The Hemp Seed Halloween Spell
This Halloween anyone can find their one true love, no need for that high priced party you only need a pocket full of hemp seed!
Tam O’Shanter and the Witches, illustration by John Faed to the poem of Robert Burns 1855
Thought to date back to Pagan rituals, the hemp seed charm is believed to show its user the ghostly site of their true love. The charm is simple enough to perform, at midnight on a special night a person wishing to see their true love only needs to sow hemp seed while chanting a small spell three times aloud…
If the spell was performed correctly, looking back over their left shoulder would reveal a ghostly vision of their true love mowing or weeding the hemp behind them!
One of the earliest accounts of the hemp seed spell is found in the 1714 pastorals of John Gay’s ‘The Shepherds Week’. On Thursday, also known as ‘The Spell’, a young village girl misses her true love who was away on business. Wishing for just a glimpse of him, she employs the hemp seed spell on a lonely Midsummer’s Eve.
“At eve last midsummer no sleep I sought,
But to the field a bag of hemp seed I bought;
I scattered around the seed on every side,
And three times in trembling accent, cried:
This hemp seed with my virgin hand I sow,
Who shall my true love be the crop shall mow
I straight looked back, and if my eyes speak truth,
With his keen scythe behind me came the youth.”
‘Hempseed I sowe, hempseed I sowe and he that my true-love shall be come’ by Annie French
By the 19th century the spell could be found chanted in the moonlight by giggling groups of school girls throughout much of Europe. The spell had been simplified, commonly to some variation of the verses,*1 “Hempseed I sow, Hempseed grow, She (or he) that will my true love be, Come rake this hempseed after me”.
In England the hemp seed love spell was cast on Midsummer’s Eve (among other saintly nights) but in many parts of Ireland and Scotland the night to see ghost’s was of course on Halloween!
‘Peasant Woman Sowing with a Basket’ by Vincent van Gogh 1881
For all those lovesick dreamers who already have their pockets filled with hemp seed be warned! This hemp seed spell doesn’t come without it’s inherent risks!
In Cornwall in 1865 a group of girls received quite the fright on one Halloween while performing the hemp seed spell. Meeting in a field at midnight the group became distraught after witnessing a coffin appear behind their friend Nancy. The story grew hauntingly still, when within the year Nancy, her true love and a friend who also witnessed the coffin that dreary night, all died mysterious deaths.*2
In Guernsey, the towns people believe the charm escalates quickly as the young maiden sows her hemp. As she recites the spell she “must immediately run into the house to prevent her legs being cut off by the reaper’s sickle”*3, only in this panicked sprint to save her life can she glance back to see her true love.
Worse still is the humiliation of a spell gone wrong like happened in John Mayne’s 1780 poem Hallowe’en. We are introduced to poor Jock Maclean who would do anything to meet his true love.
On Halloween night as young Jock sowed his hemp seed chanting the spell aloud, a large pig began to follow the distracted boy. Turning around in hopes of seeing his true love, poor Jock is confronted instead by the hungry pig!
Just a few short years later poet Robert Burns expanded Mayne’s account of poor Jock including the hemp seed sow into his own poem for ‘Halloween’.
(Translated from Scots)
“One harvest before the Sherramoor, —
I remember it as well as last night,
I was a young girl then, I’m sure
I was not past fifteen;
The summer had been cold and wet,
And stuff was very green;
And yes a merry harvest home we got,
And just on Halloween
It fell that night.
“Our chief reaper was Rob McGreen,
A clever sturdy fellow:
His son got Eppie Sim with child,
That lived in Achmacalla:
He got hemp-seed, I remember it well,
And he made little fuss of it;
But many a day was by himself,
He was so sorely frighted
That very night.”
Then up got fechtin’ Jamie Fleck,
And he swore by his conscience,
That he could sow hemp-seed a peck;
For it was all but nonsense.
The old guidman reached down the bag,
And out a handful gave him;
Then asked him slip from among the folk,
Some time when no one would see him,
And try it that night.
He marches through among the stacks,
Though he was something frightened;
The dung fork he for a weapon takes.
And hurls it at the buttocks of his horse;
And every now and then he says,
“Hemp-seed, I saw thee,
And her that is to be my lass,
Come after me, and draw thee
As fast this night.”
He whistled up Lord Lennox’ march
To keep his courage cheery;
Although his hair began to stand on end,
He was so scared and eerie:
Till presently he hears a squeak,
And then a grown and grunting;
He over his shoulder gave a peek,
And tumbled with a stagger
Out over that night.
He roared a horrid murder-shout,
In dreadful desperation!
And young and old came running out
To hear the sad narration;
He swore it was hobbled Jean McCraw,
Or hunchbacked Merran Humphie,
Till, stop! she trotted through them
And what was it but a pig
A’stir that night!”
I ask all you love starved singles this Halloween night, would you do anything for love?
Halloween Postcard from 1911
*1 – K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892. ‘English Folk-rhymes: A Collection of Traditional Verses Relating to Places’
*2 – Robert Hunt 1865. ‘Popular romances of the west of England (The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall)’
*3 – J. Stevens-Cox, 1971. Guernsey Folklore recorded in the Summer of 1882, St Peter Port: 10.