IAA Project Blog: The Nervous Pagan and the Research Visit

As part of his Impact Acceleration Account project ‘Amulets, charms, and witch bottles: Thinking about ‘magical’ objects in museum collections through collaborative interaction between academics and curators with Pagans, witchcraft practitioners and other communities with spiritual investment’, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Nigel Jeffries (MOLA medieval and later pottery specialist) organised a 2-day workshop at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

In this first of two blogs, project participant Dr Christina Oakley Harrington, founder of Treadwell’s Bookshop shares her experiences:

Pagans love museums. It’s a bold statement, yes. But true, almost a hundred percent. To explain. For many of us, an archaeological or ethnographic museum was, in our childhoods at least, something akin to a temple. It held the treasures and remains from a time when magic was treated as real, when goddesses were worshipped, and when magical practitioners were treated as genuine. Even now, as we increasingly understand the colonial history of European collecting, the feeling of the sacred hangs over these galleries for many of us. Even if the object were taken from their communities in unethical circumstances, those objects are a testament - physical proof - of cultures existing where the unseen is reverenced and respected. Where a Christian found connection in church, where a Muslim did so in a mosque, we Pagan youngsters had Nature. And the museum.

I remember going, like a worshipper, to the semi-darkened side room in the British Museum where the statues of Greek and Roman goddesses stood. It was a silent room, and for me, it was quiet in the way a cathedral is quiet. It was private, though public, the way a church is, or a mosque. To the guard on duty, I looked like any bookish teenager as I lingered around in front of the statues, my inward experience utterly imperceptible to the outsider. But inside, it was religious, deeply so. When I speak to others in my faith community, they tell of experiences that are similar - I know many whose ‘place of worship’ is the Museum of London, the Pitt Rivers in Oxford, the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology in Cambridge and the recreated Temple of Mithras by Bloomberg in the City of London. I have one friend who regularly goes to the British Museum’s Egyptian gallery to commune with the goddess Sekhmet through her great statues, and even as the tourists swirl around her, he meets her and she, he feels, meets him back.

It is against this background that most Pagans I know are in awe, affectionate awe, of museum curators and museum professionals, whatever their thoughts on the current ethical issues of human remains, the colonial past, or display policies. Most of us Pagans see a curator as a person who has the wonderful good fortune to care for sacred and magical objects and to work surrounded by them.

Which leads onto the subject of the research visit. In recent years, museums tell the public they too, not just academic researchers, can ask to see an object that is in the collection, on a special visit. For Pagans, this is an openness that is immensely exciting. Pagans have a sensitivity to material culture, as our own rites of worship and of magic have us regularly making, crafting and consecrating - we are a community which appreciates things. The tactile, the sensuous, and the sensory are integral to the Pagan approach to divinity, as we are a world-loving faith in which the appreciation of the living world is a central feature.

There will be excited delight when a Pagan sees on a museum website that it holds in its collection a Victorian corn dolly, or a German stoneware jug, dating to the English Civil War era (1642-51) repurposed as a ‘witch bottle’, a Roman goddess statuette, or an early modern charm against evil. They will, if it means a lot to them, want to come and see it, to commune with it, sit quietly with it. Such a visit, however, doesn’t really count as a ‘research’ visit, and they might wonder what on earth they should say in their email to the museum. ‘Hello, I’d like to come and commune with Object 85435-B and meditate with it for about half an hour, and maybe write a poem while there…. Would you be willing to accommodate me?’ I, for one, hesitate to write such a message. To risk facing ridicule is not a prospect any of us welcome. Do we invent an excuse that is more mundane? Writing a book, researching family history, doing an art project? It feels hard, and only the most persistent carry through.

At a two-day workshop in January 2024 held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, archaeologists, academics, museum curators and Pagans were brought together for this IAA grant-funded project and shared our perspectives on this quandary. For some curators, they felt that inviting an email from a member of the public made them more approachable than having a form to fill out. However, some of the Pagans, me included, found the form easier, as on a form, we don’t have to say why we want to see the object. We don’t have to struggle to craft sentences to try to sound rational, while shaking with the fear that desiring to feel the presence of the object will make us seem unsafe or unbalanced. The simple name / object number / for publication or not / date of visit. Whew! We don’t have a justify ourselves, and the process is easier psychologically.

The final part of the conversation we held at the January workshop centered on what these visits might be called. Many museums call them ‘research visits’ and this is understandable and does seem more inclusive than ‘academic visit’ as it makes clear that the visitor need not be affiliated with an academic institution. But for a spiritual visitor - be they Pagan or religious in some other way - the term seems to imply that only researchers are welcome, and they might not be. Those of us at the session didn’t come up with any better term, but we agreed that there might be better terms for these visits, which would make clear that if members of the public would like to see an object from the storerooms, to spend time with it, it might be for non-research reasons which are equally valid. A Russian Orthodox Christian might want to sit quietly with an icon of their patron saint, a Jewish person might want to see a 200-year-old mezuzah from their ancestral lands, and a painter might want to contemplate a drawing by the artist who inspires them….. And so, we left the question open, and we invite the suggestions of the readers of this blog.

During the workshop session, we Pagans were touched by the openness and sensitivity of our new curator friends. The next task is how to best communicate the tolerance we found there to a Pagan community long used to hiding itself in plain sight who are, at the same time, immensely drawn to museum objects which they hold in especial esteem.

We welcome thoughts, comments and suggestions from museum professionals and Pagans alike as we face the work of building networks of mutual trust and esteem, appreciating that curators have high workloads, duties of care, and a natural cautiousness towards people whose outlooks may be unfamiliar to them.