Witching hour

This article is about the folklore belief. For other uses, see Witching hour (disambiguation).
Look up witching hour in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

With a modern literal meaning of "midnight,"[1] the term witching hour refers to the time of night when creatures such as witches, demons, and ghosts are thought to appear and to be at their most powerful and black magic to be most effective. Adversely, the term devil's hour applies to the hour of 3am or 3:15; the suggestion being that this demonic hour is an inversion of the time at which Christ died at Calvary. The suggestion being that this hour is a mocking of the holy trinity.

It may be used to refer to any arbitrary time of bad luck or in which something bad has a greater likelihood to occur (e.g., a baby crying,[2] or a computer crashing,[3] or stock market volatility,[4] crimes, supernatural, etc.). The witching hour from medieval times is the time believed that witches came out to do their "unholy" practices. Women caught out late at night could have been suspected of witchcraft if they did not have a "legitimate" reason to be out.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Witching hour". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2 April 2012.
  2. ↑ Manning-Schaffel, Vivian. "Cry, Cry, Cry: The latest (not entirely reassuring) research on colic". Babble.com.
  3. ↑ Malik, Om (27 October 2009). "3 Times Unlucky or the Start of a Larger Trend?". GigaOM.
  4. ↑ Little, Ken. "Beware of Stock's Witching Hour". About.com.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, February 02, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.