30/10/2023
🌿🎃 ''H**pseed I sow, H**pseed grow, [they] that will my true love be, Come rake this h**pseed after me.'' 🎃🌿
Are you yearning for a lover this Halloween? Don't panic, for we have a h**p seed spell you can try!
Thought to have its origins in Pagan rituals, the h**p seed charm is believed to produce a ghostly apparition of one's true love. To perform the charm is relatively simple: at midnight on a particular night, the person wishing to see their true love must sow the seed whilst chanting aloud a short spell three times.
One of the earliest accounts of the spell was found in 1714 in John Gay's 'The Shepherds Week', where a young village girl misses her true love and so casts the spell on a Midsummer's Eve. By the 19th century, the spell, albeit a simplified version, had become part of common knowledge and could be heard being chanted by schoolgirls across Europe. This simple version of the poem now only contained the quoted lines above. Although Gay's reference was the first, perhaps the most famous account of the poem was in Robert Burns' 1785 poem 'Halloween':
"H**p-seed I saw thee,
An' her that is to be my lass
Come after me, an' draw thee
As fast this night."
Although in England the h**p seed love spell was cast on Midsummer's Eve, in many parts of Ireland and Scotland the night to see ghosts was on Halloween (of course!) The spell is not without its risks though, as, allegedly, a group of girls in Cornwall in 1965 found out. Within a year of casting the spell, they all ended up dying mysteriously. According to the people of Guernsey, after reciting a spell, the young maiden must ''immediately run into the house to prevent her legs being cut off by the reaper's sickle''.
So, to those of us who are looking for love this Halloween, how much are you willing to risk?