Some Apple Magic

September is apple season. I love going to the farmers market in my neighborhood to see what varieties they have, and sometimes we head out of the city and go apple picking. I love the sight, smell and of course the taste of apples!

This week over at Boston.com they ran an article about fifteen ways to use apples, ranging from barbecue sauce to apples. They don't mention you can use apples to tell the future, but you can.

Apples are associated in European and American lore with love and sex (thank you Adam and Eve!), so apple magic from New England tends to be focused on divining who your true love might be. There are many ways to do this, but here are a few of my favorites.

One of the easiest divinations is to pare an apple in one long piece, and then throw this long piece of peel over your shoulder. Look at the shape the peel makes on the ground. It should form the first letter of your true love's name. Some writers stress that you also need to twirl the apple peel three times around your head before you throw it over your shoulder.

This belief comes from England, where it was mentioned by John Gay in his comic 1714 poem The Shepherd's Week. The country maiden Hobnelia says,

I pare this pippin round and round again,
My shepherd's name to flourish on the plain.
I fling th' unbroken paring o'ver my head,
Upon the grass a perfect L. is read. 

She's happy with the result, since she's in love with a shepherd named Lubberkin. Yay!

You can easily do the apple paring divination surreptitiously while you are making a pie, but the next form of divination is a little harder to hide. Take two apple seeds, and give each the name of someone you think might be attracted to you. Wet the seeds in your mouth, and then stick them on your eyelids. Blink rapidly. Whichever seed falls off last is the person who will be your true love. If anyone walks in while you have apple seeds stuck on your eyelids just tell them you are exploring your New England heritage.

The two previous forms of divination are from Alice Morse Earle's 1902 book Old Time Gardens, Newly Set Forth. I think they're both kind of charming, but here's one that's a little spookier from Fanny Bergren's Current Superstitions (1896).

At midnight, stand in front of a mirror holding a lamp and a mirror. As you eat the apple, say the following:

Whoever my true love may be,
Come and eat this apple with me.

Your true love should appear, though I'm not sure if they will appear in the mirror or in person. Bergren notes that this charm works better if performed on Halloween. I will also note that sometimes the person who shows up in these love spells is not always what you expect.

There is of course a darker side to apple lore, which I have written about here, here and here. I describe some additional apple charms here. Enjoy apple season!

Morbid Rhymes for Children

Here's an interesting fact I learned from David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed. In the Colonial era, Puritan parents would take their young children to view recently dug graves. They wanted them to be aware of the possibility of a sudden death, and to instill a fear of eternal damnation into them. I think a parent would be reported for child abuse if they did that today!

According to this site, children were also taken to public hangings, and Puritan ministers routinely told them that at the Last Judgment even their parents would testify to God against them. Nice.

I mention these things just to note that in New England childhood wasn't (and still isn't) all innocence and fun, and we shouldn't be surprised to see echoes of these practices show up in children's culture, like nursery rhymes and counting games.

I think everyone is familiar with the "Eeney meeney miney moe..." counting game that kids play. Here is a slightly more morbid version:

Eggs, cheese, butter, bread, 

Stick, stock, stone, dead, 

Hang him up, lay him down, 

On his father's living ground.

Here's another one:

One zaw, two zaw, zig, zaw, san, 

Bobtail, vinegar, ticklum tan, 

Harum, scarum, virgum, marum, 

Stringlum, stranglum, back and John. 

Playing jump rope also sometimes involves a counting rhyme, and here's a grim one:

Mother, mother, I am sick, 

Send for the doctor, quick, quick, quick. 

How many days shall I live?

(Note: At this point the child starts jumping.)

And this morbid jump rope rhym has been stuck in my head all week:

Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie,

How many years before I die?

Three of these these rhymes were recorded in New England in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project for the Works Progress Administration, which was centuries after the Puritan domination of this area. The other is from the 1800s. Maybe these rhymes weren't influenced by the Puritans at all, but I'm sure there is a rich history behind them. If any readers actually played these games please let me know your thoughts!

I also find it interesting that during the Depression, the government paid folklorists to go out and collect things like children's rhymes. Sadly, nothing quite that creative has happened during our current economic downturn. Who knows what weird bits of our current culture will be lost to future generations?

I found these rhymes in B. A. Botkin's A Treasury of New England Foklore. 

