One for sorrow, two for joy

Magpies - making bridges, being witches, and gazing in mirrors.

One for sorrow.

I don’t remember ever not knowing the rhyme for magpies, that one where you can divine your fortune by counting the corvids. I assume everyone in the UK knows it.

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.

There are other variations, where three is a wedding or five a ‘sickening’ for instance, but one is always sorrow.

It was Terry, the older boy I was going out with when I was fifteen, that taught me to salute the lone magpies so that my fortune wasn’t set in stone. He’d salute and greet every one he saw.

“Hello, Mr Magpie, how’s your wife?”

Failing to do this would mean that I’d get bad luck apparently. The reason one is sorrowful, he told me, is because if you see one on it’s own it means their mate has died. I started saluting every single magpie I saw too, even if the same one flew past me multiple times. I dropped the “how’s your wife?” part of the greeting, because this seemed kind of dickish to me. Imagine if you repeatedly asked a recently widowed human man how his wife was, you could get your teeth knocked out.

Last year a local farmer told me that you only have to salute single magpies if you see them before midday, but you do have to tap your head three times when you salute. I’m not risking bad luck, so I now tap my head three times (minimum) but I stay saluting and greeting throughout the day, “Good morning/afternoon/evening Mr (or Mrs?) Magpie”.

Look at those beautiful oil-slick colours. Wikimedia picture.

In other parts of the country people have different ways of countering the bad luck of seeing a lonesome magpie. My source material for this is a Folklore society book that’s almost 150 years old¹, so if you live in any of these places please let me know if you or people you know still do these.

• West Riding - you say “I cross the magpie, the magpie crosses me, bad luck to the magpie, and good luck to me.”

• North Shropshire - Take off your hat, spit in the direction of the bird and say, “Devil, Devil, I defy thee”

• Devon - a man that the book refers to as “Mr Dyer, the peasant” spits over his right shoulder three times, repeating the following when he sees a magpie; “Clean birds by sevens, unclean by twos, the dove in the heavens is the one I choose.”

Two for joy

Magpies are seen as birds of good fortune in East Asia, rather than harbingers of doom that you need to salute or spit at. It’s the national bird of South Korea, where little children used to throw their teeth on the roof for magpies, and in traditional Chinese writing the first character for the word magpie means ‘happiness’.

The annual Qixi festival was on Saturday, a day that celebrates the story of Zhinü the weaver girl and Niulang the cowherd boy, and is sometimes referred to as ‘Chinese Valentine’s day’. Zhinü was one of seven daughters of the Jade Emperor of heaven, and responsible for weaving the celestial cloth. She came to earth and fell in love with a cowherd boy called Niulang and neglected her weaving duties. The Emperor brought his daughter back to heaven and Niulang followed his love, but the whole milky way was put between them to keep them apart.

Zhinü became the star Vega and Niulang the star Altair, and every year, on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month (which this year fell on the 10th of August), all the magpies fly up to heaven and form a bridge across the milky way so that the lovers can reunite for one day.²

Three for a girl

One old Swedish story tells of a farmhand who shot a magpie, but when he went to retrieve the bird he realised it was a witch, and on even closer inspection it turned out to be his master’s wife. This seems like a pretty major fuck-up but maybe he got away with it since the story comes from a time when it was believed, in northern Europe, that witches transformed into magpies so that they could fly to Blåkulla and party with the devil on Walpurgis night. Blåkulla, supposedly a Satanic party island where witches ate bacon and butter and listened to harp music, was frequently referenced in Sadducismus Triumphatus, the 1681 book on witchcraft that influenced the Salem witch trials.

The etymology of the name Magpie relates to misogyny too. The birds were called Pie (from their latin name Pica) until some time after the 13th century when ‘Mag’ got added to the name.

The first element is Mag, nickname for Margaret, long used in proverbial and slang English for qualities associated generally with women, especially in this case "idle chattering”. https://www.etymonline.com/word/magpie

Four for a boy

If I had a thorn for every story that sought to explain something about birds by invoking the crucifixion I wouldn’t quite be able to make a crown, but I’d definitely have a handful of thorns. 

As a way of explaining the magpie’s bad reputation in England it’s said that, unlike all the other birds, it did not go into mourning after Jesus’ death. For the transgression of not grieving publicly she must suspend herself from a branch nine times before she can lay an egg.

I was going to make a joke here about birds in mourning, wailing and wearing black shawls and raging at God, but of course birds do actually grieve and corvids more obviously than most.

Five for silver

The mirror test (also known as the mirror self-recognition (MSR) test or red spot technique) aims to see whether various animals are capable of self-recognition. Hundreds of animals have been tested but only a few have passed, and they’ve mostly been primates. The only birds to have passed (without extensive training. I’m looking at you, pigeons) have been Eurasian magpies.

The mirror test is just one of many ways that the bird’s intelligence has been tested and measured, but there could be a million other ways they’re smart and feeling that are too animal for our human brains to comprehend.

Magpies have shown the ability to make and use tools, imitate human speech, grieve, play games, and work in teams. When one of their own kind dies, a grouping will form around the body for a “funeral” of squawks and cries. To portion food to their young, magpies will use self-made utensils to cut meals into proper sizes. - Encyclopædia Britannica

Six for gold

A 2013 study done by the University of Exeter showed that despite their reputation for thieving sparkly things, magpies are actually scared of anything shiny or new.

Of course, I think we should consider that maybe they just outsmarted the researchers and knew better than to rob while being watched. I reckon that’s what my gran would have claimed if she’d known about this study.

My mum says that when she was little there was a group of boys that lived in her village that stole eggs from various corvid’s nests (these were pre Pokemon GO times), took them home and then raised the birds as pets. My gran took her opal engagement ring off to do the washing up one day, and swore one of the boys domesticated magpies flew off with it.

Seven for a secret never to be told

According to an old superstition, if you scratch a magpie’s tongue and put a drop of human blood in it then they will receive the gift of a human speech. But even if you do get them to talk, they’ll never tell you their secrets.

For the record, I’m not accusing the good people of Alaska Zoo of any tongue-scratching tomfoolery.

1. The folk lore and provincial names of British birds by Charles Swainson (1886)

2. August is full of other celestial goings-on too. It was the last of the dog days of summer yesterday, the period when Sirius (the dog star) rises and falls with the sun and “goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest”. Late tonight and into the early hours of Tuesday morning the most prolific meteor shower of the year, the Perseids, will peak, with the possibility of seeing 60 - 90 shooting stars an hour.