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Crystal balls & contacting angels: predicting the future in early modern England
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- [00:00]
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- [00:42]
Ellie Cawthorn
What do you think makes the perfect snack?
- [00:44]
AMPM Advertiser
Hmm. It's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.
- [00:48]
Martha McGill
Could you be more specific when it's cravinient? Okay.
- [00:51]
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Like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right down the street at am, pm. Or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at am, pm.
- [00:58]
Ellie Cawthorn
I'm seeing a pattern here.
- [01:00]
AMPM Advertiser
Well, yeah, we're talking about what I.
- [01:01]
Ellie Cawthorn
Crave, which is anything from ampm.
- [01:03]
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- [01:17]
Podcast Host
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Eating the palpitating heart of a mole. Sleeping with a wolf's tooth under your pillow. Communicating with angels through a crystal ball. In the 16th and 17th centuries, people had many cunning methods for predicting the Future. Historian Martha McGill has written a feature for BBC History magazine highlighting some extraordinary stories of early modern divination. And my colleague Ellie Cawthorn caught up with her to find out more.
- [01:52]
Ellie Cawthorn
Lovely to have you here, Martha. Talking about a very exciting topic today, fortune telling. Why might people turn to a fortune teller in the early modern period? So we're Talking about the 16th and 17th centuries mainly here.
- [02:06]
Martha McGill
Sure. So this is a particularly chaotic period of history. You've got a lot of major and dramatic events going on in the 17th century. You've got periods of civil warfare, you've got outbreaks of plague, you've got famine. There's an awful lot of uncertainties to life. Essentially, people had relatively short lifespans as well. People died unexpectedly, their children died young very commonly. So I think faced with all of these challenges and these difficulties of basic subsistence, people look for reassurance. They look for some kind of guidance, some sort of way of saying, well, is it a Good idea to get on this ship and go try and seek my fortune on it. Or if I have this baby, how long is it going to live? Should I hurry to get it baptized as soon as possible before it dies? It's these sort of questions that just stem from a basic sense of insecurity about the world, I think. Yeah.
- [03:01]
Ellie Cawthorn
And it's not just about telling the future, is it? You could go to a diviner for other services as well, couldn't you?
- [03:08]
Martha McGill
Oh, absolutely. I think one of the most common was finding lost goods or stolen goods, also searching for missing people, because this is a society in which it's relatively easy to disappear. So people might go off to sea and just not show up again for a long time. Their relatives might not know whether they're alive or dead. They might travel to the towns for economic opportunity and lose contact. So finding missing people, finding something that's been stolen from you. But also diviners were usually figures with a mixed skill set. They would often provide basic healing services as well, for example, cures for the plague, things like that.
- [03:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
So you've written this brilliant feature about this for BBC History Magazine, and if people want to read that, they can find it in the History Extra app. And in it you share a story about a pair called Goodwin Wharton and Mary Parish to kind of set the scene for us. Will you share this story because it's quite extraordinary.
- [04:06]
Martha McGill
Yes, I absolutely love this story. These two are wonderful. So Goodwin Wharton, he's the youngest son of a baron, he's from a noble family, but he's not personally set to inherit the estate and all the money he needs to find a way to make his own living. And he tries out lots of things. He goes into politics, but he makes this furious speech attacking the soon to be James II in 1680, and the whole political establishment shuns him. He tries out inventing different devices, he tries out going diving for treasure. None of it works. So then in 1683, when he's getting desperate, he heads in to this scurvy tavern, as he describes it, in Covent Garden, and he goes to speak to a woman who he's been told is very, very clever and very, very shrewd and has knowledge of occult things. This was a woman by the name of Mary Parish. She was in her 50s by this point. She was suffering from ill health, she was impoverished. And when she looks at Goodwin, she sees a target. She sees someone she can get things out of, they launch into conversation. She starts telling him all kinds of insightful things that seem to reflect A kind of understanding of his situation. And they become partners for the next 20 years until Mary dies. During this time they go on all kinds of adventures together. Mary tries to make him divinatory charms like a charm to make him really good at gambling, charms to win people's favour and so forth. Nothing really works out. They never actually manage to get wildly rich together, but they do have a lot of fun. Along the way. They became lovers. According to Mary's reckoning, they conceived a slightly improbable sounding 107 children, although only two actually came to be born. Mary explained to Goodwin that she had contacts