Fortune Telling Games

Divination by Young Girls

    The girls of Salem read their future by putting egg whites in warm water. This practice was called oomancy, and it apparently made John Hale very uncomfortable. In his account of the Salem trials, he said that the girls "tampered with the Devil’s tools so far that hereby one door was opened to Satan to play those pranks"(The Salem Witch Hunt, page 53). He also said this practice led to one of the girl's deaths, after she had seen a coffin in her future. I wonder what he would have thought of the future telling games my friends and I would play in elementary school.

    

    The game we played the most was M.A.S.H. This was a paper and pen based fortune telling game. When we played it, the letters stood for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, and House, but I've seen other variations. The players would write out MASH, a list of people they might marry, a job they may have, the number of kids, a place to live, and the car they may drive. Then, one of the players would close their eyes and draw a spiral until the person who is getting their fortune told tells them when to stop. They would count the number of rounds in the spiral and that would be their magic number. They would go down the list in each category until they reached the magic number, and whatever they landed on would be their future. I played this games many times, but have yet to marry one of the Jonas Brothers or members of One Direction, like was predicted.

        Another fortune telling game I remember fondly was the paper fortune teller. This one was much more involved because you had to learn how to fold the fortune teller. I was always bad at it, but once you got it down, you had the power of divination literally in the palm of your hand.  In this game you would fold a piece of paper to create layers where the players would choose different options that would reveal their future. To start, the player would pick a color and the fortune teller would spell it out loud, opening the fortune teller to a different side with each letter. Then, the player would pick a number and again the fortune teller would open it that many times. Finally, the player would pick a number to open and that would be their fortune. Of course, the fortunes were just written by other kids, so their legitimacy is unclear.  

    

    We always knew that these were just games. They didn't really mean anything about our future. We did them for fun in between classes or during recess. I wonder if the girls in Salem thought the same thing. Were these just silly games to pass the time, or did they really believe in those eggs? Would John Hale call me a witch for knowing how to fold a fortune teller?

I'm not sure, but I would bet the girls of Salem cracked those eggs for the same reasons we drew spirals all over our papers.