New poetry now on the Grievous Angel from Christopher Hivner, Julie Bloss Kelsey, and Larry Lefkowitz – and all have a strong science fiction vibe... you can read them all HERE

It's St Agnes' Eve tonight – 20th January – so here's a transcript from my latest digital radio show which featured a discussion of some of the folklore, traditions and legends associated with both St Agnes' Eve and the lady herself...

CHARLIE:         We also need to talk about the folklore and legends surrounding St Agnes Eve, which is the 20th of January.

JANIE:        Ooh, I remember reading that, how does the poem by Keats go…

St Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold

Bit like the temperature in this studio tonight!

CHARLIE:        Keats based his poem on an old folklore tradition that St Agnes Eve is one of the traditional times of the year for love divination rituals, when young women would try to discover if they were going to get married over the next 12 months and who their husbands might be.

JANIE:         Because young women in the 19th century didn’t get out much and didn’t have access to FaceBook! Although I recall reading that along with St Agnes Eve, other popular dates for conducting love divination were St Valentine’s Day, May Eve, Midsummer’s Eve, St Anne’s Eve - 26 July in case you were wondering - Halloween and New Year’s Eve. And not forgetting weddings, which had their own rituals including catching the bride’s bouquet and sleeping with a piece of wedding cake beneath your pillow. So what form did these rituals take?

CHARLIE:        There were a couple although it’s worth noting Keats rather sexed up the version in his poem by having his heroine take all her clothes off and lie naked on her bed.

JANIE:        Well Keats was a Romantic poet!

CHARLIE:        To get back to the story. There were two main forms of divination. 

In the first one, the young woman fasts all through St Agnes' Eve “eating only a little stale bread and drinking parsley tea.” Then goes to bed, pausing only to remake the bed with clean sheets and pillow cases, and, when she finally climbs into bed, repeats the following verse:

Agnes sweet, and Agnes fair, 
Hither, hither, now repair; 
Bonny Agnes, let me see 
The lad who is to marry me

If it works, she will then either see her lover in her dreams of see his image appear in her bedroom or dressing table mirror.

Alternative verses include:

St Agnes be a friend to me
In the gift I ask of thee
Let me this night
My future husband see

or even

St Agnes, I pray unto thee
I, a maid, would married be
So thou my husband show to me

JANIE:        While you’ve been saying this, I’ve been looking through the reference books and found another, rather more yucky version from as long ago as 1711. It goes like this… Take a sprig of Rosemary and another of thyme. Sprinkle them with urine thrice. Put one into one shoe and the other into another shoe. Then place the shoes at each side of the bed. Then, when you go to bed, say

St Agnes, that’s to Lovers kind
Come ease the trouble of my mind

and you will dream of your lover. 

Let’s just hope you lover is not a cobbler as he’ll be grossed out by your shoes! Anyway, you said there were two main forms of St Agnes' Eve rituals, what’s the other one?

CHARLIE:         The other one involves cake. Yay! It’s called Dumb Cake and apparently it was still being practiced in rural Lincolnshire and East Anglia until the Second World War when, presumably, the influx of unattached, young American airman and regular dances in the airfield hangers removed the need to resort to magic to find a husband.

OK, Dumb Cake - and the earliest recorded recipes for this go back to 1685. You make a cake - actually it sounds more like a savoury pancake or what the Scottish would call a bannock - made of flour, salt, water and egg - and cooked on a griddle, which you place beneath of your pillow - and then you’ll dream of your future beloved.

Unlike the other St Agnes rituals, Dumb Cakes will supposedly work for men and women. And, you can do it collectively with, say, four people all taking part in the preparation process - you’d divide the ingredients into four equal parts - and then each one takes a quarter of the cooked cake to place under their pillow.

However there is a catch - which is why it is called Dumb Cake - in that the whole preparation and cooking process must be carried out in absolute silence. No talking, no smiles, no laughing and no sniggering otherwise the magical spell will be broken. Oh, and you’ll like this, according to some versions of the ritual, once you’ve placed your slice of Dumb Cake beneath your pillow, you should walk backwards into your bed.

