![]() “If you see that the egg whites kind of look like a plow or a horse, your husband might be a farmer,” Muise explains. Much like tea leaf-reading, or tasseomancy, the resulting shapes offer clues as to whom you might marry or how you might die. The concept is simple: take a glass of warm water, slowly pour in a raw egg white, and watch what shapes form as the proteins denature. One method, described by Hale as the “Venus glass,” may have its roots in Scotland. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, a Roman historian who lived from 69 to 122 B.C., once described how the Empress Livia Drusilla kept a chicken egg in her cleavage believing that its sex would foretell the sex of her unborn child.Ĭultures around the world, from Southeast Asia to Latin America, have relied on eggs to unscramble the mysteries of the future. Ancient Greek soothsayers coined the term, which stems from the words for “egg” ( oon) and “divination” ( manteia). Even by the 17th century, the idea of oomancy was already age-old. Hale’s accounts described one particularly interesting form of divination: oomancy, or using eggs to interpret the future. But that didn’t stop people in New England from practicing it anyway. “In the 1600s, the Puritan hierarchy was very opposed to magic of any form-particularly fortune-telling,” says Peter Muise, author of Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts. Yet he still vehemently condemned the practice of witchcraft until his deathbed. Hale later came to regret much of the proceedings-conveniently, after someone accused his wife of witchcraft. In the process, he also testified against two of his parishioners: Sarah Bishop, often referred to as “Goody Bishop, wife of Edward Bishop,” and Dorcas Hoar, a fortune-teller. Hale, as a reverend, was present to listen to confessions. From 1692 to 1693 the accusations of witchcraft mounted to more than 200. At the age of 12, he saw his first execution of a convicted “witch.” As an adult, Hale was a pivotal figure in the Salem Witch Trials themselves. Whether or not Hale is a reliable narrator, he certainly had the credentials to write such a text. His posthumously published work, A Modest Inquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, is one of the few written records from someone present at the Salem Witch Trials. Shortly before his death in 1700, John Hale, a Puritan reverend from Beverly, Massachusetts, decided to document a dark historical moment. ![]()
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