PUCK’S POTION
In 2002, scientists recreated a #Shakespearian #lovepotion ❤️ Studies of #midsummernightsdream led them to create the elixir used on #Titania 🧚 Queen of the Fairies to make her fall in love with the first person she saw. In the play, the mischievous character #Puck was instructed to find a “little western flower” and produce a magic potion from its juice. The brew is applied to the sleeping Titania’s eyes and she falls in love with Bottom—despite the fact that he has been given a donkey’s head. 🐴
The Royal Society of Chemistry says research of the play’s text revealed the wild pansy—or ‘heart’s ease’—was the basis of the potion. It was used in old folk remedies for cardiac problems—so, problems of the heart!
Fragrance company Quest International was then asked to create a #perfume based on this fictional potion. Dr Charles Sell, head of organic chemistry at Quest, said: “There are scores of references to plants and herbs in Shakespeare, who was obviously very knowledgeable about their real and mythical potency.” The resulting perfume was called ‘Puck’s Potion’, but it had a powerful, old-fashioned parma violet smell, and they opted not to commercialise it.
You’ll have to rely on your wit and good looks instead this #ValentinesDay ! 😉❤️ Painting: ‘Scene from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania and Bottom’, Edwin Landseer, 1851
#FolkloreThursday #folklore #potions #shakespeare #herbalremedy #folkremedy
PRINTING PRESS & WITCHES
The advent of the printing press & resulting mass sharing of frightening #tales regarding #witchcraft spread fear of #witches & the harm they could inflict. This led to the rise of counter-witchcraft #folklore & #cunningfolk offering personal spiritual protection.
FAERIE TREE VS DELOREAN
Stories of the misfortune that befell those who dared cut down a #faerietree are legion.🌳 Perhaps the most famous tale about faerie thorns is that of the ruin of the #DeLorean car company, whose factory was built over the sacrificed roots of a faerie tree.🧚 The tree was one of the most important religious symbols to the #Celts. Virtually all species of trees were deemed magical in some ways, however none was more tightly linked to the faerie world than the #thorn or #hawthorn, whose spiky thorns, white blossoms, and distinctive red haws or berries were said to have been favoured by the Good People. All individual hawthorns shared the faeries’ general beneficence towards their species, but certain thorns marked faerie lands: those that grew in a group of three; those that grew alone in a stony field; and those those that grew together with an oak and ash to make the most magical of all groves.
#FolkloreThursday
ALEWIVES
“For centuries, #Alewives dominated the brewing industry.🍺 Professional brewsters and alewives had several means of identifying themselves and promoting their businesses. They wore tall hats to stand out on crowded streets. To signify that their homes or taverns sold ale, they would place broomsticks—a symbol of domestic trade—outside of the door. 🐈 Cats often scurried around the brewsters’ bubbling cauldrons, killing the mice that liked to feast on the grains used for ale. “If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is all iconography that we now associate with witches. 🧙♀️ While there’s no definitive historical proof that modern depictions of witches were modelled after alewives, some historians see uncanny similarities between brewsters and anti-witch propaganda.” – @addisonnugent @atlasobscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/women-making-beer Image: #MotherLouse #Alewife by David Logan (1634-1692) Wellcome, Wikimedia Commons #witches #folklore #brewing #feministemployment
APPALACHIAN DIALECT
As the linguistic legend goes, the #Appalachian ⛰️ dialect is so odd and archaic, hundreds of years out of step with the rest of the English-speaking world, that it’s the oldest living English dialect—older than the speech of Shakespeare, closer to Chaucer. Isolated from the outside world by natural barriers, they have preserved the language of #ElizabethanEngland. It’s a myth repeated frequently by linguaphiles, but is it true? Language has an important place in the #folklore of #Appalachia and one of the ways Appalachian communities show solidarity and belonging. Perhaps it’s evolved to become its own entity, but the romanticised past is a story all its own. JSTOR by linguist #ChiLuu Photo: Tony Barber, Getty Images #FolkloreThursday #WorldMountainDay #language
LABYRINTH
In the 1986 classic Labyrinth (i.e. best film ever) Sarah’s dog ‘Merlin’ is also Sir Didymus’ mount ‘Ambrosius’. 🐾 In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain Merlin is called Merlin Ambrosius 🧙♂️—revealing the dog’s secret identity.
BOYS & GIRLS COME OUT TO PLAY
The old English 18th century nursery rhyme ‘Boys & Girls Come Out to Play’ 🤾🏻♀️ warns of the dangers of faeries luring children out of their beds. 🧚🏻♀️
Boys and girls come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day;
Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And come with your playfellows into the street.
Come with a whoop, come with a call,
Come with goodwill – or not at all.
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A half-penny loaf will serve us all;
You find milk, and I’ll find flour,
And we’ll have a pudding in half an hour.