JANIE:        Perhaps if all these young maidens didn’t have shoes that smelled of wee and hair full of crumbs from the cakes they’d been sleeping on, they might have had more success with the boys? Just a thought. Anyway, just to neatly round off this piece, who was Saint Agnes? I’m guessing she was some poor Sheila from the Roman Empire era who was horribly martyred for her beliefs? Am I right?

CHARLIE:        Spot on Janie - as ever. She was apparently a beautiful young girl, about 12 or 13 years old, from a noble family who had many suitors from other wealthy patrician families. However when she turned them down, because of her, in quotes, “resolute devotion to religious purity” one of the young men reported her to the authorities for being a Christian. This was at a time in the Roman Empire when Christians were still being persecuted.

According to legend, she was sentenced to be dragged naked through the streets to a brothel, however she prayed to Heaven, whereupon her hair grew to cover her entire body and any men who tried to molest her were immediately struck blind. The Roman authorities then reverted to a Plan B of having her burned alive at a stake - but the bundles of wood and kindling would not catch fire - so finally a Roman soldier hacked off her head. Incidentally you can still see her head - well at least her skull - in a shrine at the church of Sant’ Agnese in the Piazza Navona in Rome.

Today St Agnes is the patron saint of chastity, girls, engaged couples, rape survivors, virgins, Girl Guides and gardeners.

JANIE:        Gardeners?

Urban Fantasist is now publishing an occasional newsletter for readers of the Urban Fantasist and Grievous Angel webzines. The first one – WEIRD#1 – was published at the end of last week and, in case you missed it (see sign-up details below), here are its main points...

* Grievous Angel is launching a new Page-to-Podcast science fiction/urban fantasy flash fiction competition with cash prizes + publication + the winning entry will also be recorded and be included in an upcoming episode of the new Urban Fantasist Weird Tales internet radio & podcast show. There will be NO charge for entering this competition. Full details to follow in the next issue of WEIRD.

* And talking of the Urban Fantasist Weird Tales Show, this new fortnightly podcast (it launched in September 2017), is hosted by Charles Christian, has a radio magazine format and each episode covers a variety of topics from the realms of urban myths, folklore, legends, ghosts, geeks, magick, and the just plain weird. The podcasts are free to download and we are already working on some major enhancements in 2018. We are also always looking for suitable people to interview, including authors of SFF&H books. So don't be shy, please get in touch via urbanfantasist@icloud.com. You can find links to all the episodes to-date here https://www.urbanfantasist.com/digital-radio-show

* Elsewhere, the Urban Fantasist webzine is continuing to attract ever growing numbers of readers as it continues on its mission to inform and entertain you with news and comment on weird tales, geek stuff, tech, urban myths, and folklore. We are now averaging over 3750 page views daily and 110,000 page views a month plus over 5000 unique visitors each week. Visit https://www.urbanfantasist.com

* Urban Fantasist also hosts the Grievous Angel science fiction and fantasy, poetry and flash fiction webzine. Changes in 2018 include: we have increased the maximum wordcount for flash to 750 words (we continue to pay a "pro" rate of 6 cents a word) + we have introduced a new Drabble-length category of 90-to-125 words for which we will pay $10 + a new micro fiction category of 300-to-350 words for $20. We continue to accept poetry, scifaiku and haiga at the usual rate. If this were not enough, we have also increased our budget for contributors in 2018 so we can publish more of your work. AND we do not charge any submission or readership fees - no pay-to-play here thank you. Visit https://www.urbanfantasist.com/grievous-angel

In other news...

* Urban Fantasist editor Charles Christian is a member of the judging panel for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award 2018 for Best Science Fiction Novel. He also served on the judging panel last year.

* The Sci-Fi-London 48 Hour Flash Fiction Challenge will be back later this year. Full details to follow in the next issue of WEIRD.

* Charles Christian's creative writing guide Writing Genre Fiction: Creating Imaginary Worlds - The 12 Rules has just completed its 178th consecutive week in Amazon's writing reference books Top 20 best sellers list. Visit https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MELTC84 & https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00MELTC84

WEIRD will be back in about 8 weeks time on 2nd March 2018 - to be added to the mailing list just email urbanfantasist@icloud.com and include WEIRD Subscription in the header