Witches Flying Over New Hampshire

John McNab Currier, a physician and amateur scientist, was born in Bath, New Hampshire in 1832. Dr. Currier was also a folklorist and contributed a couple interesting articles to The Journal of American Folk-Lore in the 1890s.

In one article, he relates how several neighbors visited his parents' house one winter night. "In the course of this rural visit, several ghost and witch stories were related, half to keep up the conversation, and half to make those stare who might take stock in their genuineness..."

A neighbor lady told the following story. One bright moonlit summer night she was out in her front yard collecting wood for the morning fire when she heard female voices, "talking and laughing merrily", coming down the road. She waited to see who was walking down the road so late at night, but when they came close to her house she realized they weren't walking, but were flying overhead.

"...I looked up and saw nothing but the bright stars. I could hear their talking and laughing as they passed along overhead. Their voices grew fainter and fainter as they passed off in an opposite direction from whence they came, until I could hear them no longer."

It's a beautiful passage. It makes me want to fly at night with those ladies!

Dr. Currier's neighbor went on to explain that the invisible women were witches, flying to some nearby abandoned house to dance and frolic. She believed witches could separate their spirits, which had flown down the road, from their bodies. Their spirits had strength equal or even greater than their physical bodies, and retained youthful vigor no matter how old the witch was physically.

Francisco Goya, Witches' Flight, 1798.

Throughout history there has been debate over how (or even if) witches were able to fly. Did they actually do it physically? Did the Devil just delude them into thinking they flew? Were they hallucinating from herbal salves they applied to their bodies?

My favorite theory is that witches were (are?) able to enter trance states, much like shamans around the world can, and send their spirits flying into the night. I wish I was brilliant enough to think of this theory myself, but I'm not. It was first stated by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg in his books The Night Battles and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath. They're both great books, but very dense and academic. I'll leave the debate about the reality/unreality of spirit flights to another day...

I guess Dr. Currier's neighbor shared this theory as well, although she wouldn't have used the term "shamanism" in early 19th century New Hampshire. She went on to tell her listeners that the witches could disengage the spirits of people who were sleeping or unaware, and take those spirits with them to their revels. These captive spirits were firmly under the control of the witches, "and sometimes such stolen spirits were made the butt of fun at their evening's entertainments at some haunted house."

Clearly, don't mess with the witches, and stay away from haunted houses at night. Dr. Currier ends his story by wondering if these witches controlled the captive spirits by throwing a special bridle over the sleeper. The witch bridle has a long history in New England folklore which I've written about before.

I just found Dr. Currier's article this week, and I was really pleased to see someone from New England giving such a clear and cogent theory about the nature of witchery. It helps show the continuity of beliefs here with ancient beliefs from around the world. If you want to read the article yourself, it's in The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 2, No. 7 (Oct. - Dec. 1889).

A Moon Charm

This month we are lucky enough to experience a blue moon, which is the term applied to the second full moon to happen within a calendrical month. The first full moon in August was the Full Sturgeon Moon on August 1; our second full moon happens on August 31, and according to The Old Farmer's Almanac is the Full Red Moon.

So, our blue moon is also the red moon? A little confusing perhaps, but not if you remember two things:

1. Each full moon has a name, based on things happening in the natural world. The moon names are mostly derived from Algonquin names. For example, the full moon in January is called the Full Wolf Moon, because hungry wolves were out prowling through the forests in the winter looking for food. March is called the Full Worm Moon, because the ground would have thawed and the worms were starting to become active. The full moon in August is called the Full Sturgeon Moon, because at this time the sturgeon would be running in the rivers, but it was also sometimes known as the Full Red Moon, because the moon appeared red from the summer haze. Since we have two moons in August, The Old Farmer's Almanac gave the first one the traditional sturgeon name, and the second one the Full Red Moon label.

2. If you have two full moons within a month, the second one is always called a blue moon.

In honor of the blue moon Red Full Moon, I wanted to share this moon charm I found in Clifton Johnson's What They Say in New England.

Look at the moon some night and say, 

"I see the moon, the moon sees me; 

The moon sees somebody I want to see." 

Then name the person you wish to see, and in a day or two you will see that person. 

 I like it. It's short, sweet, and to the point.

Aleister Crowley's New Hampshire Vacation

School will be starting up again soon, and I wonder if kids are still asked to write essays about what they did on their summer vacations. I suppose most kids write about similar things: trips to the beach, playing Little League, family vacations, etc.