in the fairy world. And she keeps telling him, the fairy queen is really interested in you. The fairy queen wants to marry you. We'll go and meet her. You're going to be king of fairyland. Goodwin is really up for going to meet these fairies, but there keep being problems. The fairy queen's on her period. Someone has tried to poison her with chocolate. The way is flooded. All of these reasons he can't go and meet the fairies and he never manages to become king of fairyland. They have angels who visit, but Goodwin himself never sees them. It's only Mary who sees them. They do shave off a couple of inches of his hair to give him a more noble forehead. They anoint his nightcap with salad oil as a sort of baptism into favour with the spirit realm. And they too give him advice about his future and what he should do. And in fact, eventually, Goodwin does start hearing the voice of God himself in his own head. So God starts telling him, you know, you're going to be fine, you're going to be rich. Also, you're going to have tons of lovers. God tells him, you're going to seduce at least 500 women. I will help you along the way. He's even going to seduce the wife of James ii, his old political adversary. All of these wonderful fantasies for the future. In the end, Goodwin finds success by much more traditional means. He actually gets somewhere in politics later in his life and eventually the relationship with Mary is over. But along the way, their story reflects this really rich occult world in which people could be steeped in.
- [07:39]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. Mary Parish, as we meet her there, she's an older woman. Is she the kind of typical picture of a fortune teller? It's what most people probably might imagine. If you said picture a fortune teller. Is that the case? In this period, there were a few.
- [07:57]
Martha McGill
Different categories of diviners, so at the top of the hierarchy, you've Got astrologers. These were usually learned men. The practice of astrology required good knowledge of maths and astronomy. So it was typically people with a decent education behind them. Then you've got cunning folk. These were people who served their local communities. They offered divinatory services, also things like curing ailments. And again, that took some level of education, typically. And most of them in the region of two thirds were men. And then at the bottom of the social hierarchy, you have itinerant, usually fortune tellers who would wander around doing things like palm reading, often at fairs or approaching people's houses. Mary Parish would fall into the middle category. She would be a cunning woman, so she was somewhat unusual in being a woman in that field, but it was by no means unheard of or anything like that.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And when you were talking about her story, you used the word occult. Is it right to see this fortune telling as kind of tapping into other supernatural ideas? Is that how people at the time would have seen it?
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Martha McGill
Absolutely. I mean, at the root of all of this is God. Early modern beliefs in divination are underpinned by beliefs in religion. So many practices, such as palm reading, for example, relied on the belief that God has made this plan for the universe and that is writ everywhere in the natural world. So it is written the stars. That's why astrology works. It is written the human body. That's why the lines and marks on your body might offer clues as to your future. Or you could draw more directly on divine aid. You could try to speak to angels like Mary did, perhaps with some kind of scrying glass or crystal ball. You could try things like rolling dice or opening your Bible at random. You leave something to chance, and the idea is God dictates the outcome, so he can send you messages by that means. So this does all come back to a kind of basic belief in the supernatural power of a deity. Yes.
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Ellie Cawthorn
I was going to ask you about how this fit within the Christian worldview of the time, because, of course, this is also the period of witch hunts and panic about witchcraft. Was it dangerous to be seen to have these powers of divination?
- [10:19]
Martha McGill
Yeah, it's complicated. Essentially, divination very much depends on religious belief, but a lot of the religious establishment is very uncomfortable with it and sees it as impertinent. You shouldn't be trying to pry into God's will. It's not the place of humans to ask those questions of a deity. So your average minister would probably caution against divinatory practices and would have a pretty fraught relationship with your local, local cunning person. They might well get told off now and then by the local church for, you know, stepping outside the bounds of proper Christian practice. That said, it was relatively rare for diviners to actually be prosecuted for witchcraft. More usually they were prosecuted or hauled before church courts for fraud or for vagrancy if they were travelling around the country. There are exceptions. There are some people who do get prosecuted for witchcraft and do end up getting executed. But usually cunning folk who practiced benevolent magic, found ways to help people, had a sort of different conceptual space for people than witches who tried to attack them. So usually when people started accusing others of witchcraft, it wasn't actually the local cunning person they latched onto first, but it could happen.
