Weekend Compendium: 20 February 2016 brings you the week’s posts: the Witch of Leadville, eye-lash history, the ghost of a living woman, a discontented and destructive daemon, as well as creepy crawlies in hair and jungle.
In this Valentine’s week, let us take the pulse of early 20th-century witchcraft and look at the power of the heart in enchantments. The hearts of lambs, moles, and humans–all had mystic powers.
Occult Science and Oats: A Canadian Witch Trial In 1920 Canada, a young woman is sentenced to jail for being a practicing witch when she helped to solve a theft with the aid of the “spirits.”
A recent discovery of a “witch bottle,” reminded me of one of the most bewitching of witch artifacts: the “witch wreath” or the “crown of feathers.” Found inside beds and pillows, these circlets of feathers appear most often in Appalachian and German folklore, both as an omen of death or bewitchment and also as a token of salvation, something which I suspect is a later belief grafted onto an essentially malevolent sign.
