On 18 March 1612, Alizon Device, a young beggar from Pendle, Lancashire, cursed a pedlar for refusing to give her pins. This was the catalyst for what would become the most infamous of all the English Witch Trials. In Thomas Potts’ contemporary witch trial pamphlet, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, we never get to hear what Alizon had wanted the pins for, but many authors have assumed that (what with her been arrested on suspicion of being a witch) she must have had plans to use them in a magical ritual. (If you want to know whether this was true or not, you can find the answer in My Mother Is a Witch and This I Know to Be True: The Voices of Pendle.)
We have records of pins being used in various forms of magical practice, and often as part of ‘love magic’. While you may be excused for assuming that love magic was all a bit of harmless fun practised by lovestruck teenage girls who wanted the boy down the street to notice them, the truth is far more sinister.
Love spells were frequently carried out by fully-grown male magicians – men we might regard today as a type of sexual predator.
A love spell from The Munich Handbook encourages the magician to drive pins into an effigy or image of their desire, inserting pins into the arms, head, heart, groin, and anus, all the while saying, ‘As this pin is driven into the [insert name of body part here] of this image, so may love of [insert magician’s name] be driven into the [again, insert body part] of [insert target’s name], so that she cannot sleep, wake, rest, stay, go, until she burns with love for me.’
This particular love spell required a lot of preparation. For example, the magician could not use any old pins for the ritual. Instead, he had to ask an artisan to make specific pins for the job, which had to be made at an astrologically significant time. He also had to obtain three hairs from his target and three from a red-coloured animal.
When it came to carrying out the ritual, the magician had to find two willing and trusted assistants who would not betray him to the authorities. (The fear of love magic was genuine, and the first English Witchcraft Act, created during the reign of King Henry VIII, made it illegal for anyone to use any form of magic to ‘provoke unlawful love’.)
After gathering the necessary ingredients, the magician and his chums headed to the nearest fruit-bearing tree and made a circle on the ground to invoke three spirits: Belial, Astaroth, and Paymon. The magician then sat inside the circle and made the ‘image of his desire’ from softened wax.
Before the effigy was prodded with pins, it was plunged into water and named. Then, turning to face the east, the magician began his incantation.
In truth, this love spell seems less to do with love and more to do with lust. The magician ended the ritual with the following command: ‘I command … your whole self … so that you cannot sleep nor settle … until you have fulfilled my erotic purpose.’
Such morally questionable spells helped to give magic a bad reputation (and the lustful magician too, no doubt).
Main source: Joyce Froome, Wicked Enchantments: A History of the Pendle Witches & Their Magic (Lancaster, 2010), 9-16.
