The Magic Easter Garter

Good Friday is coming up, which means Tony and I will run around the house and strike all our furniture with a piece of wood. Preferably, we should do this at noon. This is something that Tony's grandmother used to do, so we carry on the tradition the best we can. I'm not quite sure why we're supposed to do this on Good Friday. I think his grandmother mentioned scaring out the evil spirits, which sounds good to me. 

I'm writing about this not because it has any particular connection to New England folklore (his grandmother was Italian-American and from New Jersey), but as an example of the interesting folk practices that have become attached to the Easter season. Everyone is familiar with the Easter bunny and egg hunts, the most widespread American folklore associated with this holiday, but there are definitely some other curious traditions out there in the world.

In Sweden, little girls dress like witches at Easter-time and travel door-to-door, begging for candy. It sounds a lot like Halloween to me, but the Swedes claim that witches actually gather together before Easter to cause trouble. Are people buying them off by giving them candy? In neighboring Norway it is traditional to read mystery novels at Easter. Publishers release new mysteries the week before Easter, and most TV stations show mysteries.

Easter witches, from this site.

In Latin America and some Mediterranean countries people build bonfires and burn effigies of Judas Iscariot, while in Slovakia and the Czech Republic men traditionally spank or whip women on Easter Monday, a practice that supposedly maintains the women's beauty. The next day women retaliate by pouring buckets on cold water on men. I don't know if that makes the men look better, or just makes the women feel better.

All those examples are just a preface to this little piece of Easter love magic I found in Fanny Bergen's Current Supersitions (1896). Ms. Bergen collected this piece of foklore from an informant in Salem, New Hampshire:

Knit a garter and color it yellow. Don it on Easter Day. Wear it for a year. The wearer will be engaged before the year is out. 

The 19th century was ripe with love spells like this one, and they were associated with all kinds of holidays: Easter, Halloween, May Day, Midsummer's Day. After the Industrial Revolution people used magic less for life-and-death matters and more in those other domains where they felt powerless, like romance. Can't get the farmer down the street to give you a second look? Make a magic Easter garter and not only will he give you a look, he'll even propose.

I don't know where the tradition came from, but an informant from Maryland also told Ms. Bergen something similar. I assume it died out when people stopped wearing garters. If anyone knows anything else about the magic Easter garter please get in touch!

Looking for love, but finding Satan!

Love magic has a long history in New England. For example, the girls who started the Salem witch trials made a Venus glass, which was supposed to predict their future husbands. As we all know, once they started dabbling in magic they got more than they asked for.

Love magic continued for centuries here, and I found this story in Westerly (Rhode Island) and Its Witnesses by Frederic Denison, published in 1878. Once again young women are involved, and once again things get out of hand.

In the 1700s, two young ladies named Hannah Maxson and Comfort Cottrell were staying at the Westerly home of one Esquire Clark. One afternoon, while Mr. Clark was out on business and his wife was ill in bed, Hannah and Comfort became bored and decided to try some love magic. What could possibly go wrong?


They took a ball of yarn to the well, and repeatedly tossed it down and pulled it up, all the while reciting Biblical psalms backwards. According to popular belief at the time, these magical actions should make their future husbands appear.

As the sun went down, Hannah and Comfort went to the front of the house to wait for their beaus to manifest. Their thoughts turned to rich, handsome men.

Soon, they saw a figure walking towards them. Was it a future husband?

As the figure got closer, they noticed he was taller than the average man. In fact, he was between 8 and 10 feet tall. His height wasn't the only thing strange. His face was hideous - his eyes were the size of saucers, and flames spouted from his mouth.

Clearly, this was not what they expected.

The young ladies ran into the house, shrieking, and threw themselves onto the bed where Mrs. Clark lay ill. The monster, meanwhile, made his way to the front door.

At this point, Mr. Clark returned home. Seeing a large, and possibly demonic, monster in front of his house, the pious man began to pray. The prayers worked! The monster shuffled away, and was seen no more in Westerly.

Hannah and Comfort never used the Bible for magical purposes again, and lived very religious lives from that time on. Unfortunately Mrs. Clark died shortly after that night. The shock of having a monster from Hell on her stoop was too much for her weakened constitution.

It was only decades later that the people of Westerly learned it was not Satan who appeared that evening, but a fellow mortal. A man named Daniel Rogers, who had once been a neighbor of the Clarks, confessed he had really been the monster, and his demonic visage was merely a large jack-o-lantern. He wanted to play a prank on the girls, but had kept quiet for years afterwards out of guilt for causing Mrs. Clark's death.

