Warwick Examiner Sat 24th Feb 1872 p4 (abridged)
Allhallow’s Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day, being the last joyous feast of the ecclesiastical year, before Advent, was anciently kept with cheerful sociability in many rural households, by rich and the poor. It was an occasion that seemed to mark the close of the harvest season, and the beginning of winter, the time of home delights, when the comforts of a well to-do life are enjoyed. There was, moreover, a superstitious notion that on this particular sight of the year (as on the Walpurgisnacht in Germany; which is made such a strange, wild time in Goethe’s ‘Faust’) all the fiends, imps, goblins, witches, and other un-blessed agents of supernatural power would come out and frisk about the world till daylight or cockcrow. Hence it was supposed to be a most favorable occasion for divining people’s fortunes by different methods of conjuration or chance experiment.
In the south of Ireland it is usual for country people to hold their sportive meetings not on the night before November 1, or All Saints’ Day, but on the eve of November 2, which is All Souls’ Day, the day appointed by the Roman Catholic Church for a solemn service for the repose of the dead. The fairies of Celtic fancy are more frolicsome than wicked, and there is something graceful and amiable in the Irish popular superstitions, compared with the ghastly horrors of Teutonic and Scandinavian
tradition.
There is dipping for sixpences, to be caught up with the teeth at the bottom of a tub of water. There is bobbing for apples, fastened alternately with lighted candles around a hoop, suspended and kept twirling at the level of the lips, so that one risks being burnt in the attempt to snatch a
morsel. There is, of course, the prescribed ordeal of burning pairs of chestnuts to represent pairs of lovers, and to show which of the two is destined to bounce off, or whether they shall remain constant to each other in one steady flame of affection. But the Irish festive fortune-tempters have another method peculiar to themselves.
Three or four saucers are placed on the table, in one of which is laid a ring, which denotes marriage; in the second a lump of clay, signifying death; and into the third is poured water, the meaning of which is the sea-that is emigration across the Atlantic. There may be a fourth saucer, containing salt, which means the the person is to be preserved, during the year, from all those fates. A man or woman is blind folded, and the saucers are then changed or shifted, after which he or she is bidden to lay hands upon one of them. The one so accidentally touched is a sure token of what will befall him or her within the next twelvemonth.
The Burren and Beyond 