amuletsRabbit's foot

This charm is usually filed under European luck, beside the clover and the horseshoe, and its American history says otherwise. The conditions attached to it in North America are conditions about a graveyard. The foot must be the left hind foot of a rabbit shot or otherwise taken in a cemetery. Some accounts require a full moon, others a new moon; some a Friday, a rainy Friday, or Friday the thirteenth; some a silver bullet; some that the foot be cut off while the rabbit is still alive. Folklorists read the use of graveyard dust as a symbolic appropriation of the parts of a corpse as a relic, and as sympathetic magic.

The folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett recorded the reasoning about whose grave: "the more wicked the person who is dead, the more effective the charm associated with his remains." Puckett noted that during Grover Cleveland's 1884 election campaign the candidate was said to have been sent the foot of a rabbit killed on the grave of the outlaw Jesse James. Puckett also documented an African American cook in the Mississippi Delta whose mojo bag held "a lizard's tail, rabbit's foot, a fish eye, snake skins, a beetle, and a dime with a hole in it", worn for good luck — the rabbit's foot as one ingredient in a Hoodoo working rather than as a standalone token.

The folk song record says the same thing plainly. "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight", once popular in minstrel shows, runs: "And you've got a rabbit's foot To keep away de hoo-doo". The foot turns up in blues lyrics as well. A 1905 anecdote has Booker T. Washington and Baron Ladislaus Hengelmuller, the Austrian ambassador, confusing their overcoats at the White House while both waiting to speak to Roosevelt; the ambassador realised the coat was not his when he reached for his gloves and found instead "the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit, killed in the dark of the moon."

Other accounts pull in other directions. Benjamin Radford has suggested the charm may be connected to the Hand of Glory, a European charm made from the hand of a hanged man and pickled. The belief in a lucky rabbit's foot is reported from Europe, Africa, Australia and both American continents, with the same pattern everywhere: the rabbit must have been killed in a particular place, or by a particular method, or by a person with a particular attribute — in one version, by a cross-eyed man. A related British and American ritual is to say "rabbit rabbit rabbit" on waking on the first day of a month, for luck through the rest of it.

Taken from the animal under the conditions the tradition names — place, day, moon, method — then dried and carried in a pocket, or mounted in metal and hung. The strictures are described by the source as now mostly observed in the breach. Nothing is said over it and nothing retires it.

Sold dyed in bright colours on keychains, and carried by people who have never heard of a graveyard rabbit. Inference — what the mass-market version keeps is the object and what it drops is every condition that made it one, which is the same story this atlas tells about the horseshoe bought new. The Hoodoo lineage is the part most often left out, and it is the part the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century record documents best.