Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. It is time to go into the vault for an older episode of the show. This one originally published November one, twenty twenty two. And Rob, this is an interview you did with the author Brian Hoggard.
Yes, Yes, as the author of Magical House Protection The Archaeology of Counter Witchcraft. Just a really fun, fascinating discussion about the various curios that have been unearthed in old buildings throughout Europe and also in North America, where things have been hidden in walls or underfloors that have some purpose of protecting the house or the inhabitants from evil spirits. So this is a great one to listen to for the first time or re listen to as we begin to get into the Halloween season.
Let's jump right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. My regular co host Joe is out on parental leave, but today I'm going to be chatting with independent researcher into the archaeology of folk Magic Brian Haggart. He's the author of the excellent book Magical House Protection The Archaeology of counter Witchcraft, which I highly recommend. So without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi Brian, thanks for coming on the show.
Hi you Wilco.
So much of your work, and certainly your twenty nineteen book Magical House Protections, revolves around the archaeology of counter witchcraft artifacts secreted in many cases within historic homes. So before we get into the varieties and the particulars, what parts of the world and what time periods are we predominantly dealing with here?
Well, it's actually worldwide, and I think it's been going on forever, to be honest with you, because humans seem to innately believe in the power of some kind of supernatural evil and they fear it wherever they exist, whether it's sort of tribal societies or up to sort of quite sophisticated societies, and so it's been happening for as long as humans have been around, I.
Think, and I want to come back to specifics in detail later, but generally, what sorts of objects are we talking about, and where do we tend to find them positioned in a home.
Okay, so I normally work with Western Europe, but also receive reports of objects from much further afield as well. And you know, within the home, we're talking mainly about hearths and thresholds. So wherever there's a fireplace or a chimney, that tends to be the main point of focus for a lot of this, a.
Lot of these objects and practices.
And that's because the chimney is always open to the sky because it kind of has to be, and so it's also the most vulnerable point in the building for that reason, so at night people fear things coming down the chimney. And also thresholds. So windows and doors obviously are also points where the house could kind of leak essentially,
and they would often be protected. And yeah, but literally any boundary point within a house, any precious object or precious person or precious artifact, can you know, you can find that people have gone to some efforts to protect them.
I hadn't connected the dots on this till just now, about mentioning the hearth as being an entry point. I guess we see this reflected at least distantly in traditions of Santa Claus entering a home through the hearth.
Yeah, absolutely, indeed that goes even further than that, really, because, yeah, it is the idea of some energy coming down the chimney, but one of the types of objects that we often find in homes is concealed shoes, And obviously at Christmas you hang your stocking by the mantlepiece, which is a similar kind of thing, so you're kind of trying to trap some good energy instead of some bad energy.
Now, early in the book, you do a tremendous and seasonally appropriate, I think, job of describing what the experience of church may have been like, especially to a pre Reformation English commoner. It sounds incredibly spooky really and really not at all that comforting. I was wondering if you might sort of summarize just a little bit of the energy here.
Yeah.
So when in the medieval Britain, when churches was still essentially Catholic before the Protestant Reformation, church rituals were usually conducted in Latin, so most common as most parishioners wouldn't necessarily understand the language that was being spoken, And in fact, it's quite widely assessed that a lot of priests didn't understand the words of the Latin rituals either, and they learned a lot of them by wrote, so they just they knew the sounds, they knew how to emulate a
Latin ritual rather than perform one. And those rituals would take place behind a screen which was called the rude screen, which is basically a wooden screen that's been pierced in a decorative manner, so you could see behind, you could see through it, but not really clearly, a little bit gauzy, and there would also be in sense being burned as well, and candlelight, so you've got a sort of spooky language that you don't understand Latin conducted in a kind of
foggy candlelight, misty environment, which is quite spooky, as you say. And on top of the rude screen, which was called a rude screen because it would have the rude on top of it, which is the image of Christ that judgment day, quite foreboding. And of course a medieval church would often be decorated with art, sometimes relating to the devil, sometimes relating to saints, so the be all kinds of supernatural imagery all around you, as well as the candle light,
the incense, the slightly opaque view of the ritual. Yeah, it's really quite a magical environment, and I think that that's how a lot of people felt about it.
Yeah. You mentioned in this section that, for instance, one might not have like a clear idea of how the figure of Jesus factors into everything, which of course is very easy to take for granted today, especially with among modern Christians and people in Western society. But it's the idea here that you would have sort of the vague structure of the Christian religion and then just the common individual is then having to sort of fill in the gaps with other supernatural ideas.
Yeah, to an extent, I think it would vary quite a lot depending on how literate someone was or wasn't, and how inquiring their mind was as to whether they're actually asking their priest the answer to any of these questions or not. But yeah, I think there's sort of overarching feeling that a god exists, and they would hear about Jesus, and they would hear about Mary, etc. But
they wouldn't necessarily know what their relationship was. So I'm sure I've read an account before where someone was asked you know, do you know who God and Jesus are? And they would think that, oh, isn't Jesus God's uncle? And they would be really unclear about the familiar relationships that we might now think exists between them.
So how does the Reformation change this scenario.
Well, technically it's the reformations because there was like several attempts to kind of move it along. But yeah, essentially it was about trying to dispel some of the superstitions that might have aggregated around believing God and Jesus over
the years. I think there was about a thousand years worth of people sort of augmenting what was going on in churches with their own ideas, and the Reformations were supposed to be about stripping all that away and getting back to the actual text of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, not the Old Testament, and trying to worship Jesus principally and also God, but you know, with the whole Trinity, the Holy Ghost, and pretty much getting rid of Mary and getting rid of all the saints and
all these other things that have kind of grown in importance over the thousand ors of years before.
