Love Is The Lore:The Charming And Divine.

"I am already sick of love, my gentle Valentine" - Charles, Duke of Orleans

Three marriages might do that to you but it's worth noting the duality of Charles, Duke of Orleans's poetry and logic. He may be sick of love but he still refers to a gentle Valentine. Even if it would be personally beneficial to stop being in love with someone, it's not just something you can make happen. Even if, according to the first SELFS talk of 2021 - online (of course), we can use charms and divinations to alter the course of love, bend it to our will, or at least be able to see what will, and what won't, work out when it comes to romance.

"Evidence of efficacy is scant" our speaker, George, informed us towards the end of the talk but that doesn't matter. It's interesting to learn what people believed in over the centuries and SELFS always do a great job of doing that. The talk had actually been held on Sunday, Valentine's Night, but I'd been feeling a bit low (locked down, lonely, unloved, and, frankly, unlovely and unlovable - which is a bit silly as I have several people who tell me on a regular basis that they love me) and wasn't really in the mood for love (talk).

But I shook myself the best I could out of my self-pity and discovered, to my pleasure, that the video created for SELFS attendees to watch the talk on was still available. I'd missed out on the Q&A (which can often be interesting but occasionally painful) but I'd get the bulk of the show even if it was three days late. I'm glad I did. It may not have compared with last week's talk about love-locks (with the LFS) but it was still very interesting.

I'd never given much thought to Saint Valentine, the 3rd century Roman saint, himself but it seems he was chosen as the saint that would represent love (as well as beekeeping, epilepsy, and, even more topically, plague) because the day he was martyred, 14th February 269, tended to coincide with the time that spring was springing (at least in Rome). Flowers in bloom, spring blossoms, that kind of thing just feels romantic.

 

So Saint Valentine just landed the gig by pure luck. There had been an ancient Roman festival, Lupercalia, that took place on February 15th but that had been more a festival of purification than one of romantic love. Rumours persist that it was the day that Romans chose their partners (by lot!) but completely unsubstantiated ones.

The roots of modern day Valentine's Day date back to the 14th century when Geoffrey Chaucer's poem, Parliament of the Fowls, made the claim that birds chose their mates on this day. Chaucer's popularity saw the concept of Valentine's Day grow in the popular imagination and soon it was cropping up in other poems. For examples Farewell My Love by Charles, Duke of Orleans, a quote from which tops this blog.

The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote often of Valentine traditions and even claimed that already married people were expected to make Valentines of people other than their partners to spice things up. Valentine's cards soon appeared but they disappeared again very quickly as they were seen as too schmaltzy. The mass production of them, with no concerns at all about schmaltz, didn't start until after World War II when the craze of sending them to lovers or potential lovers reappeared.

That's a tradition that is still firmly in place but many of the divinations and charms we were to learn about are rarely, if ever, still performed and now fall firmly in to the area of folk memory. Acorns, it is said, could be dropped into a bucket of water to see if they float close together. If they did that was a symbol that your love was close. Alternatively you could peel an apple, throw the core over your shoulder, and the way it landed would reveal the initial of your future lover.

Or you could put a snail on a plate of flour overnight and let its movement reveal that all important initial. If you wanted to find your true love's name you could stick the pips of that apple to your face, name them with all your potential Valentines' names, and the last to fall off would be your true love. The white of a hen's first egg would, in water, it was said, reveal the shape of a future husband. Gates and stiles had manifold romantic uses but if you were to stand on one during the new moon on New Years Day and ask the moon who you would eventually marry the answers would be revealed in your next dream.

Another way to force a dream of future love would be to place your shoes in a t-shape by the side of your bed, say a little rhyme, and hop in bed for some very sweet dreams. Garters, too, could be tied to bedposts to induce revelatory dreams of romance and lead could be dropped into water to make the shapes of the profession of your future lover. 

There are many other beliefs and theories, now mostly forgotten, on how you could reveal the future direction of your romantic life and these involved everything from hair to herrings, from coal to nuts, from hemp seed to laurel and on to sage, wraiths, and even knives. Some even believed revelation could be forced by giving yourself a nosebleed with a yarrow leaf.

Dumbcakes were baked to reveal the identity of future husbands but the rules were quite specific. The baking process had to involve three, five, or seven maidens and each of them had to remain totally silent during this period, hence the name, or the spell would be broken.

These love rituals, divinations, and charms were played out on Valentine's Day but also on May Day, the Eve of St Agnes (January 20th), St Mark's Eve (25th April), and Midsummer Eve (21st June this year). Once the services of your desired lover had been procured by means foul or fair, you could also get them in the mood with a staggeringly large number of supposed aphrodisiacs.

This 'amorous medicine' could be made from almost anything it seems. Carrots, marigold, periwinkles, mandrake, cyclamen, oranges, myrtle, St. John's-wort, and even deadly poisonous henbane. Love philtres were concocted from ingredients as disparate as potatoes, hot chocolate, and rhino horn.

Yummy, yummy, yummy. I can see that putting love in your tummy. Despite the fact that some of these philtres and particularly the henbane sound dangerous they were not mentioned when listing the plants that it has been believed can be used to destroy love. Or cure the pain caused by it. These include hemlock and poppies but the most interesting destroyer of the heart in folklore is the unnamed Irish fairy who was believed to smoke a clay pipe and make love to fair maidens before disappearing and leaving them to pine to death.

That's cruel but love can be cruel and he was, it seems, only carrying out an early form of ghosting. Thankfully, an evening with SELFS (even a delayed one) is never cruel and is always kind. The Lore of Love wasn't, as I mentioned earlier, quite as fascinating as Love-Locks the week before but it made a great accompaniment to that talk. I logged off feeling better than I had in the last few days and then I decided I'd write this and, as with my previous blog, sign off with a message of love at a troubling time. Never give up on love. Be it for your romantic partner, your family, your friends or, perhaps most of all, life itself. Because if we give up on love then love gives up on us and no amount of yarrow up your hooter can change that.