#cornish superstition

Second in four Allantide posts - the last was about divination!

Starting out with superstitions - the Cornish types aren't just reserved for October and Allantide, they go much deeper and span all kinds of professions and places. They also can get fairly gruesome, so full warnings ahead!

The most common and well known (even taught to us in primary school!) is the miner's rule of throwing the crust of a pasty into the depths of the mines for the knockers. Like a lot of superstitions, this has a dual purpose of both practical and folkloric. The practical side - the crust of a Cornish pasty is the perfect way to hold it and in fact kept the miners from eating the harmful chemicals and grime their bare hands collected while deep in the earth, and tossing it away was the easiest disposal. The folkloric? Giving the knockers gifts of food kept the mines from collapsing and ensured everyone got to go home to their partners and children at the end of the day. Conversely, whistling in a mine would draw their ire and potentially cause a collapse! Whistling in mines is not so dissimilar from the St. Ives superstition of not whistling at night by the ocean, for fear of merfolk.

There’s two quite startling ones incoming, so count this as warning number 2!

One custom (that wasn’t entirely unique to Cornwall) is that the hand of a dead felon held magical properties, from healing to lighting up any kind of darkness. Another is that if a boat were to go looking for a lost fisherman, the vessel would stop over the top of their corpse despite the weather.

Some magic now - did you know that a specifically knotted string could call up a fierce wind? Or perhaps the custom of witch balls - glass fishing weights hung in the house to ward off ill magic or curses. Or, maybe, would you like to know about a famous Cornish pellar?

Thomasine Blight (locally known as Tammy Blee) was a Pellar* local to the Helston area of west Cornwall. Known for her curse-breaking abilities, she was locally revered and people travelled far and wide for her treatments. Allegedly her husband, a mine engine driver, had similar gifts.

Tammy's practice started out in Redruth, lifting curses from livestock and plying her trade in the service of small cures and charms for fisherfolk. While she was renowned for doing mostly good deeds, it’s not out of the question that when her husband fled she likely cursed him all the way! Even on her deathbed though, people brought to her for cures would magically rise with just an incantation from their stretchers.

She died on 6th October 1856, the year the painting was completed.

*I hesitate to ascribe any kind of modern-terms like “white” witch, “black” witch, or even witch in general unless there’s no description of a practitioner from their time. Cornish witchcraft wasn’t divided as rigidly as the general witchcraft world is today, and it’s common that a Cornish pellar, witch or any kind of practitioner would need to know how to curse and how to break curses, how to hurt and how to heal.