Halloween is a magical time of year. They say it is when the veil between the earthly and spiritual realm is at its weakest, and thus it is far easier to divine the future.
I love reading about love divination rituals. Aside from being great fun, they offer a fascinating window into the eras in which they were most popular. For many years—from time immemorial until the Second World War—divinatory games were among the most important Halloween traditions. (Editor’s note: See this week’s archives section for a reference to such games in an 1876 issue of the Gazette!)
The most popular rituals involved predicting future relationships, and some could be quite involved. Take the kale test. Young men and women would take turns guiding each other blindfolded into a garden on Halloween.
The blindfolded youth would then pull up a stalk of kale, and the state of the kale would determine who they were destined to marry. A long, healthy stalk meant the future spouse would be tall and in good health, a decrepit older stalk meant the partner would be older and not so vigorous.
A clean stalk meant they would be broke, or in the case of a potential future wife, there would be a meager dowry or none at all. However, if it was dirty, it meant good times ahead, at least financially. The taste of the kale mattered too: a sweet stalk meant you would marry someone with a great personality, but a bitter stalk meant you would end up with a jerkbag.
It does sound kind of fun, right? Perhaps you want to try for yourself. On the off chance you don’t have access to a kale garden (perhaps you are fortunate enough not to know any hipsters), you can always use everyday stuff around the house to get in on the action.
According to the wonderful book Games For Hallowe’en by Mary F. Blain (written in 1912), all you needed to spice up your Halloween party was a pot of mashed potatoes. (As a side note, all parties should be required to have a big pot of mashed potatoes on standby; they are fucking delicious.)
Before serving the potatoes, mix in a ring, a thimble and a dime, and then give each of your guests a spoon. Whoever gets the ring will be married within a year, the person with the dime will have wealth, and the lucky winner of the thimble will have “single blessedness”. Not being of the Christian religion I had no idea what that last prize meant, so I Googled it. According to Yahoo Answers (I go real in-depth with my research), “single blessedness” is the quality of “someone who will remain single, pure and chaste for the rest of their lives and dedicate themselves to the greater glory of God.” I’ll take the dime.
Not hungry? You can always just walk backwards in the moonlight holding a mirror, and your future lover will appear! (Presumably as a hallucination as you fade into unconsciousness after tripping over a rock.)
Now that I have given you some amazing Halloween party ideas, I really hope all of you ladies out there are finally able to divine your future husbands. As a contributor in the March 2, 1932 issue of the Gazette once wrote, the primary reason a woman comes to college is because “it offers the delectable opportunity to enjoy a gay, social existence, to make charming acquaintances, to display her physical gifts, and above all, ‘to get a man.’”
This sentiment is fascinating because it comes from an era in which divination games were at their height of popularity. At the time, even university was first and foremost considered a place to find a quality husband. It’s sad to think that this was the major reason women were encouraged to attend. Whatever the private hopes and dreams of the women students, their presence in school only indicated (whether correctly or incorrectly) that they were on the hunt for husbands.
The activities listed in Games For Hallowe’en offer another indication of the overriding societal imperative to ‘land a man’, as the majority of the games are steered towards divining a potential husband. It seems like the author threw in male rites as an afterthought. Even on Halloween, a night to celebrate freedom and fluidity of identity, women were being pushed in a certain direction. Sadly, this push was not without its justification given the lack of options for women at the time—for the woman who failed to consider her marriage options carefully, life could turn into something far more frightening than the usual Halloween scares.
Without the ability to determine their own fates, women were either damned or blessed, depending on the man they married. The desire to learn more about future husbands makes perfect sense in this context. Of course, I’m sure a lot of these games were done in good fun, but there was clearly also a more serious anxiety lurking underneath it all.
But that is way too depressing a note to go out on. This is Halloween after all, so let’s end with a riddle from Games For Hallowe’en. It’s a real corker.
“An old woman in a red cloak was passing a field in which a goat was feeding. What strange transformation suddenly took place?—Answer: The goat turned to butter (butt her), and the woman into a scarlet runner.”
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