Also called Eve of St. Agnes, St. Agnes' fast
On the night of 20 January, a person goes to bed without supper after a small rite with pins and a prayer, hoping to see a future sweetheart in a dream.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Skipping one supper is fine for most adults; do not fast if you are pregnant, diabetic or have an eating disorder, and simply eat lightly instead. Keep pins in the cloth, not the skin.
Aubrey records the night as one for love divination: pins are drawn one by one from a row while saying a paternoster, and one is stuck in the sleeve, so the sleeper will dream of the person they will marry.
Uses: pins, sleeve
Young women met at midnight on St. Agnes' Eve, went one at a time into a remote field, threw in some grain, and recited a rhyme asking Agnes to show them their love. The vision was expected that night.
Uses: handful of grain
Keats's heroine Madeline follows rites she heard from old women: no supper, no looking behind, eyes upward, and a silent bed. The poem fixed the custom in the English imagination and is why many people know it today.
Agnes of Rome was a young Christian martyr of the early 4th century, remembered as patron of girls and of chastity. Her feast falls on 21 January, so the eve is the night of the 20th. By the 1600s English country people treated that night as a time for love dreams. The antiquary John Aubrey noted the pin rite in his Miscellanies of 1696, alongside other dream charms of the period.
John Keats probably arrived in Chichester on St. Agnes' Eve in 1819 and began his long poem there. Published in 1820, The Eve of St. Agnes tells of Madeline, who fasts and goes silently to bed hoping to dream of her love, while Porphyro slips into her room. Victorian painters such as Millais and Holman Hunt took up the scene, and the custom became one of the best-known love divinations in English.
Peel an apple in one unbroken strip, throw it over your shoulder, and read the letter it makes on the floor as the initial of a future partner.
On midsummer night, unmarried young women weave flower wreaths, often with a candle, and set them on a river. How the wreath floats tells of love and marriage in the year ahead.
Tell us what you need and we will craft a custom spell, charm or reading for it. Or call to book a reading or a road blessing in person.
