Say ‘Easter’ to most people, and they’ll think of eggs or rabbits. They may even think of Jesus, hot cross buns, or ancient pagan deities. The whole celebration has become something of a mishmash of all these things. There are sombre overtones for the religious, and fun treats for the secular. In a lot of […]
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A Joker in the Pack: The Folklore of Playing Cards
You probably own at least one deck of playing cards. And if you’re anything like me, you literally only know how to play one card game. Solitaire. Have you ever considered using them to tell fortunes? Cartomancy doesn’t just rely on fancy decks of special cards. True, Madame Lenormand became famous for her divinatory cards […]
Fortune-Telling Made Easy: 4 Strange Forms of Divination
In dark and uncertain times such as these, it’s easy to wish you could see into the future. You might easily turn to fortune-telling practices to try and navigate the potentially choppy waters ahead. The idea of divination as a whole lies beyond the scope of this post. It’s not just fortune-telling, it’s more a […]
Meet Fortuna, Goddess of Luck, Abundance, and Fate
The English language features a lot of sayings about fortune or fate. Fortune favours the bold. May the odds be ever in your favour. They all boil down to the same thing – Fortuna may, or may not, give you a boost. She’s the woman to speak to if you want some luck sprinkled on […]
Who was Spring-heeled Jack, the Victorian scourge of London?
Spring-heeled Jack sits in the centre of a weird Venn diagram. It features urban legends, ‘penny dreadful’ serial fiction, theatre plays, and modern folklore. The last sightings of him were in the early years of the 20th century. Yet Jack still makes appearances in contemporary popular culture, including: True, in these later adaptations, he’s part […]
Inviting Sin-Eaters to a Funeral: Fact or Folklore?
There are few areas of human existence not touched by folklore and superstition. Unsurprisingly, burials and funerals come with a whole raft of beliefs and practices. Some of them persist to this day, while others, like sin-eaters, have largely died out. Despite the practice apparently lasting from the 17th to the early 20th century, there […]