So how does the period of witchcraft persecution factor into all of this, because I don't understand much of this takes place in post medieval times, no matter how much mean we might want to shove it back into prior centuries.
Yeah, that's an interesting one because I think that belief in witchcraft and beliefs about witchcraft actually didn't really change very much during.
The period of witchcraft persecution.
There were some new ones brought in, but essentially the core beliefs about witchcraft were essentially the same, in my opinion,
they just became magnified. And that was partly through the popularity of new pamphlets and literature and the printing press, you know, the advent of the printing press, and partly through I guess, in a way, I think the stripping away of some of the superstitious aspects or the saintly aspects as well, you know, where you could appeal for help as particular saints, and all of that being stripped away post Reformation, I think meant that people had a
bit more of a need to address supernatural feelings in their lives almost and I think it's possible that witchcraft beliefs and worry about it were almost they sort of came into the vacuum. If you're like created by the absence of a lot of the things that people used to do pre Reformation.
That's a fairly contentious argument. It's not that simple. You know.
It's probably more to do with the printing press than anything else. The fact that sort of very salacious and exciting stories about which is levels were being circulated in pamphlet form, and then literate people, people who could read, would then you know, regurgitate these two people who couldn't, and this kind of heightened awareness of the fact that there could be more danger around than there was before concerning witchcraft.
So you discuss some of this in the book as being like the elite understanding of witchcraft and I guess ultimately demonology, right, that's again coming down through printed material. And then is it kind of like bumping heads and then meshing with ideas that would have been more commonly held among more common and less wederate people.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of we get this kind of very much.
History gives us more of a top down look at what went on, whereas archaeology tends us to give us a bottom up or kind of look at what went on and really as other than Ralph Merrifield before me and some of his colleagues who have been doing work but not published, there wasn't really an awful lot of people looking at witchcraft from the archaeology angle. So so all we've ever seen really is from the history side, top down, and I think an awful lot has been
neglected or missed for that reason. And so you know, these ideas like like, for example, I talk about concealed shoes. Again, some of our earliest examples of that are from the fourteenth century, but we've also got examples of it from the nineteen seventies, you know, And so so it's been a it's been a complete continuum, you know, the which the period of the witch trials as people think of it, came and went, but this practice has steadily been carrying on the whole time.
You know.
It's you know, you can say that it had a period of magnification during the witch trials, yep, but it hasn't gone away and it didn't leave, you know, and.
It's it's always been there.
So the common people, if you like, the sort of illiterate people, maybe continue doing what they were doing. And then they started to hear about these apparently new dangers or more powerful witches, or that there was some kind of panic going on, and.
It just raised everybody's fears. So there was always some fear.
You know, there was general fear of the dark, general fear of the supernatural, especially particularly about around sleep, you know, because how could you protect your house when you're asleep. So that's one of the big worries that people had. But you know, during the period of the some people call it the witch craze. I don't really like that term, but you know, the kind of excitement about witches. Obviously fear was heightened, so people did more things to try
and keep them away. And that's when you know, for example, witch bottles were a direct, in my opinion, a direct response to the witch trials, to the period of heightened fear. But the rest, all the other things seem to have just become magnified, if you're, like, more important during that time, but they'd always been there.
Now you've mentioned witch bottles, so that this might be a good time to ask what is a witch bottle, what would it contain? And where were they found?
Okay, so witch bottles were an awful lot of detail here they were essentially German stoneware bottles, which in Germany were known as Bartman's stoneware, nothing to do with the Simpsons. And basically Germans had the ability to make stoneware, which is this non porous, really hard bottle, which in Britain we couldn't make.
We only had earthenware.
So basically, when we found out about stoneware, we wanted these bottles, and so they were shipped over by hundreds of thousands, usually filled with beer or wine, and that beer or wine would be consumed and the bottle would be cast away. But the thing is, because these bottles were so good that often be reused again.
And again and again.
But the significant thing about them is that they have a really evil looking mask of a man on it. Yeah, so they look quite anthropomorphic. So these bottles have a salt glaze which gives a kind of leathery skin like appearance.
Then they have this beastly looking face on the neck, and then they have a big round belly which often has a kind of armorial shield on it, which sometimes that's a little bit occult or a little bit kind of a spooky and sometimes as well, they're quite sort of petal like quite flowerlike, which is which resembles another one of the marks that often crop up in this.
Area of study as well.
And so for that reason, you know, if you were going to do anything magical, you would want to use this bottle because it looks anthropomorphic. It's quite a spooky looking bottle. You couldn't imagine a better bottle for doing
magic with. Put it that way if you want it, if you're sitting at home and you want to do some so anyway, these bottles, we quite often find them underneath the floor, sometimes up to a meter deep, underneath a flag stone, in front of a hearth, or directly underneath the hearth, sometimes integrated into an ingle nook into the wall, and they're often upside down in the ground.
We're not entirely sure why the upside down thing happens, but inside the bottles this is when we x ray them, they often show evidence of lots of pins and nails that have accreted or aggregated and coagulated around the neck, whether gravity is just taking them down towards the neck.
And then when we open them and have a.
Look inside, they've often got some liquid, a big lock of hair, sometimes sort of thorns or other pins. Importantly, the pins and nails which are found inside are usually deliberately bent as well. And when I say deliberately, we have assessed the angle of the bend, and it seems like in many cases these nails and pins all been bent around the same iron pole. So someone's deliberately sat there and gone around lots of pins and nails before adding them into the bottle.
So there's clearly an element of sort of.
