In 2023, Nigel Jeffries and Tom Crowley (independent curator) teamed up to win a MOLA IAA partnership grant titled ‘Amulets, Charms, and Witch Bottles’. The partnership aimed to think about how these objects types - seen as representative of British folk magic traditions of the past few centuries and integral to many UK museum displays and collections - were perceived by what we have called ‘spiritually invested’ communities: a catch-all term for Pagans, witchcraft practitioners, Wiccans, Druids, and related faiths or practices, and with whom these artefacts resonate and have relevance.
In this blog, the project team reflects on the process of co-design in the development and implementation of the grant, the workshop held at the Pitt Rivers Museum and an event at Treadwell’s bookshop, to signposting the diverse and important outputs (listed throughout and below) it has so far generated, including Sarah-Jane Harknett's important evaluation (download below).
S J Harknett Evaluation Report
In her first blog, Dr Christina Oakley Harrington describes the importance of museums and the items they display for the Pagan community, providing insights into how they engage as heritage and museum consumers with these spaces and collections. Her second contribution provides important guidance on the terms and language curators should be using when thinking about and cataloguing ‘magical objects’. In addition, Peter Hewitt (Folklore Museums Network) and Tom Crowley have written short pieces for various specialist museum group publications and blogs, and members of the project team have posted content on their personal X and Instagram accounts. Links to these outputs can be found at the end of this blog.
Creative Practitioners
The project also commissioned creative practitioners to each create their own artistic outputs and responses:
- The Song of Stone poem written by Hannah North drew inspiration from one of the many hagstones in the Pitt Rivers Museum’s collections. The poem can be downloaded below.
A Song of Stone - Poem by Hannah North
- A cyanotype was created by Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz during the workshops by using many of the ‘magical’ objects the Museum curates.
- At the Treadwell’s Bookshop event, Callum James gave a reading of three poetic sequences titled Three Charms, each a meditation on the lore and magic surrounding an object he had chosen from the Pitt Rivers collection and using their detailed accessioned records for contextual detail.
- Dr Kirsty Ryder produced a horseshoe charm that drew upon the focus and objects she observed from the January workshops and is now proudly in the Pitt Rivers Museums’ keep, having been accessioned into their collections.
Project vision and the benefits of co-design
When planning and submitting the application we were joined by a wonderful team: Dr Christina Oakley Harrington, the founder of celebrated esoteric bookshop Treadwell’s and Dr Kirsty Ryder both brought spiritually invested perspectives - and much more - to the work, Sarah-Jane Harknett of University of Cambridge Museums and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was charged with developing and delivering an important and critical evaluation, and Peter Hewitt, founder of the Folklore Museum Network, helped realise the sector-wide impact of the work being planned. The inclusion of the three noted creative practitioners was also central to this process.
Co-design lay at the heart of our approach. As an ethos it was at the very core of MOLA’s IAA offer and embedded by the Principal Investigators (PIs) for the grant, Dr Emma Dwyer and Dr Sara Perry, and is a thread that connect the results and outputs of many other MOLA IAA funded projects.
Our project soon began to take a shape that would be based around a series of museum workshops, working with relevant collections of the sorts of objects we have noted above.
Pitt Rivers workshop
We found the perfect museum partners in Faye Belsey and Bryony Smerdon of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. In January 2024 they facilitated two days of workshops and discussions here which brought together researchers and museum staff on the one hand and spiritually invested participants on the other in a roughly 50-50 mix.
The first day of the workshop began with a tour of the galleries where participants considered how magical objects were displayed as well as approaches to design, labelling, and curation. The gallery tour led to fruitful discussions. It was queried, for example, why objects used in ‘counter-witchcraft’ (such as ‘witch bottles’) were kept alongside objects that were used in sacred, ritual, spiritual practices. This left some participants feeling uncomfortable, and led to conversations about the whether the context of the museum could suppress the efficacy of the item; had curation, display and years without use impacted them as magical objects? Further to this, the group pointed out that because the efficacy of magical objects was always described in the past tense – ‘this object was thought to be able to…’; that this suggested to the visitor that no-one would now believe objects to be possessed of agency. Christina Oakley Harrington’s blog and her reflections as a Pagan on the importance of museums and their displays make for an insightful read for those interested in how different communities and faiths engage with these spaces.
Later in the day participants spent time looking at how relevant catalogue entries are created, managed and added to, and this led to discussions of how knowledge is recorded and/or excluded. Importantly, catalogues were seen as sites of inspiration: the level of detail in a good catalogue entry, it was observed, could lead to countless possibilities for further research, artistic responses and spiritual enrichment, something that is evidenced by the project's own creative outputs. This has been reflected on by Christina Oakley-Harrington in her second blog post for the project, which focused on the language and semantics of online catalogues for ‘magical objects’.
On the second day, it was the participants’ turn to lead. Everyone at the workshop chose and then spoke about an object of personal significance to them, thereby creating shared ground across all attendees, independent of their positionality. Then, in a series of brief sessions, spiritually invested participants involved everyone in rituals inspired by objects in the Pitt Rivers’ collection. Here those of us who did not see ourselves as spiritually invested were learning by doing.
One session focused on the numerous ‘stabbed’ objects in the Pitt Rivers’ collection: notably a pierced toad and a bull’s heart pierced with nails and thorns, both retrieved from a chimney at Shutes Hill Farm, Somerset in 1917. Why did the maker of these objects do this? What was his/her state of mind when making them? By engaging in a haptic exercise – piercing pieces of heart-shaped felt with pins (which was surprisingly difficult to do!) - the group was asked to reflect upon the symbolism of the heart, as well as the intent, purpose and energy needed to create magical objects in the past and present.
