The Magic of a Crooked Sixpence

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In 1984, archaeologists found a 1596 English sixpence at a naval station in Maryland that had been the positioning of a Jesuit plantation from 1637 to 1942. A detailed look revealed traces that recommended the coin had been bent into thirds, carried in that bent state for a while, after which flattened out once more. However why? To discover the chances, archaeologist Sara Rivers Cofield took a tour of coin magic.

Cofield writes that cash had been used for hundreds of years in lots of ritual contexts, and the English silver sixpence was a very frequent attraction for a number of causes. The silver steel was believed to guard holders and chase away evil. The coin’s design included a cross, which had symbolic significance each for Christians and in pre-Christian magic, in addition to a picture of a monarch, which could possibly be related to therapeutic. One other issue was that six is a a number of of three, which is a vital quantity in many spiritual and magical contexts.

In Britain and Eire, individuals used the cash in some ways. Yorkshire dairymaids dropped them into cream to counteract witchcraft that prevented it from turning to butter. Others used them to assist divine the long run, strengthen prayers, or deliver good luck. They is also a part of rituals related to marriage and beginning.

In lots of instances, the cash used for these functions had been intentionally bent or damaged, making them “crooked.” This apply went again to pre-Christian European thought of “killing” an object to dedicate it to a deity. By the early fourteenth century, English individuals typically bent cash when making a vow to a saint. In a second of disaster, just like the illness of a cherished one, an individual may bend a coin whereas promising a pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine. This displays a typical facet of magical or spiritual ritual throughout many cultures—the necessity for a private sacrifice.

“Cash are bent not solely to suggest the promise of the pilgrimage, which is itself a sacrifice of effort and time on the a part of the giver, but in addition to take away the cash from common circulation as forex,” Cofield writes.

After the Protestant Reformation discouraged this sort of attraction to the saints, coin bending took on a brand new which means. From the Elizabethan interval by way of the eighteenth century, a bent coin could possibly be a love token and was generally utilized in marriage rituals as a substitute of marriage ceremony rings.

Within the case of the Webster Area sixpence, Cofield writes, the truth that it was bent strongly suggests it was utilized in some ritual apply. On the Jesuit plantation, it may have been meant as an providing to a saint—a folk practice of which the clergymen answerable for the place may or won’t have authorised. Then again, it may even have been used as a attraction for butter churning, a token used at a marriage that might have been carried out by clergy on the web site, or in a variety of different methods together with as a easy good-luck attraction.

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