That's the end of the story. It reminds me of an episode of Scooby Doo. The monster's real - no, wait, it isn't! The part about Daniel Rogers being the monster feels a little tacked on to me. Isn't this story really about the perils of unmarried young women with too much free time? A cautionary tale from a more patriarchal era?

I think so, and a very similar story recorded in 1928 among the Wompanoag of Gay Head proves my point.

Once upon a time, a Wompanoag minister had four daughters. One evening while he was out preaching, his daughters tried a little love magic that involved hanging their underwear in front of the fireplace. Soon a howling wind picked up, and they heard someone (or something?) pounding on the doors and windows of their house. The girls cowered inside, terrified. When the minister came home, he saw a large creature, half human and half animal, clawing at the front door. The monster disappeared into the night, and the minister reprimanded his daughters for raising spirits. (From William Simmons's Spirit of the New England Tribes (1986)).

I definitely like this version better. There's no Scooby Doo ending, just magic, a monster, and some teenage girls causing trouble. It could be the basis for someone's thesis in Women's Studies.

Love Magic Gone Bad

The Ann Putnam house in Danvers (formerly Salem Village)

A special post in honor of Valentine's Day!

When I read through books of New England folklore, I'm struck by all the folk magic aimed at revealing who your true love will be. Throwing apple peels over your shoulder, sticking apple seeds to your forehead, reading tea leaves, pouring melted wax into water - there's probably a technique using every common household item.

I can understand the need for all this magic. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued that people use magic in situations where they feel helpless; isn't being in love (or not being in love) one of them?

Love divination is often claimed to be the spark that kindled the Salem witch trials. In the long dark winter of 1691-92, a group of teenage girls in Salem would gather to fight off boredom by practicing fortune-telling. As John Hale wrote in his 1702 book A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, one day the girls were floating egg whites in a glass of water. The goal was to learn what trades their future husbands would practice. For example, if the whites formed the shape of a ship, he'd be a sailor. If they formed a plow, he'd be a farmer. (This technique was called a Venus glass.)

Unfortunately, when one of the girls put the whites in the glass she saw "a spectre in the likeness of a Coffin." Would her husband die an early death? Or did it mean she would die soon, in effect becoming Death's bride? Needless to say, she became upset. Soon thereafter the group of girls became afflicted with strange behaviors indicating they were bewitched. (Interestingly, Hale claims he met another woman later who had tried the same spell, and who "came under sore fits and vexations of Satan." Hale later freed her with his prayers.)

Most people have assumed the girls John Hale describes were the ones who started the Salem witch trials, but historian Mary Beth Norton points out in her book In the Devil's Snare that Hale never makes this claim. Wouldn't he, if it were the incident that started everything?

I'll leave that to professional historians. And just to be safe, I'll scramble my eggs, not divine with them!

Apple Love, and Some Media Updates

Adam and Eve go apple-picking!

My last post was about the ominous side of apples. Today, I thought I'd share some happier lore. Sure, apples have a bad reputation in Western culture because of that incident in the Garden of Eden, but that story isn't just about sin, it's also about love. If Adam and Eve (or Steve) hadn't eaten the forbidden fruit, there'd be no love in the world!

Discovering the identity of your true love through magic was widespread in New England in the 1800's. I think some of it spread through the magazines of the time, but some may also have been brought over with the Puritans. Apples figured prominently.

To figure out if someone loves you, split open an apple and count the seeds. The number of seeds inside determines where the relationship is heading. There is a chant that goes like this:

One I love,
Two I love,
Three, I love, I say
Four, I love with all my heart,
And five I cast away;
Six he loves,
Seven she loves,
Eight they both love;
Nine he comes,
Ten he tarries,
Eleven, he courts,
Twelve he marries;
Thirteen wishes,
Fourteen kisses,
All the rest little witches.

There's another way to use apple seeds to predict love. Let's say you're romantically interested in multiple men. Take some apple seeds, and assign the name of a potential lover to each. Wet the seeds and stick them on your forehead. The one that falls off last is the person you're meant to be with.

Those are quoted in Botkin's Treasury of New England Folklore, but are originally found in William Wells Newells' Games and Songs of American Children and Alice Morse Earle's Old Time Gardens.

******************************

New England folklore has been appearing in the media lately. Today's Boston Globe has an article about George's Island, including the ghost who is supposed to haunt Fort Warren, something I wrote about a while ago.

The October 2009 issue of Martha Stewart Living has a brief article about New England gravestone art. There are some nice photos of historic Massachusetts cemeteries in Haverhill, Salem and Ipswich. Martha Stewart can even make death look tasteful. I don't think the article is online, but you can see many grave stones from across New England at A Very Grave Matter.