Now, it’s possible that children might sing such a rhyme to ask their playmates to come and join them outside, but there’s something slightly sinister about this jaunty ditty. 😈
It’s far more likely that this rhyme is a warning against leaving the safety of your bed. 🛌🏻 Night 🌃 was the time of witches 🧙🏻♀️ faeries, and evil spirits. 👻 The moon🌜 in particular was seen as intensifying their power and tempting forth even more dangerous creatures, like werewolves. 🐺
The poem is a siren call to children to leave the safety of their homes and come out to play with their enticing magical playmates with the promise of a faerie pudding. 🎂 But as any child who knows their fairytales 📜 can tell you, faerie time passes at a completely different rate to normal time. ⏰ One night spent playing with your new friends, and you could come home only to find that everyone you had known died of old age. ⚰️☠️ Source: Jack Albert ‘Pop Goes the Weasel: The secret meanings of nursery rhymes’
Image: ‘Fairy Islands’ from the book Elves and Fairies, 1916, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite
SAINT JOHN SCHORNE
The link between shoes and good luck might have come from the tale of unofficial Saint John Schorne. He performed the remarkable feat of conjuring the #devil into his boot. 👢 This legend may have resulted in shoes being seen as spirit traps. 👻 After his death in 1313, Schorne’s legend became quite famous and was the second most popular pilgrimage in England, generating so much money it was appropriated by the Crown 👑 and moved to Windsor in the 15th century. Shorne’s legend is also thought to have led to the creation of the jack-in-the-box 🤡 – which is called ‘diable en boîte’ (‘boxed devil) in French. *Image: St Helen Gateley, Norfolk from Flickr, 15th century.
CHIMNEY SHOES
A common home protection folklore practice was to conceal shoes behind walls and in chimneys. Why the shoe? 👢 It’s the only garment we wear that retains the shape, the personality, the essence of the wearer. According to footwear historian June Swann on a number of occasions she found that the bereaved had no problem dealing with the deceased’s belongings, until it came to the shoes, and then would ask, “Would I take what we want for the Northampton Museum and dispose of the rest?” Most hidden shoes have been discovered around fireplaces, hearths, and chimneys 🕯️– understandable when the hearth was the centre of the home before 21st century heating made most rooms habitable in winter. ❄️
VICTORIAN MOONLORE
In Victorian times, in some parts of northern England, it was considered a sin to point at the moon, while gentlemen would touch their hats 🎩 and young girls would curtsy to the new moon. The new moon shining on your purse would keep you poor; only make wine 🍷🍷🍷 in the dark of the moon; calves weaned during a full moon produce the best milking cows 🐄; and sleeping in moonlight can make you blind. 🛌
ARBELLA STUART & DIVINATION
In Tudor times, divination and astrology were common practices and the casting of #horoscopes was taken very seriously. In a letter to her grandmother, Arbella Stuart (1575-1615), a claimant to Elizabeth I’s throne, mentions that she has enclosed her hair, which was cut on the “sixth day of the Moon”. This lunar precision was necessary as the hair was going to be used astrologically to cast a horoscope to foretell Arbella’s chances of becoming Queen of England.
HOME PROTECTION SACRIFICE
Our ancestors left behind numerous clues in the buildings we continue to live in today of how they attempted to protect their homes and families over the last 500yrs. Like the human body, a house was believed to have vulnerable points where witches 🧙🏻♀️ faeries 🧚🏻♀️ and evil spirits 👹 could enter more easily. In Scandinavia and the Alps 🗻 venomous adders 🐍 were buried alive under thresholds to ward off unwelcome visitors, such as witches & thieves. Poor snakes!
MERRY MAIDENS OF CORNWALL
1804 postcard of the Merry Maidens Stone Circle in Cornwall—legend has it that these stones were once a group of young girls who, while walking in the fields on a Sunday, began to dance to the music of two pipers—who were of course evil spirits in disguise 😈—and the young dancing girls were turned to stone in a flash of lightning.⚡This stone circle is one of many examples of a common theme of revellers being turned to stone for having fun on a Sunday when they should be at church!
HORSESHOES
Today, people hang horseshoes for good luck without realising that a century or more a go they were considered powerful apotropaics – or ‘warding away’ objects against witches. Here we have a representation of two separate traditions: because iron weapons aided the Iron Age Celts to vanquish the bronze-using peoples who proceeded them, the belief arose that iron was a powerful protection against earlier inhabitants & their gods, which in time became represented by faeries, goblins, witches ect. – therefore iron was a protection against witches. 🧙🏻♀️ The second tradition is connected with the moon goddess – the horseshoe resembles a crescent moon so a house with this talisman was under the protection of the moon goddess. 🌚🍀🤞
MOONLIGHT LORE
In some parts of Northern England it was thought that sleeping in moonlight could make you blind, cause birth defects or alter mental health. Many thatched cottages have extra thatch extensions projecting over upstairs windows to protect moonshine from falling on sleeping inhabitants. 🌚🌜
HAG-RIDDEN
In previous centuries nightmares were believed by some to be caused by supernatural beings. The medical condition sleep paralysis was blamed on witches It was described as being witch-ridden or hagridden – a term referenced by J.K. Rowling for the beloved character Hagrid in Harry Potter The experience is accompanied by a feeling of weight on the chest and hallucinations, which gave rise to the notion of pressing demons such as the incubus and succubus.
Blackthorn & Stone 