Tag: animal death

blackpaint20:

London’s lost amulets and forgotten folklore

Edward Lovett’s curious collection of handmade charms and treasured trinkets reveal the hopes and fears of superstitious Londoners.
At a meeting of the London Society held at the Royal Society of Arts on November 14, 1919, the president of the society, the artist Arthur Rackham, introduced the meeting’s lecturer as follows: “It is a very general habit to regard folklore as a thing of the past – something which concerns the historians. But is it not true that we ourselves are making history? We do not think of London as a country for folklore, and yet London is a very large country with peculiar boundaries; and also a country concerned with folklore. Ideas are constantly coming into London and constantly going out of it. As a real Londoner, I am very keen to hear what our speaker has to tell us about the folklore of London. I am quite sure he does not regard it as a dry science”.
Rackham was right: the speaker at the meeting – Edward Lovett – certainly did not regard folklore and in particular, London’s folklore, as a “dry science”. His talk at the meeting – just like the numerous other pamphlets he wrote and lectures that he gave – explored his belief that in metropolitan Edwardian London thrived practices and beliefs more commonly associated with England’s rural past.

Given other folklorists of the period collected in rural England, why did Lovett pay particular attention to the capital? For him, the populations of the countryside who moved to the city took with them an array of beliefs which they still clung to when living in London. The objects Lovett collected in London illustrated customs which stemmed from all across Britain (and which he believed gave insight into customs practised long before his time).

Take, for instance, Lovett’s account from “northeast” London of a cow keeper, originally from Devonshire, who believed his cows to have died after being cursed. Seeking to find the culprit who had condemned his livestock, he took one of their hearts and stuck it all over with pins and nails in the belief that the pain inserted into the heart would trace itself back – and cause pain to – the person who placed the curse. This gruesome artefact is similar in construction to the ‘witch’s bottle’ which was found in Greenwich recently complete with finger nails and hair buried within it.
While exploring London’s docks, Lovett spoke to sailors who cast pennies into the sea to “buy wind” on becalmed days, a practice he discovered that was also carried out on England’s east coast. In west London in 1914, the medical inspector of schools in Acton informed Lovett that children wore necklaces consisting of glass beads to ward off illness. The beads – “mostly blue, but occasionally yellow” – were worn underneath their clothes and believed to act as a charm against bronchitis. Their owners believed that the necklaces must never be taken off, even when washing. Lovett traversed London, finding over 60 shops were these beads were sold as amulets against illness, a journey depicted in a (self-drawn) map of London.
Lovett’s relationship with the objects he collected was not a simple one. Even though his house in Caterham in Surrey was filled with his hoard of amulets and charms, he was no archetypal obsessive collector. In fact, Lovett’s relationship with his collection has more the air of the bank clerk balancing the books, with surviving correspondence suggesting someone skilled in selling items on in order to get the money to buy more, even keeping museums interested by passing selected items on to them over time.

To Lovett, a belief in the powers of amulets and charms would grow in times of crisis. Magic in Modern London includes numerous examples from the First World War, with British soldiers travelling to the Western Front with an array of good luck mascots and totems, including brooches in the shape of black cats and four-leaf clovers, and dominoes with ten dots.
Lovett was an active collector as opposed to an armchair theorist, summing up his beliefs on the theories of urban folklore as follows: “I not only have no theory, but as regards my personal opinion as to the reason why these remarkable beliefs in magic still exist in modern London, I simply say ‘I don’t know’“.

But the amulets and charms Edward Lovett collected are not only testament to the spirit and interests of a keen folklorist, they capture something of the beliefs of everyday Londoners from a century ago. Whether worn to protect against illness, or kept to bring good luck, the objects he collected are miniature repositories for the hopes and fears of previous generations.

death omens in Polish folklore

slavicafire:

the following things, considered to be a sign of upcoming death – or even something that would bring death upon someone – are widely present in many branches of slavic beliefs. they are deeply rooted in the belief in magic – and even if now thought by many to be merely folk superstition, they were once a very set and important way of recognizing signs, foretelling the future, and protecting yourself and your household – way of life if you will.

considering my research and sources I’m using focus mainly on Polish folklore (with lesser additions from other slavic countries) I refrained from using the universal “slavic” title and categorization.  

however, keep in mind that many of those will be present in the folklore of other slavic (especially east and west) lands.

birds:

– if a rooster crows three times, it means the death is coming – similarly, if he crows at night. if a hen crows similarly to the rooster, it should be killed because it is a terrible omen

– killing a stork will bring death upon the killer and misery upon the entire village

– if a swallow hits the window and dies, it foretells a death of someone in the household

– if you hear a cuckoo while staring at the ground or looking down it means death will get you before the year ends

– if a woodpecker pecks at the door or threshold of a house it warns you about the upcoming death

– if a woman sees a black pigeon it is a sign she will soon be a widow

– if an owl hoots throughout the night near the household it is a sign that someone will soon die

– if a jay sits upon the roof, someone in the household will die

– if a nightingale sings while someone is sick or dying, it means their death will be peaceful and painless

– crows, raven, and jackdaws circling above the household were the most agreed upon death omen

dogs:

– if a dog howls relentlessly at night, it means someone will die

– if a dog howls precisely three times, it means that someone just died and their soul passed close-by

– if a dog howls while looking down on the ground, it means he sees death itself coming for someone

– if a dog keeps digging in the ground in one place it is a sign of a grave having to be dug soon

– if a dog dies while its master is sick it is a sign the person will die as well

plants:

– cutting down an elderberry would bring death upon the person who did it; cutting one growing above a pond or stream would poison the water

– a lonely tree in a field, especially if dead or slanted, would bring bad luck, demons, or even death upon someone who touched it or sat beneath it

– digging up a rowan or a  hazel tree (or destroying its roots) would bring death upon the one who did it

snakes:

– killing a household or barn snake would bring bad luck, illnesses or death upon the family

– if a child was sick and a household snake died it was a sign the child would die as well

dead, corpses, funerals:

– if someone points a finger at a funeral procession, they bring death upon themselves

– falling asleep in the room where a body of the deceased was kept would bring sickness and death on the person – similarly if someone sat or put anything between the legs of the dead

– if you look a dead person in the eyes they might take you with them

– if you do not belong to the closest family of the dead person or you are not the one appointed to carry out funerary preparations, touching the corpse might bring death upon you

– if someone looks through the window of the room and sees the deceased, that person will die soon

– if the funeral procession stops randomly while going through the village, someone will die in the house by which they stopped

– do not look behind you while in the procession, as the dead person’s soul might be following and will take you with it

spring and Kupala’s Night:

– if someone fences off his household in spring – or during Kupala’s Night St. John’s Eve – and drives the stakes through the ground, they will die before autumn

– if someone bathes in a pond or river before Kupala’s Night or St. John’s Eve they might die, killed by “the evil in the water” (usually topielce, boginki, witches, evil spirits etc)

these are, in all honesty, just a part of nearly countless beliefs and superstitions connected to death – and the signs and omens. 

if anyone – especially my Slavic followers – knows more and has something to add, please do so, I’d greatly appreciate it.

(main sources, other than personal research and conversations with people – especially older – in villages and cities of Silesia and Lesser Poland: A. Lebeda, Komentarze do Polskiego Atlasu Etnograficznego: Wiedza i Wierzenia Ludowe, 2002; Z. Sawicka Śmierć i pogrzeb w tradycji ludowej; B. Żurawski Ludowe zwiastuny śmierci i złe wróżby; excerpts from S. Hodorowicz, Polish Customs, Traditions and Folklore)