Fingers, frogs and fairies: the fashion for fortune telling in the 15th and 16th centuries

Perhaps most striking were the pair’s dealings with the spirit world. Parish promised to introduce Wharton to the fairy queen, but problems kept arising: the way was flooded, the queen was on her period, a fairy duke had tried to poison her with chocolate. Nor did Wharton ever see Parish’s angelic advisors, though they apparently shaved his hair while he slept to give him a noble forehead.

But by 1687, Wharton had learned to communicate with higher powers. The voice of the Lord guided him while he gambled, and assured him he would seduce at least 500 women, including Mary, wife of James II. This never came to pass, but Wharton’s fortunes did recover in time: he re-entered politics and became one of the lords commissioners of the Admiralty in 1697–99.

The world of spirits

The story of Parish and Wharton offers a window into a world of colourful future predictions. Both were unusual characters, but their faith in the power of divination and the existence of spirits was commonplace in early modern Britain. Astrologers plotted the future by scrutinising the stars. Cunning-folk served local communities, offering divinatory services such as finding lost goods and identifying thieves alongside healing and removing witches’ curses (they were called ‘cunning’ after the Anglo-Saxon word cunnan: meaning ‘to know’). A flock of fortune tellers read palms or drew on traditional lore to interpret the patterns of nature. Across its various forms, divination offered the illusion of control over life’s vicissitudes.

The most extensively theorised method of divination was astrology. Astrological predictions were published in cheap almanacs or proffered in individual consultations. William Lilly, who practised the art in mid-17th-century London, handled nearly 2,000 cases per year. He traced stolen goods, identified prosperous career paths, and advised numerous maidservants on whether their suitors were likely to propose.

In 1525, a Kent woman was prosecuted for predicting the future by listening to the croaking of frogs

Not everybody appreciated Lilly’s insights. An anonymous 1650 letter warned Lilly that his accusations of theft were going to get him “wonderfully beaten”. But Lilly was known across the country, and his influence extended to political and military spheres. When Oliver Cromwell’s troops were marching in Scotland, one soldier allegedly consulted Lilly’s almanac and called to the others: “Lo, hear what Lilly saith; you are in this month promised victory; fight it out, brave boys!”

While astrologers surveyed heavenly bodies, palm-readers looked at earthly ones. Palmistry was particularly associated with travelling ‘Egyptians’, or ‘Gypsies’, who offered their services door-to-door or at fairs. According to a hostile 1673 work, ‘Gypsies’ claimed Egyptian origin and artificially coloured their faces to associate themselves with the “ancient black magi” famous for “the art of divination”. In 1608 the playwright Thomas Dekker portrayed travelling fortune tellers as thieves but lamented that “simple country-people” would “come running out of their houses” in excitement at their arrival. Love, death and money were probably the focal points in their predictions.

Highland seers

People also told the future by observing the behaviour of animals. Owls, cats, dogs, ravens, magpies, ospreys and crickets could all be omens of death. In 1525, Joan Mores of Kent got in trouble with her local court for divining by listening to the croaking of frogs.

Even the bones of dead animals were etched with occult meaning. The minister Robert Kirk wrote in the 1690s that Scottish Highland seers could gaze into the shoulder-bone of a sheep to learn whether its owner had been wealthy, whether any of his kinsfolk or cattle were due to die, and whether “whoredom be committed” in his house.

Underpinning these practices was the idea that God had ordered the natural world. Inspecting his work could theoretically offer insight into his plan for the universe. For those lacking patience or sheep bones, it was also possible to make more direct appeals to the deity. Divination by chance – drawing lots, rolling dice, cartomancy (using a deck of cards), consulting Bible passages at random – supposedly worked because God determined the outcome.

A popular village practice was divination by the sieve and shears. This entailed impaling a garden sieve with a pair of shears, asking two maidens to hold the shears up with their fingertips, saying “By St Peter and St Paul, [suspect] hath stolen my [item]”, and repeating for every suspect. The sieve, it was believed, would begin to turn when the thief was named. In 1589, Mistress Wilcockes of Essex was said to have used this method to find stolen goods and predict the sex of an unborn baby.

Nor was Mary Parish alone in her attempts to command the assistance of invisible spirits. In the 1630s, constables rebuked the Welsh vagabond Harry Lloyd for fortune telling, palmistry and “familiarity with wicked spirits in the night time”. Lloyd acknowledged meeting fairies every Tuesday and Thursday but added that he was just trying to make his neighbours rich.

