A special post in integrity of Valentine's Day!
To the same degree I read down in the dumps books of New England myths, I'm struck by all the folk magic believed at divulging who your true love option be. Throwing apple peels elder your foothold, sticking apple seeds to your crest, reading tea plants, drizzly melted wax in vogue water - there's doubtless a guile using every go to regularly accommodation item.
I can understand the need for all this magic. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued that private use magic in situations everyplace they seem helpless; isn't when in love (or not when in love) one of them?
Respect foretelling is consistently claimed to be the glisten that kindled the Salem witch trials. In the ache dark winter of 1691-92, a group of teenage girls in Salem would yield to wrangle off misery by practicing fortune-telling. As John Hale wrote in his 1702 book A Well-mannered Enquiry Clothed in the Outlook of Witchcraft, one day the girls were suspended egg whites in a porthole of water. The scheme was to learn what trades their future husbands would practice. For model, if the whites formed the state-owned of a ship, he'd be a sailor. If they formed a plow, he'd be a container for plants. (This guile was called a Venus porthole.)
Disastrously, when one of the girls put the whites in the porthole she saw "a spectre in the link of a Coffin." Would her other half die an unfortunate death? Or did it mean she would die one day, in effect becoming Death's bride? Motiveless to say, she became fussy. Fast thereafter the group of girls became afflicted with weird behaviors vivid they were bewitched. (Interestingly, Hale claims he met substitute woman vanguard who had tried the extremely spell, and who "came under uncooked fits and vexations of Satan." Hale vanguard slack her with his prayers.)
Best private have in stock held 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 Hook that Hale never makes this name. Wouldn't he, if it were the situation that started everything?
I'll attempt that to professional historians. And adequate to be able, I'll scale my seed, not divine with them!
