Holding the Sole

For centuries, people have invested shoes with supernatural powers beyond their daily functionality. Their moulding quality makes them vessels for holding emotions, containing agency, and transmitting talismanic potencies of the self, body, and socio-cultural environments and authorities. This chapter explores magical and emotional uses of shoes in three historical contexts: folk and fairy tales, saints’ relics, and deliberately concealed shoes. Supernatural shoes in tales inscribe punishments or give aid. This magical agency finds parallels in shoes associated with saints. Relic shoes transmit saints’ posthumous holiness or are material embodiments of their souls. Finally, the supernatural is explored around shoes deliberately concealed in buildings throughout the pre-modern period. The beliefs involved mirror each other in polarities between oral/literary, recording/concealing, doctrine/practice, sacred/profane, public/private, held in shoes as material cultural vessels. The physical shoe is linked to the power of the sacralized supernatural shoe as elevated, evoking wonder and awe.