2♥ The Love Potion · Attraction

A love potion was exactly what it sounds like: a drink, given to someone, meant to make them fall in love with whoever gave it. Cunning folk made them to order. A client’s wanting went into the cup, the other person drank it and without knowing why felt an attraction that had not been there a moment before.

Margery Jourdemayne, this deck’s own Queen of Hearts, sold drinks like this to courtiers for years, long before the wax figures and the plot against a king that would later cost her life. It was simple, steady work: someone wanted another person’s affection, and she supplied it.

Ordinary people used the same method. In Margate, Kent, in 1582, a woman named Goodwife Swan was brought before the courts for boasting that she could brew a drink strong enough that any young man she fancied would fall in love with her the moment he drank it. Nine years later, a gentleman named Edmund Calton paid a man named John Prestall for the same thing done the other way round: a drink to win the affections of a woman he wanted.

A drink for a feeling that wouldn’t come on its own, given quietly, and left to do its work.

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Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), p.1. Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (2024), Ch.2. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (2023), pp.67, 167, 196.