The rabbit's foot: from African American folklore to key rings

For much of the twentieth century the rabbit's foot was one of the most common lucky charms in the United States, sold as a key ring in drugstores, fairgrounds and petrol stations. Today it survives mostly in synthetic versions, but its history is less trivial than it seems. Its best-documented roots lie in the folk magic of African Americans in the South, which merged with old European beliefs about hares and rabbits.

Hares and rabbits in European folklore

In Europe the hare was long an ambiguous animal. Its remarkable fertility made it a symbol of abundance and rebirth, linked to spring, while its nocturnal and elusive nature associated it with witchcraft. In Britain there were tales of witches able to turn into hares in order to move unseen through the countryside, and meeting a hare on one's path could be considered a bad omen.

Yet part of the animal could become an amulet. Samuel Pepys, in his famous diary, notes in 1665 that he carried a hare's foot, to which protective virtues were then attributed, and he shows himself convinced of it with a certain irony. The episode indicates that the use of hare's feet as charms was already known in seventeenth-century England, well before the American fashion.

Hoodoo and the American South

The American form of the belief developed within hoodoo, the body of folk magical practices that arose among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the southern United States. In this system, which combined African, European and Native American elements, the rabbit's foot was a powerful amulet, but only if the animal had been caught in particular circumstances, connected with the place, the phase of the moon and the person who caught it. Without those conditions, the foot had no value at all.

In African American folklore the rabbit was also a central figure in storytelling: the clever Brer Rabbit, hero of tales in which the weaker defeats the stronger by wit. These stories were collected and published from 1880 onwards by Joel Chandler Harris, in a version now criticised for its racial framing, but which made the character famous throughout the English-speaking world.

From magic to commerce

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the rabbit's foot left the context of hoodoo and entered the mass market. Pedlars, newspapers and mail-order catalogues offered it to everyone, often with fanciful tales about its origin. The complicated conditions of the tradition disappeared, and the object became a simple lucky pendant, taken up by gamblers, sportsmen and soldiers leaving for the front.

In the second half of the twentieth century industrial production led to millions of brightly dyed feet being made and sold at trifling prices. This very trivialisation, together with growing concern for animal welfare, caused the use of real feet to decline, replaced more and more often by imitations in synthetic fur that keep the shape but not the history.

The rabbit's foot tells a story typical of many modern amulets: a belief born within a particular community, with complex rules and meanings, which the market turns into a standard product. Recalling its roots, from Pepys's hare to the clever rabbit of African American tales, restores historical depth to a charm that is often regarded as nothing more than a small gadget.