Diviners
Many early modern methods of divination could be practised without specialist skills or training. However, there also existed professionals who offered divinatory services for a fee. They can be loosely organised into three categories, although in practice there was plenty of crossover. At one end of the social spectrum were ‘magus’ figures. These included astrologers – commonly, natural philosophers with training in astronomy who offered personal readings – and ritual magicians, who might use spirit conjuration or scrying to divine occult knowledge. They were typically male and university-educated. They risked condemnation by the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and possible charges of sorcery (prior to the 1736 decriminalisation of witchcraft). However, neither magical activity nor astrological prognostication alone was commonly prosecuted. The authorities were more likely to pursue cases of fraud or charges against diviners who used prophecy to sow social disorder.
A rung down the social ladder we find cunning folk. They served local communities, defending against witches and providing magical services. This was a skilled role, and about two thirds of practitioners seem to have been male. There was a clear distinction in popular culture between witches, who worked magic for evil purposes, and cunning folk, who sought to protect their neighbours. All the same, cunning folk were sometimes prosecuted for witchcraft, as well as for fraud.
At the bottom of the hierarchy we find fortune-tellers, who were not typically considered to be skilled practitioners. Most were female. They could have a fixed abode and attract clients to them, but they were also commonly itinerant, travelling about the country and offering their services in the streets, at fairgrounds or directly by approaching people’s houses. Palmistry was a particularly common offering. Many in this group were characterised as ‘Egyptians’, shortened to ‘gypsies’, although it’s not clear whether the majority of British ‘gypsies’ in this period were part of the Romani diaspora from India, or primarily Scottish and English travellers. Fortune-tellers were most likely to appear in court rooms on charges of vagrancy, or sometimes fraud or theft.
Images of different diviners from an eighteenth-century pamphlet.1The Universal Fortune Teller (London, 1790), Google Books.
Simon Forman (1552-1611)2See esp. Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford, 2005). Image references:
1) Engraving of Simon Forman by an unknown artist (c. 1611), Wikimedia Commons.
2) Reading for Elizabeth Phoenix from Forman’s casebooks, MS Ashmole 195, 205v, Cambridge Digital Library.
3) Painting of Simon Forman (c. 1900) after J. Bulfinch (active c. 1680-1720), Wellcome Collection.
4) Woodcut from London’s Wonder ([London], [1671-1702?]), EBBA.
5) Painting of Frances Howard by William Larkin (c. 1615), Wikimedia Commons.
Simon Forman was an astrologer, physician, philosopher, alchemist and magician. As a young man he dropped out of university, served some prison sentences (including one for possession of magical books), and was taken captive by pirates. In 1591 he moved to London to work as a doctor. An outbreak of plague in 1592-3 boosted his business.
Forman was twice imprisoned for practising medicine without a licence, but his popularity only grew. Although primarily a doctor, Forman could also comment on matters such as marriage prospects or the location of lost items. He answered queries by drawing up star charts, which found occult meaning in the position of the heavenly bodies.
Forman advised servants and members of the aristocracy alike. Around 60% of those who came to him were women. Forman commonly advised them on the state of their wombs, and seduced several, all of which he recorded in his journals. In 1599, at the age of 46, he married a 16-year-old called Jean Baker.
The astrologer William Lilly (1602-81) recorded an interesting anecdote about Forman's death. In 1611, when Forman was having dinner with Jean, she asked him which of them would die first. He responded that he would be dead within a week. Seven days later he was rowing across the Thames when he fell down dead.
Forman's notoreity only increased after his death. One of his clients was the noblewoman Frances Carr, Countess of Essex then Somerset. In 1615 she was found guilty of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, a political enemy. Lawyers claimed that Forman had supplied poison and harmful magics, and he was widely demonised.
Andrew Man (d. 1598)3Main primary source: Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 5 vols (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1841-52), vol. 1, pp. 119-25.
Image references:
1) Woodcut from Grand Testament de Maistre François Villon (Paris, 1489), Wikimedia Commons.
2) 17th-century image of fairies, Wikimedia Commons.
3) Woodcut from The Children’s Example, EBBA.
4) Woodcut from Fabulae Aesopi Graecaè et Latinè (Amsterdam, 1672), p. 28, Internet Archive.
5) Detail from woodcut of feasting witches in The History of Witches and Wizards (London, 1720), p. 36, Wellcome Collection.
Andrew Man was a magical practitioner from Aberdeenshire. He healed people, performed protective rituals on crops and removed witches’ curses. However, he could also perform harmful magic, like taking milk away from a cow. (The images are generic; Man wasn't famous or important enough to be depicted in portraits or woodcuts.)
He said that the Fairy Queen had first appeared to him about 60 years ago, and had promised to teach him to ‘know all things’ and ‘help and cure all sorts of sickness’, except raising the dead. He also claimed that he had begun a sexual relationship with the Fairy Queen, and fathered several children by her. He had also spent time in Fairyland.
