In 2004, builders working on a basement in Greenwich, in south east London, dug down about five feet and found a stoneware jar. It was buried upside down. It was still corked. When they shook it, it rattled and sloshed. That jar turned out to be the most complete witch bottle ever recovered in Britain. Around two hundred early examples had been catalogued before it, and every single one of them had been broken, leaked, emptied or degraded. This one had held its contents for something over three centuries with the stopper still in place.

Dr Alan Massey, a retired chemistry lecturer from Loughborough, was brought in to open it. What came out was a complete, physical, unarguable record of a working: twelve iron nails, eight brass pins, a quantity of human hair, ten fingernail clippings, a piece of leather cut roughly into a heart and pierced through with a bent nail, a scattering of what appeared to be navel fluff, brimstone, and about half a jar of human urine.

I find this find genuinely moving, and not because it is strange. It is moving because somebody did this. Somebody was frightened enough, and certain enough, to go out to the yard with a jar of their own urine and their own hair and their own nail parings, and bury it head down beneath their house, and then go back inside and get on with their life.

What a witch bottle actually is

A witch bottle is a counter-magickal device. It is not an attacking working and it is not a charm in the sentimental sense. It is a defensive trap, made and hidden by a person who believed themselves or their household to be under attack.

The vessel is usually a bartmann, more commonly called a bellarmine: a salt-glazed stoneware jug made in the Rhineland or the Low Countries, pot-bellied, with a bearded face moulded onto the neck. The name is a Protestant insult aimed at Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, who died in 1621 and whose anti-Protestant writing made him a useful target. The suggestion was that the ugly jug looked like him. That the faces were already there, already vaguely humanoid, already leathery from the glaze, almost certainly contributed to why these particular vessels were chosen for this particular job.

The contents follow a recognisable grammar. Brian Hoggard's survey of the corpus found iron pins or nails in around ninety five per cent of bottles with identifiable contents, and human hair in around twenty five per cent. Roughly a quarter of bottles have been tested for urine, and every one of those tested positive. Beyond that core you find small bones, thorns, fragments of wood, and in a handful of cases a piece of fabric or leather cut into a heart shape.

So the recipe, stripped down, is: iron, urine, hair, sharp things, sometimes a pierced heart. Everything else is variation.

The folk logic

Here is where it gets interesting, because there is a real internal reasoning to this and it has almost nothing to do with the vague "trapping negative energy" language you will find on most modern sites.

The prevailing period explanation is that the bottle works as a link and a torment. The urine, hair and nail parings belong to the afflicted person. They constitute a taglock, a personal concern, a piece of the victim carried out of the body. The witch or spirit already has a connection to that person; the bottle offers a decoy target, a false body, and the connection follows it in.

Once it is in, the iron does the work. Massey's own framing of the belief is that the bulbous jug stood for the witch's own bladder, so that the pins and nails inside it would torment her when she passed water, and go on tormenting her until she lifted the curse in order to make it stop.

This is sympathetic magick of a very specific and very brutal kind. It is not banishing. It is coercion by proxy. The bottle is not designed to send anything away, it is designed to make the sender's own body unbearable to them until they withdraw.

The alternative reading, and the two are not incompatible, is the spirit trap: the entity comes down the chimney, smells its victim, dives into the jug, and is impaled and drowned.

The chemistry that makes it stranger

Massey noticed a black solid in the urine and tested it. It was iron sulphide, formed when the sulphur in the jar reacted with the iron of the nails over the centuries.

Meaning: the bottle contained brimstone. Meaning: over three hundred years in the ground, the working chemically transformed itself. Whatever you think about the efficacy of the original intent, the object was not inert. It was still doing something.

There are other details from the analysis that make the maker suddenly human. Gas chromatography found nicotine in the urine, so the person was a smoker. The fingernail clippings showed almost no wear, which suggested to Massey that they came from somebody who did not do manual labour, a person of some social standing.

Someone comfortable. Someone with clean hands. Someone terrified.

