The Pilgrim's Manual: C
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C
Cabbages - the pulling or cutting of a random cabbage from the patch can be used for divining, including the summoning of omen-wraiths. Cabbage-leafs can be tied around poor knees and cabbage-water drank for quelling headaches.
Candles - a common bed-ward and grave-offering, especially when kept continuously lit. Known as a sealer of devils. Sticking a candle with pins is a tool used by quarrellers and strange lovers both. It can fix the legs of the mark - if of the opposite sex.
Caterpillars - sacrificed and worn in a neck-bag for throat ailments.
Cats - black and white cats signal luckiness and unluckiness. The divvying up of a dead black cat is common: the head, tail and ears taken for various ailments, though drain the rag first: the blood is poisonous.
Caul - a newborn's face-covering can be taken and kept as a ward against drowning. The careless disposal of a newborn's caul indicates their death or fate as a restless wanderer.
Chairs - a just-vacated chair bestows the characteristics of the previous sitter to the new. Turning a chair also turns the sitter's luck.
Charmers - the skill of animal charming is passed down by blood, tutelage, or ownership of a fetish.
Charm Wands - rods of twisted coloured glass protect against the evil eye and sickness. It draws out the pest, which can then be wiped from the wand.
Chime Hours - those born at certain hours can see the dead and hidden. Times vary based on the specific mark: hours of monastic prayer, multiples of three, or from Friday midnight to Saturday's cock-crow.
Churching - new mothers are unlucky to receive as visitors before they first enter a place of worship.
Circling - circles stand for perfection, wholeness, boundaries. Circling something steals some form of blessing from it. To 'clip the church' by linking hands with a party - while facing away from the edifice - is also lucky and a way of stealing a blessing.
Clocks - a clock stops when the owner dies. if not, it must be stopped. One stopping without clear cause is an omen. If a clock strikes during a wedding or a sermon, one of the congregation will die. Do not speak while the clock strikes.
Clothes - one must wear at least one new garment on New Year's Day. Unlucky to mend clothes while wearing them or right a garment accidentally put on inside-out.
Clover - four leaved are lucky. In the Fens, two leaved are love charms.
Coal - a lucky substance, good for first-footing on New Year's Day.
Cocks - a cock's daybreak crow drives away evil. Crowing at irregular times indicates poor luck or the arrival of visitors; and if on a church spire, the return of the dead.
Coffins - adornments made from used and decaying coffin parts have curative effects.
Coins - holed or bent coins are lucky. Some rituals, blessings or vows involve the bending of a coin. Fishermen cut a slit in their net's cork-floats with a coin to signal their willingness to 'buy their fish' from Neptune, or place a coin underneath the mast of a new boat.
Colours - no consistent code or system. Rhyming meanings are common: "blue is true".
Colt-pixy - a horse fairy that leads travellers into bogs and attacks boys who steal apples.
Comets - indicate momentous events.
Conception - many charms exist, though few are recorded. Women often pilgrimage to holy wells to incite fertility. Rising tides and waxing moons are also advantageous times. Death in the family also indicates conception: a trading of souls. "Lay on your right side for a boy, your left if you want a girl".
Contraceptives - intercourse done for the first time or while standing up is said to not yield child. Similar practices include vigorous exercise straight afterwards, inserting one's wedding ring into the womb, and currying favour with death by holding a dead man's hand during the act, opening up a grave, or putting a corpse's mouth-coin under her pillow. Some folks - when speaking - mean these as propositions. Remedies include parsley, pennyroyal, nettles, saffron, hot gin, and vinegar in which twelve pennies of church money had been steeped for multiple days. If this fails, women have been known to sneak up and throw themselves down the stairs of church towers or such.
Coral - oak-twigs of chalk are used as beads and teething rings for babies. Certain branching sorts ward against the Evil Eye.
Cork - keeps cramp and heart attacks at bay. One should always keep bottle corks, especially those popped during celebration.
Corpse candles - these are small lights that flit about the home of one fated to die. At points they come along the road to reach the churchyard from their home.
Counterspells - to prevent: horseshoes, hagstones, plants hung at the door, the sign of the cross, and a bent coin laid 'in the churn' while buttermaking. Thereafter: "drawing blood above the breath", meaning drawing blood by scratching the witch's face, stabbing the witch's footprint or shadow with a coffin-nail, and burning straw from her thatch. The link between caster and victim can be reversed, and injury applied to the target is apparently mirrored on the witch: if an object, prodded with red-hot pokers or horseshoes, boiled, baked into a hard cake, or buried; if a person, their excrement thrown into a fire; if a farm animal, its heart should be removed, stuck with pins, and thrown into the fire or stored in the chimney and the rest of the body burnt.
Counting - unlucky to count things too accurately or announce the exact number, as this tempts fate to take or give some. Conversely, counting warts is an effective cure.
Covens - some suppose that three close women are witches working in triplicate.
Cowslip - balls made by tying the flower's stems together can act as a ward, doubly so if tossed over a house.
Cradles - rocking an empty cradle heralds a child. Keeping an empty cradle or pram in the house prior to birth is bad luck. Never push an empty pram. A cradle must be paid for prior to use; or the child will end up without means to pay for a coffin.
Cramps - cured by specific animal bones secreted in the pocket or under the pillow: "the lytle bone in the knee ioynt of the hunder legge of an here", or the knuckle-bone of a sheep, or more generally the patella. Also cured by gold and silver 'cramp rings' that have been rubbed and blessed by the king on Good Friday. Five silver pennies from the Good Friday Mass-offerings of five different churches is also effective. Other 'special coins' can be fabricated by changing coins collected from a diversity of people for a higher denomination, or putting together scrap metal from different sources, such as lead from three coffin-nails taken from three coffins out of three churchyards.
Crickets - cricket-song in the house is an omen. Get out.
Cross - ward off evil or bad luck by making or tracing the Sign of the Cross in the air, on oneself, or on food. Witches cannot step over sticks laid crossways, or enter portals over which a cross is engraved. One who crosses their legs brings on bad luck, especially during childbirth or during prayer or invocation.
Crossroads - the traditional burial-place for suicides or criminals, affairs in which the corpse is often also staked. The afflicted should rub desirable items against their maladies and leave them at crossroads, passing on the disease or curse to whichever sap comes that way next and claims the 'prize'.
Crows & Magpies - unlucky and omens of death. Signal different things depending on precise number counted.
Cuckoos - a signal of Spring. Subject of many inane traditions. Associated with cuckoldry.
Cunning men - local sorcerous 'problem solvers' exist called Cunning Men or Women, employed to heal sickness, to find thieves, to fortune-tell, to assist romance, and - most importantly - detect and defeat witchcraft. Ability is alternately born to the "seventh son of a seventh daughter", and book-learned from handwritten manuals of recipes and formulas.
Curses - wielded by the clergy more than any 'black witch'. Also seized by normal folk who kneel on their bare knees in a public place around witnesses, or inscribe lead 'curse-tablets'. Psalm 109 is also a 'Cursing Psalm' which can be invoked on the deathbed. Often no cure is possible - this being the point - though one should beseech a priest for temporary alleviation. In dire circumstances, find the one who was angered and make amends.