I wonder if any kids write about practicing ritual magic? That's what Aleister Crowley did on his summer vacation to New Hampshire in 1916.

Aleister Crowley has a very sinister reputation, which he actively cultivated, but I don't think it is entirely deserved. Crowley was born into a well-off British family in 1875, and even as a very young child he questioned his parent's devotion to fundamentalist Christianity, which resulted in his mother calling him "the Beast." The name stuck, and when he was an adult he called himself the Great Beast 666 to signify his opposition to Christianity.

However, Crowley was not a Satanist. While he was attending college in Cambridge he became a bisexual libertine, and also became interested in occultism and ritual magic. After college he joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, an order of ritual magicians in England that included notable members like W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and Sax Rohmer.

The Golden Dawn eventually splintered apart due to conflicts between members, and Crowley founded his own magical order called the Argentum Astrum after he had been contacted by a divine being called Aiwass while he was living in Cairo. Crowley felt that he had come in contact with the Godhead itself, and was able to converse directly with the Holy Guardian Angel that guided his life. It's not entirely clear if he thought this angel was an external being or part of his deep subconscious.

Before his death in 1947, Crowley founded even more magical orders and lodges, went through a string of male and female lovers, preached about the end of Christianity, and became addicted to a lot of drugs. Crowley felt there was no such thing as bad publicity, and reveled in being called the Wickedest Man in the World by the British press. Even in death he generated controversy. The physician who was attending Crowley died exactly one day after Crowley did, and the press claimed the magician had put a curse on the doctor.

With such a busy life, you can see why Crowley might want an occasional vacation, and in 1916 after leaving New York City he spent the summer on the shores of New Hampshire's Lake Pasquaney. In his book The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, he describes what he did on his summer vacation. He did not play Little League.

Before leaving New York, he drank a special potion to restore his youthful vigor. The effects didn't kick in until he reached New Hampshire, where he found himself unable to focus on any intellectual work and instead chopped down an enormous tree to build a wharf for his canoe. He claims that "Passers-by spread the story of the hermit with superhuman strength, and people came from all parts to gaze upon the miracle."

After the effects of this potion (which sounds like some type of amphetamine to me) faded away, Crowley decided to clear his mind of the remnants of his parents' Christianity by ritually crucifying a toad.

The result was immediately apparent. A girl of the village, three miles away, asked me to employ her as my secretary. I had had no intention of doing any literary work; but as soon as I set eyes on her I recognized that she had been sent for a purpose, for she exactly resembled the aforesaid toad. I therefore engaged her to come out every morning and take dictation.

While in New Hampshire, Crowley also had a vision of the universe, which he called the Star Sponge Vision.

 I lost consciousness of everything but a universal space in which were innumerable bright points, and I realized this as a physical representation of the universe, in what I may call its essential structure. I exclaimed, "Nothingness with twinkles!" I concentrated upon this vision, with the result that the void space which had been the principal element of it diminished in importance; space appeared to be ablaze, yet the radiant points were not confused, and I thereupon completed my sentence with the exclamation, "but what twinkles!"

I guess Crowley overall had an eventful summer vacation in New Hampshire - he even had a ball of lightning follow him into his cottage during a thunderstorm, which he wrote about in a letter to the New York Times. However, there is one small catch to the stories he told about his vacation: there's no such place as Lake Pasquaney in New Hampshire. (Thanks to Joseph Citro and Diane Fould's Curious New England for pointing that out.)

The cottage where Crowley vacationed.

 Well, according to the site Atlas Obscura and a book called The New England Grimpendium by J.W. Ocker, Crowley actually spent his vacation in Hebron, New Hampshire in a cottage on the shores of Lake Newfound. The cottage (photo above) was owned by Evangeline Adams, a well-known astrologer in the early 20th century. Adams and Crowley collaborated on several books together, but eventually had a falling out over who should get authorial credit.

Evangeline Adams

Crowley only has bad things to say about Adams in his Confessions, so maybe this is what motivated him to invent Lake Pasquaney. He clearly enjoyed his time at her cottage, but perhaps didn't want to give her any credit for loaning it to him. Crowley also enjoyed creating an air of mystery around himself, so that was probably part of the decision as well.

Lam!

One more interesting vacation tidbit. Hebron is very close to where Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by UFOs, and Crowley once had an encounter with an entity named Lam that looked much like the aliens who abducted the Hill. This site has some speculation about connections between the two. Read at the risk of your own sanity.