Ritual or like a quite a lot of effort goes into putting it together, and then of course you have to dig this really deep hole to put it down there. And so essentially what we've got is an anthropomorphic bottle, so it looks like a human and inside it we have the liquid, it turns out through analysis is human urine,
so we've got a human's urine in there. We often also have nail clippings, nail pairings in there, a big lock of hair, and then all these pins and nails that have been deliberately and meticulously bent before being added into the bottle, which has then been sealed with a bung or a cork and then buried upside down under the earth, covered over and a big flagstone put on
top of it. So it's quite a lot of effort, isn't it quite a lot of effort, right, And what I think is happening here is that because fifty of all of these bottles are found by the hearth or in the immediate vicinity of the hearth, so that we again we've got this focus on the hearth. And so the idea is, if something bad, like a spell or an energy or maybe a demon or something like that is potentially traveling down your chimney trying to attack you,
it's plunging down the chimney trying to find you. It detects this human like figure that smells like you. It's got your hair in it, it's got your fingernail clippings in it, it's got your urine in it, and it dives down to attack you. And when it gets inside the bottle, it then gets impaled on all these dead pins, which you've deliberately killed one by one before putting them into the bottles. And there's kind of like the ghosts of pins there to work against the ghosts that's trying
to attack you. And so there are some some bits of folklore that suggests that spirits and witches aren't very good at traveling backwards, so once they get into a spot, they find it difficult to get out. So maybe there's an element of that, like a kind of trap as well.
So like a trap slash.
Impaling people, you know, a decoy that has a trap within it. That seems to be what's going on, but
confusingly there is. There are some texts that relate that talk about witch bottles that describe something different, right, So, there are several texts in the late seventeenth century that talk about this idea of boiling a witch bottle, that if you think you've been bewitched, or if you know someone who's been bewitched, you can take a bottle and you can get them to urinate into it, and you can add some pins and nails to it and boil it on a fire. You could to bug it up
and boil it on a fire. And the idea is that this will that the bottle will act as kind of a substitute bladder for the you know, and by boiling it you're causing pain to the witch. Because they had this belief that if you've been bewitched. There's something of the essence of the witch inside you as well. So if you then urinate into this bottle and do something to it, it's going to have an effect on
the witch. And so the thinking is in these texts that excruciating pain is cause to the witch, who will then come seeking you out and will come knocking on your door begging for you to stop boiling the bottle, and in return you can barter your freedom from the spit whatever spell has been put on you. And generally speaking, it says that if that fails, you should then bury the bottle. So that's interesting, but it's different to what
we find in the buried bottles. Okay, so the buried bottles obviously have hair, which isn't mentioned in any of these test The texts also don't mention bending the pins to kill them if you like, you know. So what we've got is two separate ways of working that are thought to be behind these two practices.
The boiling things seems to.
Be depending on the idea that you can cause pain to the witch's bladder by sort of acting upon a substance that might be infused partly with the witch, whereas the ones that are buried seem to be acting as a decoy in a trap. And I think that that practice, the one where the bottles are buried, actually resembles and has a lot in common with other practices like shoes and like some of the marks and all sorts, whereas
the one with the boiling seems to be well. One of my friends who was studying that called Dr Annie Thwaite. She was studying it for a long time, and she called it the urinary experiment and saw it as a kind of pseudomedical practice that people at the time thought that supernatural energies were real, and that this was a way of potentially removing them from someone. You know, they were sort of using medical theory, if you like, to
try and remove the presence of a witch. Whereas the one where you bury them seems to have more in common with folk practices that have been going on for a very long time. So I'm not sure, you know. They certainly both use the same type of bottle. They both emerge at about the same time, which is the third quarter of the seventeenth century or thereabouts, but two
separate practices. And I wonder if you know that you have the written one that's more about medicine and science, and you have the the other one, the buried one that's like more going with the real old school kind of folk magic to how to get rid of a witch.
Wow. Yeah, it's just just so so amazing and so like very roughly speaking, like what sort of numbers are we talking about in terms of surviving witch bottles that have been recovered.
Since I last started counting? I mean, I think when I published, there was about one hundred and thirty odd bella means, which is the German German type ones, and there was probably another eighty or ninety of glass ones that I had on a file, and I wouldn't be surprised if the German stoneware ones was easily an excess of two hundred by now with the amount of reports.
But you have to bear in mind that these things are only ever found when someone demolishes an old building or excavates under an old building, So there's probably a vast amount more that have been discovered that just weren't reported.
Because these bottles are actually quite valuable, so you know, you can sell you can sell one that wasn't used as a witch bottle for potentially four to five hundred pounds on an eBay, and if it was used as a witch bottle, I've seen people selling them for up to fifteen hundred pounds, so you know, so, yeah, they're reasonably valuable when it comes to the black market. So I think a lot of builders and homeowners when they find these, they're curious, but they also see an opportunity
for making a bit of money. And so we don't know exactly how many there were, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were maybe fifty times more common than my figures suggest, No, maybe even more than that.
Yeah, now we've twice mentioned shoes, So if you would explain how to shoes factor into all of this, because on one hand, we have the witch bottle here, which you know, once explained, has all of these obvious occult and supernatural aspects to it. But but shoes we take for granted. Any number of us just have shoes, probably piled towards the front of our house, and we don't attach any kind of special importance to them.
That's right, and that's because we have an amazing factory production system that makes them cheap and easy to buy. But once upon a time they were you know, artisan made things and of course we do actually still have a culture of the professional artisan shoemaker still exists, and there's still people who care about the history of shoes
and still make very expensive handmade shoes. But of course, once upon a time that was the only kind of shoe you could get would be a handmade shoe, and they were quite expensive, and so they were repaired and repaired and repaired until you eventually wouldn't you couldn't use them anymore. Basically, so they were quite valuable in more ways than you can imagine now.
