The Powers
The Jokers – The Two Powers
The fifty-two cards of this deck describe the objects, practices and people of the English cunning folk tradition. The two Jokers describe something different: the world those people inhabited, and the two powers between which every one of them operated.
These were not obscure forces known only to practitioners. Every man and woman in sixteenth to nineteenth century England knew them. Providence: divine will moving through events, ordained and unstoppable, forever restoring the world to what was meant to be. And Opposition: the power that ran counter to it, met at crossroads and in desperation, that would bend what was meant to be, for a price. Church and chapel named them from the pulpit. The cunning folk met them in their work.
The cunning folk identified with Providence. They healed in God’s name, worked their charms in Christ’s authority, and presented themselves, honestly for the most part, as people who worked with the divine, not against it. But they stood closer to the boundary than anyone else in their communities. Some moved toward Opposition, consciously or not. Some were accused of it regardless. The two cards that follow give these powers their most historically documented faces: the forms they took when they became visible enough to be recorded.
The Man in Black
Opposition
He is the face Opposition wore when it became visible enough to record. So present was this figure in the confessions, the pamphlets, and the examinations before magistrates, that he stands here as the embodiment of everything that moved in that register. He was not the only form Opposition took. But he was the one everyone knew.
In the witch trial records (and it is important to be clear that these are witch trial records, not the records of cunning folk practice) a dark figure appears: at crossroads, at dusk, in moments of desperation. The courts called him the devil, a word that means, at its root, nothing more than the opposer. The people who encountered him understood something older and more complicated: a lord of the otherworld, a power that existed alongside the Christian framework and operated by its own logic entirely.
Scholars have shown that very few cunning folk were ever prosecuted under the Witchcraft Acts. Ordinary people made a clear distinction between harmful magic and the helpful work of the cunning person. But the world was small and its people knew each other’s stories. The Man in Black moved through the same landscape the cunning folk worked in. He was part of the cosmology everyone in that world inhabited. The cunning folk knew exactly who he was, and most of them would have insisted, with complete conviction, that they had nothing to do with him.
At Pendle in 1612, James Device confessed to conjuring a spirit he called Dandy and setting it against a man who had refused his grandmother a penny. In Scotland in 1661, Bessie Wilson described hers speaking to her directly: thee art a poor puddled body, it told her, thee sail never want. These were not abstractions to the people who described them. They were presences, with voices, with names, with opinions about the people who called on them.
Some may have been right.
There is power on offer here, and a price not yet named. Read the terms before you take the hand.
The Angel
Providence
She is the face Providence wore when it arrived in person: vivid enough, documented enough, that she stands here as the embodiment of the divine power the cunning folk claimed. Not the only form that power took. But the one that gave it a presence, a figure, a face.
Joan Willimot, a Leicestershire cunning woman examined in 1618, described a spirit that stood upon the ground in the shape of a woman, sent by a mysterious master to do her good. James Murrell, the last great cunning man of Essex, summoned good spirits and angels to fight the bad ones. These were not theological abstractions. They were presences: encountered, described, worked with.
But the Angel was the visible face of something much larger. Providence expressed itself in a hundred ways that had nothing to do with angelic visitation: in a psalm written against fever, in the words Christ, Trinity, Holy Ghost spoken over the sick, in the authority a cunning person claimed when they said what I do, I do in God’s name. Bridget Bostock healed six hundred people a day with fasting spittle and prayer and charged nothing. She never mentioned an angel. She did not need to. Providence was already moving.
This was the register the cunning folk’s communities recognised, the framework that kept most of them from the gallows. Not because it was a performance, but because it was real. Providence was genuinely what most of them believed they were working with, most of the time.
There are powers at work beyond your control. Trust them. Allow Providence to guide what comes.