- [11:39]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, interesting. And a lot of nuances there that might be lost to us today. Were there cases in which people stepped beyond what was deemed benevolent, perhaps into the realms of politics that put them in a bit more danger?
- [11:52]
Martha McGill
Yes, absolutely. We can come onto another younger son, William Neville of Worcestershire. So again, he's from a noble family. We're coming back to the earlier 16th century. Here he's doing his excursions into divination during the reign of Henry viii. He's desperate for money, as many younger sons of noble families were. In 1531, he visits a cunning man called Nash. First of all, he's asking about the location of some stolen spoons. So a pretty typical inquiry for a cunning person. But they soon get off into much more interesting avenues of conversation. So Nash tells Neville that he's going to marry a wealthy young heiress. He's actually already married at the time. No matter. Nash says his current wife is going to die soon. Don't worry about her. His brother is also going to die, so he's going to inherit the family estate. Then they go and speak to another cunning person who summons up lots of strange spirits, sees this vision, tells Neville that he's going to become the Earl of Warwick, a pretty prominent position. Also tells him that Henry VIII is going to die at sea, which was an accusation that very closely bordered on treason. You know, saying the King's going to die is getting you into pretty dangerous territory. And at this point, Neville's servants wrote to the Privy Council, this executive governing body, to sort of complain about what their master was getting up to. So Neville and one of the cunning people he'd spoken to get arrested and questioned. One of the cunning people is held in the Tower of London for quite a long period. They do eventually escape without any more serious punishment. So on the whole, they actually do get away with it. But but you could see they were sort of treading in dangerous territories.
- [13:49]
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- [15:39]
Ellie Cawthorn
I wonder if you could run us through a couple more practical tips now, Martha, Anyone at home who fancies doing a bit of 17th century fortune telling for themselves? One I wanted to ask you about was a snail's shell. What could you do with the snail's shell?
- [15:55]
Martha McGill
You could search it very carefully. If you were lucky, you might find a little purple stone that supposedly lived within the body of snails. If you place that stone under your tongue, you might be able to prophesy and tell of future things.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Wow. And another object that might be useful is a crystal ball. We're all familiar with the crystal ball. But did they have those in this period too?
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Martha McGill
Yes, absolutely. One of the more famous astrologers from this period, John Dee, who worked in the court of Elizabeth I for a period, had a scryer who used a crystal ball to speak to angels on his behalf, and they offered him various insights into the future. It was a relatively common method. People could use mirrors to peer into. You could also peer into anything sort of reflective, like a body of water, or you could gaze into flames. The four elements were very commonly employed in divinatory techniques. So there were various methods of geomancy using earth, pyromancy using fire, eromancy with the air and hydromancy with the water.
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Ellie Cawthorn
And the idea there is that they will present some kind of message or some kind of image to you.
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Martha McGill
So this again is coming back to the idea that God has ordered the natural world and the elements reflect his will in some respect. But, for example, using fire to divide, you might toss things into a fire, like fruit, stones or nuts, see how they burn, see at what point they crack, things like that. To tell the sex of an unborn baby or to tell who's going to die in the coming year, you could look into water. It could foretell things. In 1633, in Orkney, one curious woman visits a local curry woman called Bessie Skebbista and asks her whether her husband, who's away, is well. And Bessie gets a bucket of water and she drops a sixpence into it, and she says that if it lands with the side with a cross on it upwards, he's well. And unfortunately, the sixpence lands with the cross downwards. And Bessie goes, oh, well, we'll try again. And she drops it in again. It lands with the cross upwards. And she goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's great, absolutely fine. But, yeah, you could try, yeah, Dropping things into water, dripping candle wax or molten lead into water and looking at the shapes it makes for geomancy, divination by earth, you could foe handfuls of earth or stones and study the patterns that they land in. Or for using the air, you could look at the shapes that clouds make, or look at the behavior of the weather or animals. In Cork in 1621, the whole city is astonished by this vision of a great battle of starlings. They all congregate in the air overhead and then they clash as if they're at war. And this is taken as a great omen. And eight months later, a lot of the city is destroyed in a fire. So this kind of observation of the natural world could offer insights into what's to come, essentially.