But yeah, they are that.
Probably the most common object that's found in buildings is concealed shoes. They're usually concealed on their own. It's usually just one shoe. In the old days, shoes weren't made to fit a left foot on the right foot. They were just the same and they would take the shape of the wearer's feet gradually over time. But these ones that we find, they're as I say, they're almost always
an odd shoe. I think there's slightly less than ten percent are found as pears, and they're almost always extremely well worn, because who would get rid of a brand
new shoe with them being so expensive. Like I said before, and also they then wouldn't be able to if they hadn't taken the shape of the wearer's foot, they couldn't perform the function which I give, which I suggest that they have, which is not just me, other people too, but that they act as a kind of decoy a bit like we were talking about with the witch bottle, that it's got some hair and some urine in it, so it kind of fools any evil energies that are
looking for you into thinking that you're there. It's the same idea with shoes that an evil entity or a spell or something negative trying to get into your house. It's seeking you to cause you harm, and it finds your shoe, which might have been on your foot for many years and has taken every you know, it's uniquely your shoe.
It wouldn't for anywhere else anyone else.
Coincidentally, this is also where the Cinderella myth comes from, you know, the fact that shoe has become a unique thing to someone's foot. And yeah, so it then plunges down to attack the shoe as a decoy, and it attacks it instead of you. So it's essentially acting as a kind of lightning conductor. It's drawing negative energy away from you, which is great, isn't it, And the idea
that it's kind of trapping the energy inside it. Now, the idea that the shoe can act as a trap is weird, okay, but there is some kind of historical evidence for it. So there was a fourteenth century priest from England, from a little village called North Marston in Buckinghamshire, and he was When I say he was an unofficial saint, I mean he was never ever canonized by the Catholic Church, so people regarded him as a saint even though he
wasn't actually one. And he is reputed to have cast the devil into a boot, which is a remarkable thing to do, as I'm sure you can imagine. But the interesting thing about John Sean is that even though he wasn't officially a saint, pilgrimages to his shrine for a period of about two hundred and fifty years, was the second most popular shrine in Britain, and second only to
Thomas A. Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral. In fact, he was so popular that the monarchy in Britain stole his relics from the church at North Marston and moved them to Windsor so that they could benefit from the money that the pilgrims brought to come and visit his shrine. And then those remains and relics have then been returned to
norse Maston when his popularity waned. But the interesting thing is that the little pilgrim badges that people would pick up when they went to visit his shrine, all of them show him holding a big boot with a little devil poking out of the top. And we're talking hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions of people would have had a badge that showed a devil trapped in a boot. Yep, And not just that, but an awful lot of churches had imagery. Obviously to do with all
of the saints. He was an incredibly popular saint, and so many many churches would have had an image of john Shaw and holding a boot with a devil trapped in it. So from the fourteenth century onwards, this was a really popular idea that you could trap a devil in a boot, and funny enough that some of our earliest examples come from that time. So back to the shoes themselves, as I say, sometimes you find them singly.
Sometimes you find them in large groups. Sometimes you'll find there'd be a void in a house just through some sort of quirk of construction that people can drop a
shoe down. And for example, the plow at Sitting Born in Kent, there was over one hundred shoes I believe collected from that building from four different deposition points, and those shoes have been dropped into those voids over generations, so subsequent owners of the building all carried on the same practice of putting old worn shoes down the same holes, and you end up with this record of footwear over the ages, as well as evidence of people's desire to
draw evil away from the people in the house.
Now, what about dried cats? Why dried cats?
Oh, the poor little cats.
I love cats, so I would never do this to a cat, and I would never advocate anyone ever does this to a cat. This is a tradition from the past. We don't do it these days, So please don't go hiding cats in your houses people.
But yeah, it's.
Really really common throughout the whole of Europe and Britain and Australia actually and the USA. So we have examples from from all over There's also an example that I have on a record from Canada, but I don't have so many records from Canada. I've also got a record from Chile actually, so it's a very, very widespread and it seems to be. Earlier on I mentioned about people having been very concerned with who was or how was the house being protected while they slept, and so there's
an element of this going on with cats. Because they're semi nocturnal, they are quite mysterious in their behavior. In certainly in the British Isles, there was a belief about the witch's familiar that was often focused on cats as well, so that kind of leans towards how mysteriously people thought about them. But yeah, essentially they're benevolent little creatures that
are in our lives. They help control pests. But also we must also consider the fact that they breed like wildfire if they're not used in spade as we do in the modern world. So basically, there were too many cats and they were semi noted or generally helpful, and so people started to they fell naturally into a helpful role essentially, So a lot of these practices. One of the things you'll find in common with them is that people were thinking about how do how do we affect
something that's happening on the supernatural plane as it were. Okay, so most people weren't able to be supernatural, they weren't witches or wizards, yep. But there were these things happening to them that were coming from the supernatural plane, or they believed were happening to them from the supernatural plane, and so they had to find ways of affecting it, yep. And they had to find special little recipes and special
little practices that would have an impact on those things. So, for example, these old shoes that are no longer worth using, no longer worth keeping on your foot, are essentially dead shoes. So they've died, they've flipped over to the other side, so they're now effective against the other side, against the supernatural realm, if you like. And then with witch bottles, you know, you've got a big lock of hair removed
from your hair or nail pairings clipped off. These are parts of you that we're attached to you and we're considered to be alive, which are now dead because and so they're now on the other side, acting as a kind of lure or bait on the other side, and then the same thing with these nails. And then we come to the point where in that way of thinking, here is a cat that's alive but friendly and can
control pests. If we make it dead, if we flip it into the other side, we can hope that it continues that role on that side, Yeah, as a presence in the house. And so what I think is going on is that these cats are being essentially kind of sacrificed, if you like, to the house to act as little protectors of the house while you sleep, because they're awake
while you're asleep, and they're catching vermin. They're looking out for things that might come in that might harm you, like, you know, instead of pests, you know, exchange the word pests for spells. You know, negative energy is coming in, you know. And I think that's what people were doing.
