Category Archives: Contagious

Lover Spells

The informant begins by explaining this phenomenon called “agua de calson” which translates to water made of underwear. She heard it first from her Tia since her aunt used to have a lot of boyfriends. Her aunt would always be joking around stating that she would make them drink her agua de calson but as a little kid, she would just listen. She did not understand what that could mean and so one day she asked her what it meant but she was just told to not worry about it. Then on the TV channels, there was this Mexican show that that they always like come up with rituals or stuff that you can do so you may get more money, have better luck, a better chance at love, etc. This ritual would have the person take their used underwear and boil it in water. Then they would take the water that resulted from that, and make the person, who they are attracted to and want to seduce, drink that water.

The informant has also seen it on TikTok however she is not fully aware of how often it is actually done. She believes her aunt only ever joked about doing it but never truly did it. She also states that she believes this type of ritual or magic might be common with people in other countries in Latin America. Additionally, she provided an example of a similar form of ritual where the person will wrap a photograph of their lover in a red ribbon and pour honey and cinnamon on it. She stated that honey is viscous, sticky, and sweet and cinnamon has a strong smell. Then the person must bury the picture under the dirt and it is supposed to make the targeted person more likely to fall in love with them. Both examples are deemed to be “brujeria”, witchcraft, and are looked bad upon as they are means to make others fall in love with them.

These two examples are forms of magic in folklore. The first example seems to incorporate elements of both homeopathic magic and contact magic. For starters, the targeted victim is supposed to drink water that has the juices of the persons’s underwear without knowing almost as if it is a potion, that results in the desired outcome of them falling in love. It also shows some form of contact magic but uses an element that was in contact with the perpetrator, not the target. The second example utilizes homeopathic magic because it mimics the person with the photograph and potentially a tie being formed with the ribbon and honey. Then the burying of the item might resemble the person being trapped under their love. Overall these examples seem to represent a bad use of magic and thus can be seen as witchcraft.

Coins on the Ground

Context:                                                    

O is a Pre-med biology major at USC, currently a freshman. O is a Vietnamese American who grew up in Vancouver, Washington — a short drive from Portland, Oregon. 

Text:

Me: Do you have anything you collect or do for good luck?

O: Yeah, actually I collect coins. Not just pennies, but like all kinds of coins.

Me: Really? How do you find them?

O: It’s really ridiculous, I just pick them up from the ground and keep them in my pocket, because I think they will bring me good luck.

Me: From the ground?

O: Yeah, they would be lying on the ground while I’m walking and I’ll pick them up, put them in my pockets.

Me: Do you keep the pennies forever?

O: No. I take them out and put them back on the ground once I think I don’t need the luck anymore. Like, the luck can go to someone else. 

Analysis:

O demonstrates some form of sympathetic magic. He connects receiving luck to picking up coins from the ground, both how lucky he is to find the coin and the luck the coin itself gives him. The luck O has that initially gives him the coin is somehow transferred into the coin, where there is some exchange between him and the coin that gives him luck with the penny as a conduit, collecting and releasing luck for anyone to pick up. The idea of quantifying luck or magic seems like contagious/contact magic, where magic or superstition can transfer from one person to the next with the penny is added as a middle man. Keeping the coin is somehow magic that ensures the luck will be sustained in him while giving it away is also magic, ensuring that luck will be passed on to the next person. If luck was the contagion of magic, the coin would be patient zero.

Running Over Lemons

Text:

Driving over lemons with a newly purchased vehicle.

SB: We place a lemon under every tire of a vehicle we just bought, and then we drive it over so we crush all of the lemons, so it’s as if all the lemons are taking the brunt of the bad luck that the new vehicle might be running into in the future. It’s a preventive measure type of thing…because all the lemons have taken the bad luck, you’re not supposed to step onto a crushed lemon you see on the street because all that bad luck could transfer to you.

Context:

SB is uncertain about the tradition’s origins or what the exact context is. However, she mentions that in in Hinduism, “when you visit a temple, sometimes you break open a coconut, and I’m assuming it has some similar things in terms of destroying these fruits.” She connects breaking these fruits as physical acts of removing bad luck, and she iterates that her family does this whenever they get a new vehicle.

Analysis:

In situations where we feel like we don’t have control, we often try to assert authority through superstitious beliefs. While they may not be scientifically accepted, they can be held true by a community and naturally embed itself into familial tradition. Specifically, when we buy a new vehicle, there’s a lot we may not know: the ins and outs of how the car drives, what it’s like to drive the car amidst a bustling highway, and other factors that could influence our sense of security. When we drive, our lives are in the hands of everyone else on the road. These acts to ensure safe driving can remove the stress from a very anxiety-inducing activity for some people.