- [18:54]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, tell us a little bit more about how animals might be used to predict things to come.
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Martha McGill
Sure, there's lots of different animals you could draw on. You could try getting a mole, cutting it open and eating its heart while it's still palpitating. This gives you insight into the future. You could try getting the tooth of a wolf, if you feel up to battling one or can afford to get one by other means. Sleep with it under your pillow with a particular herb and you'll dream about people who might steal things from you. You could try making a fumigation with the congealed blood of an ass that will also cause you to see things in your sleep. You could pull a tick out of the ear of a dog. Has to be the left ear. No right ear ticks around here. If the tick is black, it's good for fortune telling. You could try, for example, walking into the room of a sick person, standing at their feet, holding your tick and speaking to them. If they reply to you, they're going to get well. If they don't, they're going to die. Which is probably a reasonable method of defining their state with or without the tick. But I guess the tick is supposed to add something. Finally, you could drape a viper over a staff and hold it above fumes made of linseed and fleabane seed and roots of violets and parsley. And that will enable you to prophecy as well.
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Ellie Cawthorn
I mean, there's so many techniques there. One major one that we should return to, that you mentioned earlier, was astrology. Tell us a bit about the place that that held in society at the time.
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Martha McGill
Complicated again. So it's really, really popular. Loads and loads of people are interested in astrology and it's practiced by some pretty respectable figures. Men who have had university educations, who hold solid positions, have a decent amount of money and so forth, and they often get a lot of clients. So William Lilly, who practices the art in mid 17th century London, offers about 2000 consultations per year. So he's seeing a decent amount of clients pretty much every day. Essentially. There were two branches of astrology. You had natural astrology, that's making predictions about the weather, agriculture, when the rain's going to come, when it's a good time to plant your seeds, and so forth. And in general, the religious establishment was reasonably at ease with that. Then there was judicial astrology, which sought to uncover these deeper secrets about the course of people's lives or political events. Sense that was very widely condemned and seen as heretical. But that didn't stop people from practicing it. So astrologers might offer individual consultations to clients, or they might publish almanacs, cheap sort of pamphlet productions which would circulate around the country. They often contain all kinds of wonderful lines. So this woman called Sarah Jenner writes quite a few popular almanacs in the mid 17th century. And they have lines like we find Mercury in Pisces, retrograde in the sixth house, which denoteth that servants will generally be cross, vexatious and intolerable, especially maidservants.
- [22:17]
Ellie Cawthorn
So all of these techniques, do we get a sense whether the majority of people in the 16th and 17th century, let's say, believed that these really could tell them the future, tell them about people far away, or did some people express cynicism?
- [22:34]
Martha McGill
Of course, yes, people do express skepticism. Astrology is more respectable than many other forms of fortune telling. The one that particularly falls under attack is palmistry. But astrologers definitely have their detractors. Jonathan Swift, of course, known as a great satirist, wrote this very mocking epitaph about the astrologer and almanac writer John Partridge after his deceased here five foot deep lies on his back a cobbler, starmonger and quack. And it goes on like that in the same vein. So, yeah, people did look down upon the practice of astrology, saw it as a means of defrauding foolish maidservants out of their wages and things like that. But it doesn't seem to hold people back either from practicing astrology or from visiting astrologers.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Well, tell us a little bit more about palmistry then. Why was that particularly controversial?
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Martha McGill
Palmistry is especially problematic in the eyes of the authorities because it's particularly associated with a group known as Egyptians. So the history of Egyptians is cloudy. It's a little bit difficult to know exactly what's going on with this group. We're not sure whether they are people from the Romani diaspora, originally from India, or whether they are primarily Scottish and English fortune tellers roaming the land. What we do know is that they claimed origin from ancient Egypt, probably not with any basis in reality. This was perceived as a means of associating themselves with the great magi who had practiced occult arts in ancient Egypt and giving themselves that veneer of credibility when it came to fortune telling arts. But they're vagrants, essentially. They wander up and down the country, the authorities blame them for theft, they clamp down on them for vagrancy, they go after them for Fraud. And there are various attempts to expel them from the country. So in 1530, Henry VIII's parliament passes this act seeking to expel Egyptians from the country, and it specifically criticises their palm reading. Many outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians have come into this realm and gone from shire to shire and used great, subtle and crafty means to deceive the people bearing them in hand, that they, by palmistry, could tell men and women's fortunes. And so many times have deceived the people of their money. So there's this great prejudice against these traveling palm readers and the arts they employ. And later on in the period, when we get into the 19th century, Roma communities absolutely perpetuate this tradition, whether or not it was Roma communities, primarily in the 16th and 17th centuries. Later on, palm reading does become not entirely the preserve, but certainly especially associated with those communities.