And there's also there's a little bit of I think that the idea that I've just expressed to you is probably the main one, but people have often thought about where the cats were killed as a foundation sacrifice, that you give a life to the house so that it went then take a life later by falling down on you and I once had a very brief discussion with Terry Pratchett about dried cats, and that was that was his idea, was that he thought that was what was
going on. But I think it's more to do with this,
you know, the role of a cat in death. I think it's more to do with what I said to you earlier about how, you know, you take some of the qualities of the cat, and by essentially killing it but keeping it within the house, you've hopefully got a helper within your house who's going to even why would it want to help you if you've just taken its life, right, But I think that that was thinking that was going on there, And we find them in all sorts of places,
find them, Like the first one I ever came across was actually in a village I used to live in, which is weird because I'd moved away. And then the first report that came through my website was of just a few streets away from where I used to live, and a dried cat was found sandwiched in between some layers of thatch in a house. It was basically a sixteenth century cottage, but they think that the cat dates
from one hundred years later. Yeah, and it was squashed quite flat, you know, the way, quite serious pressure had been put on it. There's no way it could have got there by itself. It had been placed there quite deliberately. But yeah, we find others that are sometimes strapped to flaw joists, you know, they literally could not have got
there by accident. And there were others that I found, not me personally, but there was another one found sandwich between tiles and plaster in the roof of a church, clearly had been placed there by the builders. And that's another thing we're thinking about. Some of these some of these methods and practices were put there by the builders,
and some were put there by the homeowners. So sometimes, you know, when we're looking at an old house and looking at all the fine so we get from an old house, we tried to discern, you know, which of them were put the out by the builders and which were added later.
So was there generally an idea that the builders were sort of on the side of the house and on the side of the occupants. Because I'm I'm reminded of
something I was reading about in Chinese traditions. I believe this was from a book by Philip A. Kuhn about the Chinese Sorcery Scare of seventeen sixty eight, and in this one, a lot of it had to do with written magical protections that were used during during a homes construction to protect against potential curses leveled by the actual laborers against the owners or future occupants of a house.
That's an interesting one. I quite you can send me that reference later. I've read that one. But yeah, but yeah, I think that generally speaking in England, for sure, because that's why I tend to know the most about it. But in England it seems like it was an additional service that the builders could provide or could offer. So say you've got two builders and you're trying to assess which ones you want to pay to give them a
contract to build your house. You know, one of them has clear expertise in marking the timbers in such a way that it will act us and you know that it will repel evil just through the timbers that have been put up there, you know. And so you're gonna you're going to go with the builders that can help protect you in a supernatural way slightly more than you
would another company that wasn't so good at doing that. Yeah, so it's another service that some builders offered, and but it's a bit more nuanced than that, because I think that, you know, you might have somebody who is the principal builder might employ a carpenter and a stonemason, and they might both have individual practices that they could do, and whether they would do them on that project or what might depend on whether they liked you or not, or
you know, how skilled they were in that in that field. So there's quite a few different, you know, elements of play here. I wouldn't say it's necessarily as simple as one builder would give you the all round service. You know, they'd give you their cat, their mark, all this kind of stuff. And I think some of these practices were a direct response to people feeling that they've been bewitched as well, so that would have definitely come after a
building had been put up. But there were certain things that certain marks in particular, and you know, I do think that builders leave shoes, for example, and sometimes they include glass bottles, sometimes empty ones in buildings as well as part of you know, in addition to some of the other mason's kind of traditions like the topping out ceremonies and things like that, but in terms of specific counter witchcraft, there was quite a few things builders and their trains people could do.
Now this is too big of a question, we can skip this one. But I was also fascinated by the whole topic of horse skulls being included in foundation and in floors, because on one hand, it makes sense that it would line up with some of the things we've already talked about here, like the horse as an important animal and having an important role and for the humans that are doing this. But then there's this whole potential acoustic angle. Right.
Yeah, I've been grappling with the whole notion of horse skulls and the different theories that play for quite some time. I don't think I haven't quite finished thinking about it all yet, but I think I've got more answers than I had before. So when we were talking about cats earlier being nocturnal and people worried about who was looking after their house and they were asleep, I think that
the horses play a role in that. And it took me a while to realize this, but basically, horses can, although they don't always choose to, they can sleep standing up and with their eyes open, so they can be in a sleep state but look like they're awake, you know, and they're and they are basically in a shallow sleep. They're ready, ready for action, ready to be alert for the benefit of the other horses that they are with, who might just be literally falling asleep on their back
with their hoofs in the air. You know, some of them are like that, but there'll be one or two of them that can be awake in this kind of light sleep with their eyes open. And I think that people knew that. So this idea of horses as incredibly vigilant creatures was I think part of what's going on. And then we also have the fact that if you take a horse's head and you deflesh it, to use a horrible word, a defleshed horse skull is a really
dramatic looking thing. I presume you've the big tradition of using horses in the States, obviously, I presume you've seen a horse skull. You know they are there. They're quite quite impressive looking beasts. And I think that when when they're in that state, you know, when it's just a horse skull, they seem to have almost a super actual power at them. You know, they take on a different persona.
