Category: Superstitions

At Tring, in Hertfordshire, one B—d—d, a publican, giving out that he was bewitched by one Osborne and his wife, harmless people above 70, had it cried at several market towns, that they were to be tried by ducking this day, which occasion’d a vast concourse. The parish officers having removed the old couple from […]

London, Aug. 30, the following paragraph appear’d in the newspapers. Middlewich, Aug. 28. There is risen up in this country a great doctress, an old woman, who is resorted to by people of all ranks and degrees, to be cured of all diseases ; she lives four miles from hence, and has been in this […]

Arts and sciences, philosophy and civilization, are well known, generally speaking, to have had their origin in the East. The frequent journeys of the inhabitants of Europe during the latter end of the twelfth, and in the thirteenth centuries, into those distant climes, in the Crusades, gave birth to several species of knowledge then scarcely […]

One of the vain and groundless pretentions of the ancient professors of sorcery and witchcraft was, that they could raise, controul, and dispose of the winds. Thus Medea says, “Ventos abigoque vocoque.” Ov. : Met. vii. [202.] The witches in ” Macbeth” converse to the same effect : 1st Witch. A sailor’s wife had chesnuts […]

Craftsman, Feb. 21, No. 503. RACHEL FORESIGHT TO MR. D’ANVERS. SIRS Since you have already done the fair sex justice, as to their political capacities, and professed your readiness to do it, upon all other occasions, I must put you in mind of one endowrnent, for which they have been famous in all ages; I […]

On the Rise and Progress of Witchcraft. ” Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Ex. xxii. 18. I HAVE been impressed with an idea that it would be neither uninteresting nor unprofitable to collect from our ancient annals and historical resources some particulars relating to the existence and disappearance of witches. But be […]

A correspondent asks if any of our nautical readers can furnish a plausible reason for the prevailing custom of fixing a horse-shoe on the foremasts of ships in his Majesty’s service, and whether it is a common practice in other vessels, as it has been often seen in the ships of war in the royal […]

It appears to me that a cruel practice has too long subsisted with regard to a very harmless part of the animal creation, whose wrongs cry out aloud for redress. The poor persecuted creature to which I allude is the hedgehog. or urchin; concerning whom (fatally for him) an opinion prevails; which I more than […]

If you ask a countryman in the South-west part of the kingdom to dine, he objects to any kind of game which comes to your table, and says, in his provincial dialect, I never. eats hollow fowl; under which term he includes hares and rabbits, as well as wild fowl, and every kind of poultry. […]

As the 14th of next month is a day anxiously looked for by the youth of both sexes, in the expectation of exercising their ingenuity in forming those amorous billets denominated ” Valentines,” I beg leave, through the channel of your Magazine, to offer a few suggestions to parents and guardians on the subject of […]