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Ellie Cawthorn
Another story that you've looked at is that of an astrologer called Mary Smith. Can you share her story with us?
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Martha McGill
Yeah, I love this one. Okay, so we're coming to the mid 18th century here, 1749, and the story concerns a young man called Samuel Beadwell. Like many young men, he's gone to the big city, to London, to seek his fortune. He's working there as an apprentice to a distiller. And one day he's walking along the street when some women approach him and they tell him that there's something special in his face that maybe promises great fortune. And they take him to this widow by the name of Mary Smith, and she tells him that she practices the art of astrology before very great people, princes and the like. And she tells him she has many, many, many books about astrology and she can offer him exceptional insights into his future. All he needs to do is come back with some money. Samuel goes away and does so. He even borrows an advance on his next wages, brings them all back. And Mary gets his money wrapped up in a handkerchief. She adds some salt, some pepper and some mould, I suppose, to make this all a sort of convincing little ritual, and tells him he just needs to wait three hours and he will discover a pot of treasure. And she says this is all underpinned essentially by her knowledge of astrology. She can see that there are great things in Samuel's future. Great wealth, great riches. Samuel waits for a bit, can't resist having a little peek, and he finds only that his body has been swapped for bits of metal. The women, of course, are gone by this point. Mary does later get caught and she's Initially sentenced to death, later this actually gets commuted and she's deported from the country. So in her case, this fraudulent practice of astrology does carry quite a harsh punishment. But we can speculate that she did manage to live relatively comfortably on the proceeds in the interim.
- [27:37]
Ellie Cawthorn
And at the end of this period that we're talking about now, the 16th and 17th century, we have the Enlightenment. You know, this is seen as a time traditionally of great scientific revolution, a move away in theory from superstition and irrational in quote Marx belief. But does that put an end to all of this?
- [27:58]
Martha McGill
No, not at all. I think what you see is that a certain class of educated men and women, but especially men, increasingly distance themselves from belief in supernatural things beyond God and other beliefs that are very explicitly sanctioned by the Bible, like angels and certainly the practice of occult arts for a period at least. They have a revival in the later 18th century. That said, all of your social levels below that kind of educated elite continue to take a very keen interest in divinatory arts and in supernatural and folkloric beliefs of all kinds. So we still see these practices continuing. And in fact often migration into towns, which is happening quite rapidly in the 18th century, perpetuates fortune telling practices because it means that people could gain more clients by establishing themselves in these towns centers.
- [29:00]
Ellie Cawthorn
And I mean, many of these things perpetuate today. Astrology is having a big moment, so I hear. So why do you think it's interesting to reflect on these beliefs in the period that you do?
- [29:12]
Martha McGill
I think this interest in astrology reflects something pretty universal about human nature. Nowadays we have more protections in place. There are less uncertainties associated with life. We can buy insurance policies against especially bad things happening to us. If we don't know where our partner is, we could give them a call probably. Also, things like infant mortality rates, of course, have decreased enormously relative to the early modern period. People are less likely to just lose loved ones, lose their family fortunes and so forth, less likely to be seized upon by famine, by plague, etc. So I think astrology and other forms of fortune telling perhaps do not have quite the same social currency today as they had in the past. That said, I think it's fair to say that we still all struggle with life's uncertainties. We still wonder what the future might hold, and there is still a decent market for supposed answers. Horoscopes, of course, remain popular. Palmistry is still practiced. Tarot cards have become really popular, having emerged primarily in the 18th century. So I think astrology just reflects this quite basic innate human urge to try and grapple with all of the unknowns of the future.
- [30:37]
Podcast Host
That was Martha McGill speaking to Ellie Cawthorn. Martha is a historian at the University of Warwick, and you can find her feature on this subject on our website, historyextra.com or in the History Extra app.