The games we play at Halloween are the shabby remains of a serious business. Almost every one of them was divination — a method for finding out who you would marry, whether you would prosper, and occasionally whether you would live out the year.
The logic is straightforward once you know that Samhain marked the New Year. If the year begins tonight, tonight is when the year can be read.
Bobbing for apples
Now: a tub of water, some apples, hands behind your back, and a wet fringe.
Then: a way of choosing your future. Apples were marked — with letters, with names, with intended careers — and the one you came up with was your answer. In some versions the first to catch an apple would be the first to marry.
The apple is not accidental. It carries associations with love, fertility and the otherworld across the whole of northern Europe, and it turns up everywhere in this season, from Cornish Allan apples to the peel thrown over a shoulder.
Snap-apple
The more dangerous cousin, recorded from at least the fourteenth century. A wooden plank is hung horizontally from the ceiling with an apple fixed at one end and a lit candle at the other. The plank is spun, and players try to bite the apple.
You can see the flaw. Miss your timing and you take a mouthful of hot wax, or worse. This was considered entertainment for many centuries, which says something bracing about the pre-television evening.
Nutcrack Night
In parts of England Halloween was called Nutcrack Night, and the ritual was performed on the hearth. Nuts were placed in the fire in their shells and named for people. How they burned was the answer: steady and together meant a marriage that would hold, while a nut that leapt from the fire meant a lover who would not.
The custom of a young man bringing a woman walnuts as a declaration belongs to the same complex, as does the Cornish habit of a married couple throwing walnuts on the fire to test the year ahead.
Apple peel over the shoulder
Peel an apple in one unbroken strip, throw it over your left shoulder, and read the letter it forms when it lands. That letter is the initial of the person you will marry.
Try it. Even now, with nobody in the room believing a word of it, everyone looks at the peel.
Burns wrote the manual
Robert Burns's Hallowe'en (1785) is essentially a field guide to these rituals as practised in Ayrshire: the nuts, the apples, the whole apparatus of young people conducting fortune-telling with the seriousness of the half-convinced.
That tone is the authentic one, and it has not really changed. Nobody bobbing for apples at a party this October believes it will name their spouse — but nobody quite refuses to play, either.
Running them at home
- Bobbing: a deep bowl, cold water, small apples with stalks removed. Write initials on them in marker and make everyone read their fortune.
- Peel: any apple, one steady hand, and a floor you can see the peel land on.
- Nuts: whole walnuts or hazelnuts, an open fire or a wood burner. Name them. Do not do this with a gas hob.
- Snap-apple: hang the apple on a string. Leave the candle out of it — the fourteenth century had different views on child safety.