A day when it is ‘certain to rain heavily’. Well, that wasn’t true last year. On this day you, supposing you want to find who your true lover is, must:
Carefully peel an apple in one piece.
Turn round three times with the peel in your right hand
Drop the peel over your left shoulder
See what shape letter the peel forms on the ground, and this will be the first letter of your true love’s name.
And if it breaks into pieces, you are doomed, probably, to never finding your true love.
To make this work, you also have to recite:
St Simon and St Jude, on you I intrude
By this paring I hold to discover
Without any delay, to tell me this day
The first letter of my own true love.
Jude is the Saint of:
Lost Causes
Desperate causes
Hopeless causes
And if that is not enough also the Hopeless and the Despairing.
So maybe the apple peel isn’t going to work for you (although Jude is also the Patron Saint of the Impossible!)
Jude aka Thaddeus was martyred with an axe. Simon the Zealous was martyred by being sawn in half, and is, of course, therefore, the patron saint of woodcutters and lumberjacks. They are linked by the same Saint’s day because they went to Syria together to preach where they were met their fates, and they are also associated with woodworking.
There are at least four Judes. One of them may have been Jesus’ brother. He or another Jude wrote the Epistle of St. Jude.
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