A Gambling Hand - Love and Gambling

cards and money for gambling
This is an old recipe for a Gambling Hand. It uses one of those old mercury-filled nutmegs that most people advise against trying, these days. I have a suspicion that the purpose of the liquid mercury comes from a bit of wordplay off "quicksilver" (suggesting silver, money, will come quick.) I like to replace it with some Fast Luck oil and silver magnetic sand: I know others who use filed down Mercury dimes for this.

Begin: prepare a round whole nutmeg by drilling a hole in it and filling it with liquid mercury. Then use some strong adhesive tape to seal it, making an X or a cross with two pieces.

For the rest of the bag you need:

  • a chamois bag
  • an eagle eye
  • a shark tooth
  • a lodestone
  • magnetic sand
  • cinnamon

Combine all the items and the nutmeg inside the bag, and sew it shut.

You dress the bag with a mixture of clove oil, cinnamon oil and "green-luck oil." Seven drops are used to feed it. If you lose while carrying this bag, stop a while and let it rest; and don't try to use it during the waning moon.

Something I have been noticing lately is that many formulas that have a reputation for gambling luck also are used for luck in love. Take Jockey Club, Has No Hanna, Fast Luck, Algiers, Black Cat -- even the Swallow's Heart Charm with its romantic traditions, I have seen called for in a gambling hand in The Black and White Magic of Marie Laveau.

Considering why this would be so, I come to a few possibilities: firstly, that the kind of love in question is a "player's" love, where one is just trying to get as many mates as possible and overall the formulas help one to accumulate hits. However, given the use of some of these formulas (particularly Black Cat) in reconciliation workings and in fidelity spells, that seems a bit unlikely.

The next possibility then is that they don't particularly influence gambling or love, but rather Luck in general. The Church of Good Luck talks of influencers on the matter: "The mechanism by which these techniques operate is not known. Perhaps they serve to alter attitude or openness. Maybe they work in small ways on cause and effect to alter results in a larger way.Since the effectiveness of these techniques can be neither proved nor disproved theories are rather useless and practice is the key to results."

Finally, if you follow the practice of deity worship, there's the chance that these formulas particularly appeal to one of those Ochun/Venus sort of entities who rule over both love and money. In fact, it's slightly common in world religions that a single entity rules, or at least influences, both these matters -- Hariti, Kurukulla, Xochiquetzal, etc. In the case of Hathor, she is described as a "goddess of joy" and I suppose, given that love and money are the things most people worry most on, that makes sense.