A♦ Otherworldly Gift · Received by Contact

The Gift received by Contact.

Some are taken, briefly, by something that does not belong to this world, and return changed.

A cunning man from the North of England, at whose trial the Yorkshire schoolmaster John Webster was present, said it happened on the road home. He was walking back from his labour one night, “being very sad and full of heavy thoughts, not knowing how to get meat and drink for his Wife and Children,” when a “fair Woman in fine cloaths” stopped him and asked why he was so sad. He told her it was his poverty, and she said that if he would follow her counsel she would help him. Webster thought him “a very simple and illiterate person to any mans judgement,” and recorded what her counsel came to: a man “formerly very poor,” afterwards keeping “himself, his Wife and diverse small children, by his cures.” He confessed the whole of it in open court and was acquitted anyway.

Its name in this deck is Otherworldly Gift. It cannot be studied for, and it cannot be inherited. It simply arrives, once, from outside, and does not leave again.

That is what Diamonds is. The body wants to heal. Sometimes it is only by what visits it.

---

Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.70-71. Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), pp.60, 66-67, 68, 82, citing John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), pp.301-302.