A♥ Innate Power · Received by Blood

The Gift received by Blood.

Some children arrive already marked.

The seventh son, the seventh daughter: across England this was no idle superstition but a working credential. Mary Cox, a nineteenth-century wise-woman of Plymouth, defended her trade to the local Board of Guardians on exactly this ground, she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and the healing was hers by right of birth alone. John Wrightson, the cunning man of Stokesley, made the same claim. No apprenticeship explained it. No encounter granted it. It was simply there, counted into the family line before the child had done a single thing to deserve it.

Its name in this deck is Innate Power. Not luck, and not inheritance in the ordinary sense, the specific, documented belief that some are born already carrying what others spend a lifetime trying to earn.

That is what Hearts is. The household is owed nothing. It simply has, already, what it needs.

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Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), p.70. Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History 8:1 (1997), p.98. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp.200-202. Simon Young, “What’s Up Doc? Seventh Sons in Victorian and Edwardian Lancashire,” Folklore 130:4 (2019), pp.395-412.