It's not like, you know, a dead cat is a dead cat, you know, whereas a horse skull as opposed to a living horse is a kind of supernatural thing. It looks different and it's regarded differently, I think as well. And some of the ideas at play in counter witchcraft are about basically being scarier than something else. So you know, so if you've got something that's really scary, a lesser scary thing might be scared away by it, you know.
Like there's there's one tradition, for example, with rug working that I've heard about where certain rugs that are put in front of the fire would often have a red diamond pattern on them, also like just a red diamond in the middle or in the corners or something. And some of the folklore around this is that a devil poking his head down the chimney would poke his head down the chimney and think, oh, my goodness, there's already
a devil in the house. I won't go interfering with this, and we'll go scarping up the other way to go and find the house that doesn't have a devil in it because the diamond does met to represent this devil's i And I think in a way, this idea with the horse skull is that they are particularly frightening and quite large, so they could actually intimidate and frighten away other things.
And I think that the.
Sort of proof of that is that horse skulls are used in some of these folk dance traditions which appears to be about scaring away spirits, like the marry Luid and certain other ones that like the obbios and what's the other one called the hood and horse as well, you know, these kind of dances and rituals that have these kind of horse like figures that go dancing around
and converting around the countryside. And you know, with with the marry Luid, for example, there's also a custom in that of sweeping the hearth and cleaning the hearth away with this figure that's a horse skull and a big cape, and that again seems to sort of tune in with
this idea of protecting the hearth as well. So yeah, I think that the horse skulls, you know, and on top of that, there's all this ancient myth about horses as well, you know, and the idea that horses were thought to literally toe the sun up, you know, at sunrise, and chariots of the gods almost you know, and they were also the way that people access the.
Underworld sometimes as well.
You know, you would ride your horse to Valhalla or it would take you to the underworld. There's all these really old ideas about horses as supernatural beings that had access to other worlds.
Almost. Yeah, at the.
Same time, they've got this really multi sort of sort of multi functional role almost on a mythic level in a human life, you know. But ultimately, when we're talking about the period, this period of the Witch Trials, if you want to look at that period, for example, we're talking about animals that are broadly benevolent to humans. You know, we don't see them simply as eating animals, you know, although they were eaten and still are in some countries.
But yeah, they were you know, kind of a benevolent role in our lives. But also this kind of.
Incredible vigilance about them, and also there's kind of fearsome aspect to them when they are in the shape of
a horse skull. And in my book, I do cite one example from I think it's eighteen ninety seven where this is actually reported in a really good book about folklore in Cambridgeshire, where this building company we're essentially laying the foundations for a new chapel in Cambridgeshire, and they sent the builder's lad off to get a horse's head from the knacker's yard because they had a very strong tradition of placing a horse's head in the base of
the foundations, which at first you think this is a foundation sacrifice, but it's not that simple because after they've poured some beer over it, and they've all shovel with various bits of stone work and everything and earth over the top of it, they then said that they were doing this quite clearly to ward off evil and witchcraft, you know, so it's not as simple as thinking foundation sacrifice appeasing local spirits. They very clearly believed this was
for warding off evil and witchcraft. Idea of including a horse's head in the base of a foundation trench in eighteen ninety seven, which you know is well into the industrial era, and we know that there are many examples of horse skulls and horse bones found underneath nonconformist chapels throughout all of Wales and probably much of England as well. And these many of these chapels were built well into
the nineteen forties, you know. And yet we also know that horse skulls were concealed underdwellings in the fifteenth century, because we've got archaeological records of them. Yeah, and that's the whole idea of horse skulls being concealed instead of the whole horse. I'm not sure exactly when that happened, you know, because the Viking has used to conceal whole horses, will not conceal them, but bury them and have lots
of rich horse to do with them. But at some point between that period and the fifteenth century it became much more about the horse's head or the horse's skull. I'm not sure exactly when.
It's fascinating and confusing, No, no, now is there is there also an idea that there might have been an acoustic benefit in some of these cases to having the horse skull lender there.
I'm glad you brought me back to that because I clearly wandered away from that topic. But yeah, so there is this idea that somehow horses act as natural amplifiers or acoustic enhancers in buildings. So when people first started looking at the practice of concealed horse skulls, particularly in Ireland, actually a paper by Shaun O'Sullivan I think it was in nineteen forty five, but the references in my book
if I got that wrong. But yeah, he was asking, you know, what was the reason for them concealing these horse skulls underneath stones in front of the hearth in many of these cottages. And the answer he got from any of these people was that it made the dancing sound better in the evening, you know, so when they were gathered together in the evening around the fire and they were doing some Irish dancing, it sounded nicer by
having a horse skull underneath the stone. And then similarly in England when they found twenty four.
Horse skulls beneath the.
Floor of the Portsway Inn in Herefordshire, which is in Staunton on why this village, they said it made the fiddle go better, made the fiddle sound better. And then in Sweden, for example, when Albert san Cleff was researching horse skulls beneath barns threshing barns in Sweden, you know, he came to the conclusion mostly through what people told him that it made the flails sound better when they
were threshing wheat. But you know, I find it I struggle with it a little bit because, you know, when I'm not doing this kind of research, I am also a musician. I've been playing guitar for over thirty years. I think I'm quite good at it. And actually, but yeah, i have a horse skull on top of the bookshelf behind my head right now, and I also played guitar in this room quite a lot, and I've certainly not noticed any kind of ringing or pleasant harmonious sound because
of it. It may be that I need to attach the horse skull to a floorboard with a big screw in order to notice any benefit.
I haven't yet tested that.
Let's just say that I'm dubious about the acoustic benefits of horse skulls, especially because I'd say about fifty percent of the examples I am aware of are in locations where a lot of the sound that they could produce is absorbed by the earth that they're set in, or they're in a part of the building that wouldn't you know, sound wouldn't reach that part of the building, you know.
