BRING ME LOVE: Finding and Keeping Love Using Divination and Folk Magic

BY ICY SEDGWICK

Folklore is the collected body of the wisdom of ordinary people. It tells us about people’s preoccupations, given the amount of lore on certain topics, with love, money, and death being common themes. Indeed, folklore is full of charms to invite a lover into your life, and rituals to help you determine who that lover might be. There are even charms to help you keep your lover once they’ve arrived. The divination practices are the most accessible, practised at certain times of the year, involving items you would have around your home.
The procedures follow the same formula: perform a specific action at a specific time to learn the identity of a future partner (or clues to their identity). People often used saints’ days, like St Agnes’ Eve (20 January) or St Valentine’s Day (14 February), or notable dates in the calendar, like Midsummer’s Eve (23 June), Hallowe’en (31 October), and New Year’s Eve (31 December). The collective power of the day boosts the divination, and the ritual is often performed at midnight. Many were aimed at women due to the economic pressure on women to marry, given the lack of opportunities to earn a good living outside of marriage. Thanks to the flexibility of folklore, we can adapt these traditions to suit the 21st century, making them open to anyone who wants to practice them and become part of the rich tapestry of folk life.

The impending festive period offers several divinatory possibilities. At midnight on Christmas Eve, girls could pick twelve common sage leaves without damaging the bush to see a vision of their future husband. They might also make so-called dumb cakes, often out of soot and salt, which they made and ate in silence before going to bed to dream of their future partner. In some variations, their partner would appear to give them a glass of water (presumably to offset the salt).

On New Year’s Eve, unmarried girls threw their shoe at a willow tree to find out if they’d marry that year. Success followed if the shoe stayed in the tree. If the shoe fell out, they would not marry. Luckily, they also had nine attempts at throwing their shoe. Meanwhile, a Northamptonshire household notebook captured a 16th-century New Year’s Day practice, presumably for the men of the house given the pronouns in the rhyme. They ‘sowed’ hemp seed around the fire on 1 January, while saying,

“Hemp seed, hemp I thee sow, lead and unlead.
She that shall be my world, make come after one and rake,
Sleep, sleep, and I her see, wake and her know.”

Then they went to bed, lying on their right-hand side. They spoke only to say their prayers, and they should dream of their future partner. This practice evolved to see the ritual moved to Midsummer’s Eve, with women sowing hemp seed either in their garden or a graveyard, and the rhyme changed to:

“Hemp seed I sow.
Hemp seed should/will grow.
He who will marry me, come after and mow.”

If they looked behind them after sowing, they should see their future partner mowing the hemp.

There are no real records of these practices having been used, only the record of the belief. Folklorists may have recorded the existence of the practice, but not its results. Yet by the laws of averages, some people who used them must have had results, though whether that’s through their efficacy or coincidence is lost to time. Whether they worked or not, these practices speak to a deeply human desire to make a meaningful, emotional connection with someone else.

MEET THE AUTHOR

ICY SEDGWICK is a folklorist, researcher, author of Rebel Folklore and host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast.

On the web

www.icysedgwick.com

BOOKSHELF

BRING ME LOVE: FINDING AND KEEPING LOVE USING DIVINATION AND FOLK MAGIC BY ICY SEDGWICK,

published by Watkins, illustrated hardback (272 pages).

Note: Bring Me Love will be published on January 20^th.