This is a follow-up to a diary I posted yesterday.
The subject is how to keep a witch from harming you. We are not talking about modern wiccans. We are not talking about pagans or Harry Potter witches. We are talking about the kind that the Puritans thought they were hanging at Salem, when they hung poor women who denied being witches, and Tituba, a black or native American or Caribbean servant or slave, who actually admitted to being a witch.
Counter measures against witchcraft have several issues to deal with. Once you have identified that you have been cursed or bewitched, you may have to figure out who has cursed you. In the fens of Cambridgeshire (England), you could stop a witch from coming into the house by scattering yarrow on the threshold, but if you couldn’t stop her from coming into the house, you could make sure she would not have power over you if you made her sit on a cushion stuffed with yarrow.
Drawing blood from a witch is considered effective at protecting a household against her malevolent intent. There are tales of people surreptitiously sticking a witch with a needle or scratching her when passing, and there are examples of people who suggest inviting a witch into your house and placing pins, head down and sharp tip up, in the cushion of the chair on which she is encouraged to sit. Boiling urine of the victim, along with nails in the pan is thought to be a way to detect the witch – either she would appear while it was boiling, or in a few days she would have scratches on her face. This latter is referenced as early as 1593, in George Gifford’s A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraft.
Objects put in houses can provide protection against witchcraft – in the West Country you would find a heart of a bewitched animal, stuck full of pins, hanging in a chimney, and also dried out cats placed in the rafters, which were thought to be equally effective. And then there are the Witch Bottles – a custom that dates back to the 17th century at least – and was widespread in the 19th century, from Cornwall to Essex, and from Sussex in the south to the north in Lincolnshire (and probably even wider spread). Glass witch bottles have been found in churchyards in Devonshire, from the grave of an animal in Lincolnshire, and beneath floors of farmhouses in Staffordshire and the Cambridgeshire fens.
Witch bottles are bottles (ceramic or glass or iron), with contents that include a sample of the victim’s urine (which was supposed to hold some of the witch’s blood – the devil was supposed to demand some of the blood of the witch be a part of every spell she cast – and it was of course a lot easier to get the blood of the accursed than the curser), together with a few nails, pins, or thorns (this could be also the urine and hair of an animal). Other things of the victim (nail clippings, belly button lint, hair) were also often inserted. Then the bottle was tightly stoppered, and either concealed, or heated until it explodes. It thus either caused the witch to experience strangury (painful urination in which the urine is emitted drop by drop owing to muscle spasms of the urethra or urinary bladder) or even a slow and painful death. In the latter method, as the bottle bursts, so would the witch die suddenly. If the cork just flew out, then the witch would escape.
The danger and difficulty of bursting the bottle with heat made the slower variation more popular, and thus we find bottles. When the liquid is gone, the hair clippings and nails usually identify them as witch bottles, but there were bottles that used urine alone, and those are problematic to identify.
The earliest recorded account of a witch bottle is from someone who died in 1667, quoted in a 1681 text by Joseph Glanvill. The events are tentatively attributed to the period 1620-1640. It seems to be the introduction of the idea of a witch-bottle as a protective measure into Suffolk. This is supported by the archaeological evidence. The 15 known 17th century witch bottles known in 1935 were all from London and the eastern counties (Essex to Lincolnshire). These are stoneware with bearded human masks – these are the "Bellarmine" jugs. These jugs were imported from the Lower Rhineland in the later 16th century and throughout the 17th, and are pretty dateable by shape and type of mask.
One of the interesting inclusions with Bellarmine jugs, but that fell out of use when they did, was the use of a fabric or cloth heart pierced with pins, perhaps related to the image of a face on the jar.
Witch bottles could also be made of iron. These were made by blacksmiths, and as late as 1901, they were still being manufactured to order. In early 1800s (told by a woman born in 1805, who died in 1900, and this was a story from when she was a young woman), there was a story about an iron bottle used as a witch bottle:
A woman told another that all her children would be born deformed and this so weighed on the recipient of this news that she became "deranged".
Friends of her husband took vengeance into their own hands. When the witch re-covered from her ducking she promised that, if the men released her, she would undo the curse if they agreed to meet her the fol-lowing evening at the farmhouse, after dark. This they promised to do. The witch then ordered the blacksmith to make a three-sided bottle, called a Trinity Bottle, out of sheet iron, but in welding it he was to heat the iron three times only. She stood over him while he worked and spat three times on the anvil before he placed the red-hot iron upon it. When the bottle was completed, he was told to take it to the inn to have it filled with a quart of ale, to see that it did not leak. The test having been made to her satisfaction, he was ordered to empty the bottle in three long draughts.
Arrived at the farmhouse next evening, the witch ordered a hen to be brought in. Its throat was cut so that the blood ran into the bottle. Then she took cuttings from the hair and toe-nails of the farmer and his wife, sprinkled them with salt and placed them in the bottle, together with the hen's intestines and three of its tail and wing feathers. Fat from the gizzard was then rubbed on the forehead of the farmer's wife and her eyes were bandaged. The witch took a handful of soot from the chimney and sprinkled this on the farmer and his wife, both of whom were told to fill the bottle with their urine. Then the bottle was stoppered with a piece of clay and placed in the glowing centre of the peat fire, the tallow dip was extinguished and everyone waited in silence for the bottle to ex-plode and scatter its contents up the chimney. When this occurred, the bandage was removed from the woman's eyes and she was found to be once more her normal self. The farmer then angrily ordered the witch from the house and, retrieving with the tongs the red-hot bottle from the fire, flung it after her.
Just for your information, an article on a complete (including urine) witch bottle is to be found here.
Merrifield, Ralph. "Witch Bottles and Magical Jugs." Folklore 66, No. 1 (Mar., 1955): 195-207.
Porter, Enid M. "Some Folk Beliefs of the Fens." Folklore 69, No. 2 (Jun., 1958): 112-122.