So you know, so I'm a little bit dubious about that, And I think that a lot of the reasons why people gave this explanation is because it was a way of saying that you weren't doing something heretical or superstitious. You know, if you said, you're you know, you're walking down the street with a pair of horse gulls under each arm, and the local vicar comes up to you,
So what on earth are you doing that? Oh, it's to improve the acoustics, when in the evening, of course it is, you know, and I would say that probably a big clay bowl or something would be better at it.
I mean, maybe it's more expensive.
Obviously we used to have, you know, our transport culture was completely dominated by the horse for centuries, so there was an awful lot of available horse skulls, you know. They maybe this was a use people found for them, and maybe people really believed that there was Maybe there is.
Some marginal or acoustic benefit that I'm not aware of.
But I personally I think that that explanation began as an excuse for why someone is walking around with a horse skull trying to dig a hole into their house, rather than because they thought, I desperately need to improve the acoustics in my house and a horse skull must be the way I do that.
Yeah, as we mentioned already, these artifacts tend to emerge during cases of demolition or renovation, digging up the ground beneath the old dwellings and old buildings, etc. And you also mentioned like the black market and so forth. What what is the appropriate course of action that you would recommend if anyone out there is engaged in construction, renovation, demolition, et cetera, if they find something that that could conceivably be part of one of these traditions, what should they do?
The perfect thing to do is, first of all, as soon as you see something emerge from the ground or emerge from a wall, it's just pause and take loads of photographs from every angle, just sort of really really record it as well as you can maybe do a bit of video as well, you know, write down when you found it, what you found, yeah, before you even touch it, you know, and then ideally then contact someone who is interested in it or as an expert in
that field. Obviously, I would like you to consider me if you find those things, you know, and I'd like to give you some advice or maybe look at some photos and have some input about what you found. And then the ideal thing, because obviously I live a long way away from many of your listeners, you know, the ideal thing is that you find some way of keeping it in the house after you've recorded it, as well as you can keep it in the house and keep
it where you found it if you can. Some people find solutions, like they'll put a little window so you can still see it and appreciate it, and it's a kind of fun talking point in the house. I know lots of houses where they've done that with dried cats as well. Actually, even though they're a bit gruesome to
look at, lots of people still like to keep them. Obviously, as something like a dried cat, it's organic and it could rot if it becomes damp, so you've got to think more carefully about what you do with that, and a lot of people do end up disposing of them for that reason.
But you know, if you can.
Keep it dry and keep it visible or just con seal it again, just put it back in and forget all about it. Like the first one, I ever came across, went straight back in the thatch after I'd recorded it, and it's still there as far as I know. So that is the best thing to do. That's very by far the best thing to do wherever you live. That's the best thing to do. The shoes, by and large, they're not going to be worth anything, so you know, record them and put them back.
You're not going to lose any money.
You're not denying yourself some kind of riches by reconcealing a shoe or a cat, you know, the ones that people assign more monetary value to it as the witch bottles, because pottery, you know, nice old pottery with clear witchcraft, you know connections, is very interesting. But what I would say to you is sell it to your local museum.
You know, your local museum will love to own it, and I'm sure would make you an offer if you have a history you know, local history museum, and just make sure you offer it to local historians or archaeologists after you've recorded it, and let them buy it off.
You don't put it.
Don't just put it on the black market, because someone will buy it and its provenance will be lost and no one will know where it is ever forever after. So that's my only request is just record it as well as you can share that information. And if you're going to sell anything, sell it responsibly, send it to someone who is going to care about that object and care about its relevance and it's contexts in your local historical environment.
Now, in some cases, I think you mentioned in the book, the individuals who find these these objects then kind of maybe buy into the supernatural ideas around them, even as modern you know, as residents of the modern world.
Yeah, in modern parlance, you could say that people kind of freak out a bit when they find when they find these things in their houses. So in England, most of the houses where these objects like this are found are usually very historic houses, usually quite desirable, usually quite expensive houses.
See.
So in modern times, usually the people that live in these houses are quite wealthy or professional, you know, and usually consider themselves to be quite serious professional individuals. So we've got kind of quite a lot of lawyers, you know, academicians, you know, people like that. And these are people who often don't even don't think they're superstitious or have any supernatural believes at all, and yet when they find these
objects in their houses. They want to know what they are first of all, and they'll contact someone like me and they start to learn more about it, not just from me, but from you know, other relicious are online or from friends or whatever.
And then they start to.
Get really, really, really really worried that they are, that they're disturbing some form of protection, and that whatever evil that these things were protecting against might come back into their houses. And they're often really frightened of, for example, a shoe being taken away from the house, or a cat being moved, or a bottle being broken or something like that.
They feel that.
Some dark energy that was being held at bay by this thing might suddenly re emerge. Now, obviously, when you when you look at the way people used to use these things, it was usually in the specific response to them feeling bewitched. So the chances of that same cause of a harmful energy, the same witch still being alive and transferring that home energy onto you, it's almost zero. But people for some reason feel that this is going to happen to them, and they get incredibly worried. I
remember one house where a witch bottle was found. We persuaded the guy to let us analyze the witch bottles. So we were going to take it to university, have it X ray's and have all the contents analyzed. And it took a lot of persuading to get him to do it, and this was for an English TV program
on BBC two called History Detectives. He'd reported the fine because he found it really interesting and as part of the research, you know, myself and my colleague Dot dr All and Massy we often would investigate bottles like this, and the production team and us we had to work on him for ages, so it allow us to take it away. The whole time it was away, he was ringing every day as the bottle, Okay, when's it coming back?