The documentary evidence lines up

What makes the Greenwich bottle so valuable is that it corroborates the written record almost item for item.

An Old Bailey record from 1682 describes a husband who believed his wife had been bewitched. He was advised by an apothecary in Spitalfields to take a quart of his wife's urine, her nail parings and some of her hair, and boil them well in a pipkin. That is a recipe. It is contemporaneous, it is legal testimony rather than folklore collection, and the Greenwich bottle appears to have been made to it or to something very like it.

This is the point Massey himself made about the whole corpus: the excavated objects verify the authenticity of period recipes that we might otherwise have dismissed as too outlandish to have ever been followed.

Where they were put

Placement is not incidental, it is the working.

Witch bottles are found under thresholds, beneath hearths and fireplaces, inside wall cavities, and among foundations. Every one of those is a boundary. The threshold is where the outside becomes the inside. The hearth is where the roof is open to the sky. The wall is the membrane. These are the vulnerable seams of a building, and the bottle is a picket placed on the seam.

The Greenwich bottle was buried upside down, which appears in other examples too. The inversion is deliberate: turning the vessel over turns the working, keeps the contents against the stopper, and sets the whole object contrary to the ordinary way of things.

Once placed, the bottle was not to be disturbed. Its power was understood to hold only for as long as it stayed hidden and unbroken.

Two further British finds worth knowing

A bottle from Reigate in Surrey, deposited somewhere between 1700 and 1750, was found corked, containing liquid and nine bent pins, in a disturbance next to the chalk floor of a seventeenth century building on London Road. Massey published the analysis in Current Archaeology in 2000. Nine bent pins. If numbers matter in your practice, that one is worth sitting with.

A bellarmine from a cottage in Felmersham, Bedfordshire, was recovered from beneath the hearth in 2001. It contained hair and pins and tested positive for urine.

Why this matters for practice

Three things, and I would take all three seriously.

Container work in Britain is not imported. There is a deep, evidenced, native tradition of putting things into vessels and hiding them in the fabric of the house. Anyone telling you that jar magick came here from elsewhere is not looking at the archaeology.

Protective containers are structurally different from sweetening containers. A witch bottle is sharp, sour, iron-heavy and hidden. A sweetening jar is soft, sweet, sealed and kept. They are opposite shapes of working and they do not belong in the same vessel. The archaeology backs up what practice already knows.

The vessel is a body. The bellarmine has a face and a belly. The bottle stands in for a person. This is the oldest logic in the book and it is worth remembering every time you seal something into a jar: you are making a body, and something is going to be asked to live in it.

If you make one, use your own materials, place it at a boundary, and leave it alone.

Sources

  • Merrifield, R. (1955). Witch Bottles and Magical Jugs. Folklore, 66(1), 195–207. JSTOR listing
  • Merrifield, R. (1987). The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. Batsford, London.
  • Massey, A. (2000). The Reigate Witch-Bottle. Current Archaeology, 169, 34–36. Summarised at Apotropaios: Witch Bottles
  • Hoggard, B. (2015). Witch-Bottles: Their Contents, Contexts and Uses. In R. Hutton (ed.), Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain, 91–105. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Hoggard, B. (2019). Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft. Berghahn Books.
  • Report on the Greenwich witch bottle analysis, British Archaeology (2009). Summary coverage: NBC News
  • "Opening a Witch Bottle", Archaeology magazine archive, on the Massey analysis.
  • "The Mysterious Case of the Witch Bottle", Historic England blog, first-hand account of the Greenwich find.
  • Apotropaios: Witch Bottles — Brian Hoggard's corpus statistics, and the Felmersham and Reigate bottles.
  • Manning, M. C. (2014). The Material Culture of Ritual Concealments in the United States. Historical Archaeology, 48(3), 52–83.
  • Old Bailey Proceedings Online — searchable to 1682 for the counter-witchcraft testimony.
  • Museum of Witchcraft and Magic: Bellarmine jar with boxed contents
  • The Greenwich witch bottle is on public display at Discover Greenwich Visitor Centre, Old Royal Naval College.