In 1616, a diviner testified that a fairy had told her to boil an egg and collect the condensation

Sarah Skelhorn, who lived in London and Dorset in the first half of the 17th century, chose the more discreet option of scrying angels in a glass. (Scrying involved gazing into a medium with a reflective surface, as a way of receiving images, visions and messages.) So skilled was she in charming her otherworldly advisors that they reportedly began to follow her around, appearing in every room of her house until she was fed up with them. Other diviners had ghosts or fairies who regularly visited them. For
these individuals, divination offered real and meaningful connections with a hidden world of supernatural beings.

Sinful and scandalous

Although many divinatory practices drew on Christian theology, the ecclesiastical authorities were largely unimpressed. Following the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, many popular religious and magical practices were condemned as superstitious or devilish. In 1702, Lady Janet Blair of Tonderghie, Galloway, was upbraided by the kirk for using the sieve and shears. She publicly apologised for employing a “very sinful & scandalous practice” and forswore it along with “all spells and charms usual to wizards”.

Diviners could also be hauled before secular courts for fraud. In 1636, Margaret Snelling was prosecuted at Devon for “deceiving and cozening of the king’s subjects by fortune telling and deluding them”. The court ordered that she be “publicly whipped and pilloried” on the next market day. Travelling fortune tellers were sometimes prosecuted for vagrancy. ‘Egyptians’ were explicitly targeted in a 1530 parliamentary act that endeavoured
to banish them from the country, citing (among other points) their “crafty” use of palm-reading.

Sometimes diviners were accused of more serious crimes. In the early 1530s, Richard Jones of Oxford was charged with treason after allegedly predicting the death of the monarch. Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Richard wrote two pleading letters to the statesman Thomas Cromwell. He protested that he had never “imagined the destruction of no man or woman as God shall save my soul”, and boldly proposed that he win his freedom by making Cromwell a philosopher’s stone. He was eventually released, apparently without having turned base metal to gold.

In general, though, diviners were not prosecuted for witchcraft. Learned astrologers had too much social capital, while cunning-folk offered benevolent magical services, unlike witches who used magic to harm (their neighbours typically recognised the distinction). Both astrologers and cunning-folk, moreover, were predominantly male, whereas the archetype of the witch was female. Itinerant fortune tellers were largely women, but living outside community structures offered some protection as most witchcraft accusations grew out of neighbourly quarrels.

There were exceptions. In 1616, Elspeth Reoch was prosecuted for witchcraft in Orkney. Elspeth testified that a fairy man had instructed her to boil an egg and collect the condensation on three Sundays, then rub it on her eyes with unwashed hands. This had given her the gift of second sight, and she had taken to travelling around telling people “what they had done and what they should do”. The court determined that she had been dealing with the devil, and she was executed.

Early modern authorities were keen both to expand their control over the populace and to protect them from diabolic machinations, which meant that the work of magical practitioners was never entirely risk-free.

The modern witch

The 18th century saw a shift in the cultural role of magic. In 1736, witchcraft was decriminalised. Educated men increasingly mocked popular magical beliefs at coffee-houses and in printed works. Ecclesiastical and secular authorities continued to condemn astrologers, cunning-folk and fortune tellers as frauds, but largely ceased to suggest that they might be in league with the devil.

In his 1785 poem Halloween, Robert Burns described how “merry, friendly, country folks” would gather together to practise divination at Halloween. They threw nuts on the fire to foretell whether a romance would be harmonious, and tugged stalks of kale out of the earth to learn about the appearance and nature of a future spouse. Burns attributed these rituals to “unenlightened minds”. He had to acknowledge, however, that the “passion of prying into futurity” was a “striking part of the history
of human nature”.

Cunning-folk continued to offer divinatory services throughout the 19th century. In urban areas especially, astrologers and fortune tellers maintained flourishing trades. An 1885 article commented snidely that “the modern witch” did not ride around on a broomstick, but “sits at home to receive the confidences of silly shop and servant girls… enrich[ing] her pocket by promising husbands, children, or fortune to those who will cross her hand with a ‘bit of silver’”. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, palm-readers – often from Roma communities – offered their services from booths at seaside resorts.

Over the course of the 20th century, improvements in medical care, social services and insurance reduced the likelihood of catastrophic life upsets, eroding much of the market for divinatory services. Sieves, shears and the fairy queen have largely been forgotten nowadays, and even the most determined gamblers rarely ingest throbbing mole hearts.

Yet magazines offering horoscopes capture something of the spirit of early modern astrological almanacs, and professional astrologers continue to use broadly traditional methods. Other surviving practices include scrying with crystal balls and palmistry. Divination by tarot cards, a practice first popularised in late 18th-century France, has also had success in contemporary society. The enduring appeal of divination perhaps reflects an innate human urge to impose order and meaning on a chaotic world.

Martha McGill is an honorary research fellow at the University of Warwick