*Ø* Blogmanac January 20 | The Eve of St Agnes and love spells

Saint Agnes' Eve

They told her how, upon St Agnes' Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey'd middle of the night.
John Keats, 'Eve of St Agnes'

The divinations referred to (above) by John Keats in his poem 'The Eve of St Agnes' are referred to by Aubrey in his Miscellanies (1696) as being associated with St Agnes' night (thus, January 21), not the eve before. However, it is generally accepted that January 20, the Eve of St Agnes, is in fact the night of prognostications. I have changed my view as published in the Almanac in previous years.

Aubrey wrote in Miscellanies of 1696 that on the night of St Agnes you take a row of pins, and pull out every one, one after another. While saying a paternoster ('Our Father'), stick one of these pins in your sleeve, and you will dream of the person you will marry.

Otherwise, “passing into a different country from that of her ordinary residence, and taking her right-leg stocking, she [the maiden looking for a lover - PW] might knit the left garter around it, repeating the rhyme:

I knit this knot, this knot I knit,
To know the thing I know not yet,
That I may see
The man that shall my husband be,
Not in his best or worst array,
But what he weareth every day;
That I tomorrow may him ken
From among all other men.

Lying down on her back that night, with her hands under her head, the anxious maiden would supposedly see her future husband, who would greet her with a kiss.

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