Man had another spirit ally: an angel called Christsonday. Christsonday had fallen out with God, and taken to associating with the Fairy Queen instead. However, Man explained that on Judgement Day Christsonday would serve as a notary, telling men of their sins - before, confusingly, being cast into the fires himself for deceiving people.
Christsonday helped Man to divine secrets about the universe. He told him that the year to come would be an expensive year, but there would be fourteen good years thereafter. He also taught Man about the breeding patterns of crows. Man offered some divinatory services, like looking in a man's hand to tell him about his future wife.
In 1597, Man became swept up in a witch-hunt that was spreading across Aberdeenshire. He was called a notorious witch and sorcerer; in the eyes of his interrogators, Christsonday and the Fairy Queen were manifestations of the Devil. He was convicted and executed in January 1598.
Mary Squires (fl. 1753-4)4See esp. Frances Timbers, ‘Mary Squires: A Case Study in Constructing Gypsy Identity in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Kim Kippen and Lori Woods (eds), Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2011). Image references:
1) Detail from etching of Mary Squires after Thomas Worlidge (1753 or after), Wellcome Collection.
2) A portrait of Elizabeth Canning, from James Caulfield, Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, from the Revolution in 1688 to the End of the Reign of George II, 4 vols (London, 1819-20), vol. 3, p. 108, Internet Archive.
3) B. Cole, double portrait of Elizabeth Canning and Mary Squires, for the New Universal Magazine (1754), British Museum.
4) Detail from etching A True Draught of Eliz Canning (c. 1753), British Museum.
5) Detail from etching of Mary Squires (1753), British Museum.
Mary Squires is remembered because of her involvement in a famous court case of 1753-4. She was described as a ‘gypsy’, and reportedly offered to tell people's fortunes. Contemporary images portray her as dark-skinned and clad in a long cloak and distinctive pointed hat. Some accounts claim that she was disfigured by scrofula.
In January 1753, an 18-year-old maidservant called Elizabeth Canning disappeared for 28 days. She finally made it home injured and emaciated. She claimed that she had been attacked and brought to Mary Squires, who invited her to become a prostitute. When she refused, Squires imprisoned her in an attic, feeding her only crusts and water.
The jury found Squires guilty and she was sentenced to execution. But the judge, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, was unconvinced. He enquired further, and uncovered witnesses who swore that Squires had been elsewhere at the time of the alleged crime. Canning was convicted of perjury; she was subsequently deported. Squires was pardoned.
Sixteenth-century legislation had aimed to expel ‘Egyptians’ from England; by the mid-eighteenth century the law did not treat ‘gypsies’ as venomously. However, depictions of Squires in the popular press remained prejudiced and derogatory. This image portrays Squires as a witch, gloating about having made it to the crime scene by broomstick.
Other images drew on the ‘gypsy fortune-teller’ trope. This image shows Squires telling the fortune of Sir John Hill, a writer who helped to secure her release. Perhaps Hill's credulity is implied. The fortune is supplied in a caption: ‘The Checquer’d World’s before thee - go - farewell / Beware of Irishmen - and Learn to Spell.’
This 1673 passage, most likely by the astrologer William Ramesey, attacks those who practise astrology without the proper training.5[William Ramesey?], The Character of a Quack-Astrologer (London, 1673), sigs A-B4.
A quack astrologer is a gypsy of the upper form, a wizard unfledg’d, Doctor Faustus in swadling clouts … A three-penny prophet, that undertakes the telling other folks fortunes, merely to supply the pinching necessities of his own … his cloven tongue is tipped with prophecy, he never opens his mouth, but ’tis bearded with a planet … Ask him what ’tis a clock, he answers, Sol wants three degrees of the cusp of the mid-heaven. Inquire what news from the Rhine, and he’ll tell you of Jupiter and Saturn at daggers drawing in the fiery Trigon … he neither knowes nor regards the rules of the ancients, nor the true position of the heavens, but follows his fancy, and says what he thinks will please most …
Detail from a 1785 etching showing a widow and her maid consulting a fortune-teller.6I. Taylor after R. Corbould, Wellcome Collection.
In this passage, also from 1673, the Irish author Richard Head lampoons so-called ‘gypsies’.7Richard Head, The Canting Academy (London, 1673), p. 2.
The principal professors of … gibberish or canting, I find, are a sort of people which are vulgarly called gypsies; and they do endeavour to persuade the ignorant, that they were extracted from the Egyptians, a people heretofore very famous for astronomy, natural magic, the art of divination, with many other occult arts and sciences; and these strollers (that they may seem to have their derivation from these ancient black magi) are great pretenders to fortune-telling, and to colour their impostures, they artificially discolour their faces, and with this tawny hew and tatterdemallion habit, they rove up and down the country, and with the pretension of wonderful prediction, delude a many of the younger and less intelligent people.
