cold read, fish for names in the crowd, and tell people what they wanted to hear. We all want to believe that our dead loved ones are looking down on us, so they confirmed that every chance they got. It's all fake, but there's a completely different side to these practices. In much of Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, magick and divination are an everyday part of life. There are practitioners with lineages stretching back centuries, another parlor or a witch on every street corner--leaders within the community. They are not all out to cheat you out of your money, and they are to be taken seriously--not necessarily because they have some sort of mystical power, but because their traditions are a staple in their religion or their culture as a whole. In civil society we respect people's beliefs, and who are we to tell the village shaman that he's full of it while we're bulldozing his land? It might be true, but it's not our place. There's also modern movements, like Wicca, which have now become major religions. In China, magick, astrology, and I-Ching--their divination system--are all established religious practices, and the mainstream public takes part in them. This is also the case in Africa. There's no cold readings, no fishing through the audience. There's real lore. They take a lifetime to learn it, and they believe in it, body, mind, and spirit. That was also the case in pre-modern America where they'd practice Appalachian Conjure in the South or Pow-wow in Pennsylvania. Those traditions are still around in some form or another to this day. To them, the occult is a traditional religious practice as valid as any other religion.
Cleo claimed to be a Voodoo woman. Whether or not she subscribed to the actual religion is unclear. Many people integrate practices from different systems, borrowed from indigenous groups, European folk magick, and Wicca. But within that faith, ancestry is very important, and she did in fact have an Afro-Caribbean heritage. At some point, her ancestors had similar beliefs. That allowed her to legitimately claim that she was part of an ancient line, which matters quite a bit to those who give credence to her belief system. Behind the scenes, that was who she was. She kept an altar in her home. She'd light candles, cast spells, and work as a medium. She spoke like someone that had spent years studying. She actually thought that she could contact spirits and working with the other side, and she wanted to help people. Things might not have turned out that way. But she didn't rip off her wig, grab a cigarette, and revert to an American accent the second they stopped filming her commercials. She was a real Voodoo woman--as real as any other, and this is an important distinction. Sylvia Browne laughed at the audience. She reportedly told one of her many ex-husbands that if her followers were dumb enough to believe in what she was saying, they deserved to be conned. She was a convicted fraud. She'd intentionally come up with schemes. She fooled investors into buying into a fake gold mine and ran off with the cash. John Edwards is a textbook example of a conman, using techniques straight out of a fake psychic textbook, and he's not even trying to hide it. He learned how to lie so he could make a bunch of money. That's how he earned the title of the biggest douchebag in the universe on South Park. Cleo was sincere. They were not. The result was the same, but it's still an important distinction.