There are many driving rituals that exist to prevent bad luck or appreciate good luck, such as holding your breath when passing a graveyard or hitting the dashboard when narrowly escaping a yellow light. Despite laws and policies that attempt to keep our roads safe, institutions can’t really dictate belief. So much of this unofficial knowledge and these individual and communal rituals blossom from a desire to claim more direct control and exercise our personal beliefs. There is no law that tells us how to magically bring upon good luck, and there is no science supporting some of these rituals, but we believe in them anyway and engage in these practices to add an extra layer of security.

Lucky Penny Magic

Text

“I believe in lucky pennies. I have a bunch right here; I have some in my window. They’re only lucky if you find them heads up. But if I find one that is heads down, I’ll flip it so it’s lucky for the next person.

“Sometimes if I know someone’s having a bad day, or they have an exam and they need some luck, I’ll give them one of my lucky pennies.

“But there have been times when I’ve found a lucky penny, and I’m like, ‘Ok, this is the day that I have to do something ballsy and brave. This is a sign.’ And then it won’t go well. And I’ll be like, ‘The lucky penny magic isn’t real,’ and I’ll swear off lucky pennies. But I never seem to stop myself. I always continue doing it anyway.”

GR said she couldn’t recall an experience when a lucky penny actually gave her good luck. “Unless I have incredibly spectacular, amazing luck, I’ll never recognize good luck. I only really recognize when I’ve had really bad luck.”

Context

GR is a 21 year-old college student from Portland, OR, currently living in Los Angeles. Her grandparents were Irish immigrants.

Lucky penny belief is performed mostly in public spaces where one is likely to have dropped loose change, such as a place of business, a parking lot, or the sidewalk. As a resident of a large urban area, GR often encounters such spaces. It is likely that the frequency of finding lucky pennies influences her belief.

Analysis

Lucky penny magic reflects the values of American capitalist society, in which money is the main mechanism of upward mobility and survival. Under this system of values, coming into any amount of money by chance is genuinely good luck.

GR’s belief goes further, however, claiming that the pennies are not merely an instance of luck but a token of it, a good luck charm. Lucky penny belief for some is merely a sign superstition, a form of belief that requires no action; one merely encounters a sign of good or bad luck.

However, GR actively takes part in the belief, choosing to collect the lucky pennies, give them to her friends, and flip a heads down penny over for the next person. This action is what makes her belief magic. Specifically, GR believes that lucky pennies are a form of contagious magic in their ability to bring good luck to whoever possesses them.

Additionally, her choice to collect the pennies out of belief that they may bring luck in the future reflects the future-orientation of American culture, as described by folklorist Alan Dundes.

Irish Knitting Superstition

Text

“Irish people culturally believe that when you knit something, you knit a piece of your soul into your project. And so Irish knitters purposely knit one mistake into their project so that their soul can escape. Otherwise you’re breaking off little pieces of yourself every time you give someone something that you knit.

“So I’m like, ‘Oh, I haven’t been giving my soul away to anyone because I always make a mistake or two.’ Still, there’s certainly some pieces that people have that are a tiny little expression of me.”

Once having heard of this belief, GR began to express it as her own. “It actually makes a lot of sense to me because knitting is just such a labor of love,” she said, adding that she could never sell the pieces that she knits. “No price could quantify the work that I’ve done. It’s so deeply personal. When I’m knitting, I feel like I’m tapping into something cosmic.”

She added that part of this feeling comes from the labor of making something entirely by hand. “There’s no machine that can ever replicate it. Using a knitting machine doesn’t feel as personal. It feels like cheating, honestly.”

Context

GR is a 21 year-old college student from Portland, OR, currently living in Los Angeles. Her grandparents were Irish immigrants.

GR knits a lot in her free time, mainly making beanies for herself and her friends.

GR originally read about this belief online, but her Irish roots in addition to her love of knitting made it easy for her to identify with this belief and adopt it as her own.

Analysis

This belief captures the deeply emotional experience of creating something and gives words to the profound connection an artist feels to their work as an expression of their soul. It also provides a rationalization for any flaws in one’s project, which reduces the pressure on the creator to attain perfection. Such an understanding of the value of mistakes is especially relevant in the art of knitting, a very precise and meticulous craft in which one mistake might make you want to unravel the whole piece until it’s perfect. This belief helps calm the unforgiving pursuit of perfection, which is the enemy of creativity.

This folk belief contains two elements: first, the magical belief that the act of knitting places a piece of one’s soul into their work. This is an example of the law of contagion, in which a non-material bond is established between a person and object. In this belief, the ritual that breaks this bond is the act of knitting a mistake into a piece, allowing the soul to escape. This second element of the belief is an example of conversion magic, a form of performative magic that offsets another magical thing.