Was it coming back?
I need it back in the house. Really really felt desperately worried about it. And when it did come back to the house eventually after the analysis, he wanted it to be reinterred and he wanted me to do it because I was the first person he reported it too, and so I agreed. But when I got there, what I didn't know was that he and the production team had employed a group of nuns to pray around me while I was lowering it into the hole. So that was a startling ends to that little bit of TV work.
But yeah, it just shows how strongly this guy felt about it. He really wanted the thing to go back where it come from, and he felt that it needed some kind of religious blessing in the process as well to make it safe.
It's fascinating. It really makes me think about you know, early on in the book you also you mentioned like the different sense world of being in a house in historic times and everything's quieter and I guess maybe you hear all the sounds or potential sounds a bit more. But then also just thinking about our modern relationship with like the spaces between our walls or the spaces underneath
the floors. There are things we know, we tend to know or assume there are not spirits or demons under there, but we don't know for sure that there's not a mouse. We know there are wires and pipes under and through our house, and we have at least some level of understanding of how those things work, but then also maybe some some some empty spots in our understanding concerning say electrical wiring.
Yeah, it's it's really interesting. I mean I would say that that people in the past often used to feel a bit like our children do now, you know. So you know you've got a child going to sleep, that the fears of something under the bed or something you know, hiding behind the cupboard or something like that. You know, I think that it's not quite the same. I mean, I'm not saying that people had beliefs that were just
like children. But if you imagine a more mature version of those beliefs, you know that there's there still is a belief in magic. There still is a belief that there are some entities and some things around you that can harm you, but you can't see them, and you haven't got the powers to do anything about them unless you learn some of these practices.
You know, only witches can.
Maybe do something about these things, or white witches, you know, the village cunning person for example, who's got control over some supernatural powers, could maybe manipulate some of these things.
But you can't.
But all these things are around you, And so I think that some of those fears that you might remember from being a child basically carry over into adulthood as.
A legitimate belief that everybody shared.
You know, I really do think that even as recently as the early twentieth century, and some rural areas, beliefs like this were absolutely normal, and people had very sophisticated responses to them, including the practices I've mentioned plus others.
Now, this is not an example that I think has any supernatural aspects to it, but I was wondering, I'm not sure if this is a feature of homes in the UK or not, or if this is just a thing in the States, or if this is found throughout the world. But you look at older medicine cabinets sometimes and there'll be a slot in the back to dispose
razors down, like shaving razors. And I couldn't help but think of that now and again whilst whilst reading the book, as being you know, a place where we put things that maybe have some sort of connection to our physical body. And they also reminded me of the bent nails a bit, the bent pins, as being these you know, these these bits of iron or metal that are that are no longer useful.
Yeah, I've seen I've seen some lots of examples to those.
I can't remember the name of the Facebook group, but there's a group about things found hidden in walls and everything yeah, And a lot of the examples from the States are where people have bought a really old house and it's been like a medicine cabinet, and they've found this great, big, massive razor blades all behind the plaster board, you know, that will be pushed through this slot, have just been allowed to just sit there and rust away behind the behind the wall. And yeah, it's very similar,
isn't it. You know, you can see why it's a similar idea, isn't it. You've got this thing, like you say, closely associated with the body. It's then been disposed of behind the wall. It's very sharp, you know, it's this sharp thing where supernatural you know, it's not going to look there anymore, is it? Because you've got all these
dead sharp things. And it's very reminiscent of the belief in knife blades and things that used to be found underneath windows, cells and sometimes under door intels where there's there's a you know, we've talked a lot about this idea that things can be sort of killed in order to be activated on the supernatural plane, and that would the same wind apply to well, you're kitchen utensils.
You know, if you've got a broken knife.
It now is activated if you're like and it is now a useful form of supernatural defense if you were to secrete it beneath a window sill or pop it above a door intel, And so it's very similar.
There's kind of there's definitely a resonance there isn't that.
Finally, as both a witchcraft archaeologist and a musician, do you think there's a shortage of which mentions in songs about witchcraft and wizardry or there are there some great examples out there that I just don't know about.
Are you also a musician? Are you going to rectify this situation?
I have no ability to directify it if there is a lacking.
I don't think, though I don't know of any. I'm sure that there are some little folk poems that reference the idea of protecting against witchcraft. But I'm not aware of a good song, especially a rock song, which is my world, about witch bustles. But I do know there is a metal band called Ghost or Ghost but with a cane the front instead of a G and I know that they've started writing some crazy songs about counter witchcraft. So there may be a witch bustle song coming from them soon.
Excellent. Well, but before we close out here, I imagine that we have perked a number of listeners curiosities about this whole topic. Can you tell our listeners how they can follow you the website or social mediaccounts they can go to to learn more about the study.
Sure, so on Twitter and Instagram, I'm there as folk magic Man as one word. But on Facebook and on my website it's a little bit more difficult to convey without seeing it. But the domain is aperture pios, which is you can probably share a link, can't you in your podcast? But yeah, that's probably the best way to do it. But it's appaios, dot co, dot uk or or dot com and the same thing on Facebook it would be forward slash as But yeah, that's where it all is.
Excellent. Well, thanks for taking time out of your day to chat with me here. This has been I've enjoyed it tremendously and I am sure that our listeners are going to enjoy it as well.
I've enjoyed it very much too.
Thanks again to Brian for coming on the show to chat again. The book is Magical House Protection, The Archaeology of counter Witchcraft and It's available in physical and digital forms wherever you get your books. We only had time to discuss really a fraction of what is explored in the book, so if this topic fascinates you as it
does me, pick it up. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show, and if you want to reach out, simply email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.