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The Witch Killing Bottle
May. 18th, 2021 07:25 amToday I will be watching this:
https://www.facebook.com/pittriversmuseum/posts/4146316748722516
The Pitt Rivers Museum was always my favourite, having said that I never got to the Ashmolean, which friends claim might be a contender. But the Pitt Rivers was just that little tiny bit out there, all those talismans and amulets, and of course, the famous shrunken heads that made an appearance in some Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. The heads were a lot cooler than the film.
They smartened the whole place up, which I didn't much like. I was quite into mad dusty old cabinets with artefacts tucked away in random corners. The Horniman's quite cool too; not lacking its own folklore frenzies, it's where I took a photo of a witch bottle.
The idea was that if you wanted to sort out a witch good and proper, you would fill a glass bottle with nasty things plus the secret ingredient; urine.
Then you'd bury it, preferably somewhere warm like under a hearth, and the witch would start having problems passing water, a sort of supernaturally charged form of cystitis. They might swell up, they might die. Apparently the witch bottle would explode if the latter occurred.
Thing about witch bottle lore is that it didn't die out. That's a 20th century bottle. I understand that while extremely popular in Britain, and quite popular in Europe, few witch bottles have been discovered in the US. Understandably I would say; perhaps one of the great things about travel to the New World would be leaving behind a life of so much passive aggression your only recourse to dealing with someone you didn't like was to chance shards of glass and fermented piss all over your fireplace.
https://www.facebook.com/pittriversmuseum/posts/4146316748722516
The Pitt Rivers Museum was always my favourite, having said that I never got to the Ashmolean, which friends claim might be a contender. But the Pitt Rivers was just that little tiny bit out there, all those talismans and amulets, and of course, the famous shrunken heads that made an appearance in some Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. The heads were a lot cooler than the film.
They smartened the whole place up, which I didn't much like. I was quite into mad dusty old cabinets with artefacts tucked away in random corners. The Horniman's quite cool too; not lacking its own folklore frenzies, it's where I took a photo of a witch bottle.
The idea was that if you wanted to sort out a witch good and proper, you would fill a glass bottle with nasty things plus the secret ingredient; urine.
Then you'd bury it, preferably somewhere warm like under a hearth, and the witch would start having problems passing water, a sort of supernaturally charged form of cystitis. They might swell up, they might die. Apparently the witch bottle would explode if the latter occurred.
Thing about witch bottle lore is that it didn't die out. That's a 20th century bottle. I understand that while extremely popular in Britain, and quite popular in Europe, few witch bottles have been discovered in the US. Understandably I would say; perhaps one of the great things about travel to the New World would be leaving behind a life of so much passive aggression your only recourse to dealing with someone you didn't like was to chance shards of glass and fermented piss all over your fireplace.
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