Devil at the Wedding (Ritual) June 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Chris twisted my arm this month to do a podcast on wedding superstitions. I was rather pessimistic about how interesting this would be (dresses, jilting…), but after a couple of weeks of reading I’d changed my mind. As one folklorist explained things to me ‘it’s all about sex and death’. Here just to give you the general tenor of the wedding supernatural is a chapbook story from Cheshire in the late eighteenth, or early nineteenth century (or at least set in Cheshire):
Yesterday being the Eve of All Saints, Sarah Mosely and Ann Lewis, living at service in the house of Mr. Harris, Tranmere, invited several of their acquaintances to their master’s house to spend the evening, having gained his consent on the evening previous. The master and mistress retired to rest about eleven o’clock, leaving the servants and their company to enjoy themselves as long as they thought proper. After perhaps drinking freely of the juice of grapes, besides other little nick-nacks in that way, they consented to try a scheme, the intention of which was to endeavour to see the faces of their intended lovers. They accordingly commenced by laying a table out with all the necessaries of life on it, with 5 chairs round it (there being five of them in company): then they read the Lord’s Prayer backwards, at the conclusion of which they hoped in the name of his Satanic Majesty, that their intended bridegrooms would come and seat themselves at the table! No sooner had they uttered this, than their wish was complied with: it being about the hour of twelve, the doors flew open, and in an instant five ghastly looking gentlemen were seated round the table!! The young women’s fright was now heightened to a considerable degree at the sight of so awful a set of beings. They sat for little more than half an hour, when they arose, made their ‘obedience’, and disappeared as they came. Sarah Mosely was so much frightened that she died this morning, and little hopes are entertained of the recovery of the remainder.
The Victorian who unearthed this text wrote with the most extraordinary naivety (remembering the lying ways of chapbooks): ‘I have been unable to trace the burial of this wretched woman’. Perhaps, say it quietly, because she never existed… The old darling even sent spies to Tranmere graveyard.
Anything more on weddings, death, sex and the supernatural: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
