Finding a key
Finding a key puts a precise, useless object in your hand: it opens one lock somewhere and no other, much like gifts that fit only the right place. Germans once wore tiny keys as lucky charms.
What it may mean
A key found in the street is a strange object: precise, carefully cut and completely useless to you. Somewhere there is one lock it opens, and without that lock the key is a bit of brass. The same is true of many things people carry: skills, habits, ways of speaking that work beautifully in one place and fall flat in another. Finding a key is a fine excuse to ask where your own gifts fit best. Is there a talent you have been trying to use in the wrong door, a job or a group where it will never turn? Or a place where it would open things easily, if you went there?
Depending on how you saw it
A single key in the street
A loose key with no ring or tag is almost impossible to match to its door, though a nearby shop or the police may hold it until its owner comes asking. Some things are valuable only to one person. What do you own that would mean nothing to anyone else and everything to you?
An old skeleton key in a drawer
Old long-shafted keys belong to locks that may have been gone for decades. People keep them anyway, out of curiosity or attachment. Are you keeping keys to doors you will never open again, habits or hopes that belong to an earlier life?
Keys left in a new home
Spare keys from previous owners often turn up in kitchen drawers and garages, which is why many new owners change the locks. Who else may still hold a key to your life, and is that still all right with you?
A car key fob in a parking lot
A modern car key carries a coded chip matched to a single car, which is why a lost fob is so costly to replace. Small as it is, a fob holds a little of its owner's story. What traces of you do you leave behind in the places you pass through?
Why it happens in nature
Most house keys are pin-tumbler keys: the cut edge lifts small pins inside the lock to exactly the right heights, so a key works only in locks set to match it. Keys are among the things people misplace most often. A found key is best handed to a nearby business or the police, where its owner is most likely to look for it.
What folk beliefs say
Germany
In Germany, miniature keys were worn for good fortune.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 464. View the page
Norway
In Norway, a steel key was put in the cradle to keep the black dwarfs away from a baby.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 30. View the page
Scotland
In Scotland, a soup ladle and a door key were put into the hands of a newly married man to show that he was master of the house and its breadwinner.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 464. View the page
To reflect on
Which of your gifts have you been trying in the wrong door?