Further sessions explored themes of sub-creation and the interconnectedness of art, play, and magic; others explored knot-magic, chanting, and the creation of hag-stone, key, and spirit bottle charms. In one session we formed a sort of unofficial procession that led up through the Museum onto the roof. There, flanked by faded and tattered prayer flags left by previous visitors, the artist Hanna Katrina Jędrosz laid out a two-metre square sheet of cyanotype fabric. Onto it, in a preordained pattern, we placed our objects of personal significance as well as objects which had been chosen by participants from the Museum’s collection. The resulting photograph represents an eloquent portrait of the workshop’s second day.
A film crew was also present on the second day as we thought it was important to capture and record the workshops in this way and were also mindful that a good quality short film (wonderfully produced by ACAP media) would be a very effective way of sharing the project.
The evaluation conducted by Sarah-Jane revealed that several participants found the presence of the crew intrusive although it’s important to note that the participants also acknowledged that the crew were respectful and as unobtrusive as possible given their brief. Sarah-Jane’s evaluation also found that the Museum and the project organisers didn’t always “give sufficient silence and space to allow those they are working with to reflect and respond” but concluded that “the workshop was demonstrably successful at increasing the confidence levels of both creative practitioners and museum professionals”. The evaluation report represents one of the most important project outputs, enabling future initiatives to learn from our mistakes and build on our successes.
Treadwell’s event
In May we officially wrapped up with an evening event at Treadwell’s bookshop founded by project partner Dr Christina Oakley Harrington - in London’s Bloomsbury. Creative outputs were presented. This included Callum James reading Three Charms, each a meditation on the lore and magic surrounding an object he had chosen from the Pitt Rivers collection and using their detailed accessioned records for contextual detail.
The wonderful horseshoe charm made by Kirsty Ryder was displayed. This charm was created in response to the workshops at the Pitt Rivers – an object rich in symbolism.
“I wanted to create a tangible link between folk magic past and present, demonstrating that these practices persist, and challenging the notion that such traditions are solely past tense, as some museum language might suggest.” - Kirsty Ryder
Faye was so excited by the charm that, with Kirsty’s blessing, she took it directly to the Pitt Rivers to join the collection.
A wide range of guests were invited to the event from the heritage sector as well as spiritually invested communities. The idea was that the gathering would serve as a means of disseminating the project as well as generating new and fruitful connections between attendees. Anecdotally this certainly seems to be the case, with several guests reporting that they’d met people that they’d been keen to work with in the future. Elsewhere workshop participants are in conversations with the Pitt Rivers about potential future projects and our work is being disseminated in blog and social media posts across a diverse variety of platforms (see project outputs below). Collectively we feel that we’ve created a precedent of collaboration between museums and the spiritually invested community and set something in motion that we hope will continue to gather momentum.
Project outputs
You can find out more about the project and its outcomes here:
Crowley, T, 2024 ‘Folklore, Spiritually Invested Communities, and the Ethnography Museum’, Blog produced for the Museum Ethnographers Group
Crowley, T, Harknett, S.J, Hewitt, P, Jeffries, N, Oakley Harrington, C and Ryder, K, 2024 ‘Amulets, Charms and Witch-Bottles Workshop’ Folklore Society (FLS) News 103 June 2024, 5–7
Harknett, S J, 2024 ‘Amulets, Charms and Witch bottles: evaluation report’ (available to download below)
Hewitt, P, 2024 ‘Amulets Charms and Witch Bottles’, Social History Curators Group (SHCG) News, Issue 92, Spring 2024, 24–5
Hewitt, P, f.c ‘Amulets, Charms and Witch-Bottles Workshop’ Museums Journal
James, C, 2024 Three Charms, unpublished poem, read at Treadwell's bookshop in May 2024
North, H, 2024 A Song of Stone (poem can be downloaded below)
Peter Hewitt’s X post: https://x.com/folkloremuseums/status/1755672671440797829?s=46&t=XhdkxmnXz1-qkxhYgmTKBA made January 2024 on the Pitt Rivers Museum workshop
Callum James X posts:
- https://x.com/BooksnMagic/status/1755722503660388786 and https://x.com/BooksnMagic/status/1755997293688324269 made in January 2024 for the Pitt Rivers workshop and https://x.com/BooksnMagic/status/1790156157899739376 made in May 2024 for the Treadwell’s event
Nigel Jeffries X posts: https://x.com/nigeljeffries/status/1755510080768745525?s=46&t=XhdkxmnXz1-qkxhYgmTKBA made in January 2024 for the Pitt Rivers Museum workshop
Kirsty Ryder’s Instagram reel post:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3Dhn0MrXAl/?igsh=MWJpMTZ5MnR0cWtjcA== post made in January 2024 for the Pitt Rivers Museum workshop
Acknowledgements
We’d like to express our gratitude for the support and involvement of Faye Belsey and Bryony Smerdon of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford as well as to all the project participants and to ACAP Media for their professionalism, guidance and fantastic film production.
How to cite this blog
Crowley, T, Hewitt, P and Jeffries, N 2024 ‘Amulets, Charms, and Witch Bottles’: reflections on engaging with the spiritually invested community for objects-based research on museum and archaeological collections’, is a blog written for ‘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’ and is a MOLA Impact Acceleration Account project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/X003523/1).
