Doreen Virtue, born Doreen Hannan in April 1958 in Southern California, worked as a psychotherapist before a 1995 carjacking she described as an angelic intervention redirected her toward tarot readings and New Age publishing. Over the next two decades she became one of Hay House's most prolific authors, publishing more than fifty books and dozens of divination card decks built around angels, ascended masters, fairies and saints, drawing eclectically on Christian, Hindu, Celtic and Native American imagery. She held a masters degree in counseling psychology from Chapman University and a doctorate in psychology from California Coast University.
In February 2017 she was baptized by an Anglican priest in Hawaii and announced a conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, publicly renouncing the angel and oracle work that had built her career. She began warning former readers to stop using her own card decks, calling the practices spiritually dangerous, and pulled many of her New Age titles from print.
She went on to earn a further masters degree in biblical and theological studies from Western Seminary in Portland in 2021, and now produces Christian teaching content built specifically around examining the New Age movement she once led. The reversal split her former audience, with some readers following her into Christianity and others continuing to use the decks and books she now disavows, which remain widely in print and in use today independent of her current views on them.