St Agnes Eve Spells

St Agnes Eve is one of the traditional nights of the year for performing love divination spells, to find out who your future spouse may be.
     Most of these were designed for girls or young women to use, but most can be adapted for a man to try.
     The first is a Scottish spell which instructs that you should go out to a ploughed field at midnight and take a handful of grain with you. Cast it about, as if you are sowing the field and say:

Agnes sweet, Agnes fair,

Hither, hither now repair,

Bonny Agnes let me see,

The lad who is to marry me.

A chap could simply say 'The one who is to marry me.' or 'the lass'. The spirit of your future spouse should then be seen following after you, as if mowing the grain - or you might dream about them.

The next spell says that you should 'take a row of pins', this goes back to when pins were sold stuck into rows in paper. I would suggest making your own row of pins in a paper, and for this purpose 13 pins would be a good number - or 21 as the 21st is St Agnes' saint day.
     So, take a row of pins, and as you take a pin from the paper say a Pater Noster (Our Father) and stick the pin in your sleeve. Continue doing this, one prayer for each pin, until you have transferred all the pins from the paper to your sleeve, then go to bed without saying anything else and you will dream of your spouse.

Take a sprig of rosemary, and a sprig of thyme, sprinkle each with a few drops of water (the older versions of this spell say this should be a few drops of your own urine) and put one in each shoe. Put the shoes by your bed and say:

St Agnes, that's to lovers kind,

Come, ease the troubles of my mind.

I pray this night in dreams to see

The one who'll love and marry me.

Some say that you should fast all day (or from midday, or miss your evening meal). And make sure that no-one kisses you today, not even a child. Or at supper time hard boil an egg, take out the yolk and fill the void with salt. Eat the egg just before you go to bed and your future spouse will appear in your dreams offering you a drink of water.

Finally another traditional spell which says that you should knit your right garter about your left leg stocking as you say the following verse:

This knot I make, this knot I knit,

To know the thing, I know not yet,

That I may know, that I may see,

The one who is to marry me,

Where he/she may go, in what array,

And what he/she works at every day.

As we don't wear stockings and garters these days, you could make a Witches Ladder instead. Take some blue ribbon, yarn or cord and tie nine knots in it. Tie one knot at each of the commas in the verse, and the last one at the end.
     Sleep with the cord beneath your pillow, to have an ominous dream!

     Good luck.