Truant Lover Spell January 26, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Spells… it has been a while.
Location: nineteenth-century Ireland
Aim: to bring back a lover who is looking elsewhere
Ingredients: a fairy woman, a grave, a linen sheet, a moonless sky, seven candles and a wheat sheaf
Method:
(i) find a fairy woman to assist you: fairy women were the nineteenth-century Irish witches who, using the power of the fairies, sold magic to their communities.
(ii) go to a grave on a moonless night
(iii) put the wheat sheaf on the linen sheet and plant the seven candles around the grave lighting them
(iv) ‘wake’ the sheaf: unfortunately not clear what this means
(v) blow out all but one candle and bury the sheaf in the linen sheet.
(vi) go home and wait for spring when the truant lover will return and presumably the wheat sheaf will sprout
Dangers: the spell is recounted in a poem (Tiria 1874) and so some of the details are lacking, and some are (ahem) reconstructed. There is particularly some doubt about what ‘wake’ the sheaf means: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT COM. Is it to be burnt or wet or eaten? Here are the two stanzas: ‘Then hopeless Kitty sought old Nell, The fairy woman, to discover/ If she would cast the awful spell/ That gave back maids a truant lover/ And brought, as told, the wheaten sheaf,/ A linen sheet, and candles seven/ And ring the grave ah, woe and grief!/ While no moon hung her light in Heaven./ The sheaf was waked with dreadful rite,/ The candles round it dimly burning,/ Then buried by one flickering light/ And Kitty sought her home in mourning/ But hopeful through the winter hours/She prayed to Heaven the sweet Oremus/ That he’d come back with spring’s first flowers,/ But never more came handsome Shemus.’ If this spell works it will probably deliver on the basis of male psychology, ‘put him out of your mind for three or four months and you’ll see that he’ll come back to you…’
Antiquity: The earliest reference we’ve found it from the nineteenth century, but ‘through how many centuries roves back the rose’? This could be Neolithic for all we know. Perhaps at the foot of New Grange dyspeptic maidens buried the sheaf after ‘waking’ it.
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29 Jan 2018: Chris from Haunted Ohio Books, ‘Waked, I believe, means, exactly as it would in a funerary sense: to watch it through the night. You’ve got the sheet (shroud) and the candles (required to be placed around the dead) and the ‘corpse’ of true love–the wheat–which you hope will springeth green in due season. Shades of Osiris and wheat sown in containers in Egyptian tombs….’ No question, that Chris is right here. So obvious…
