Talismans · Northern charms

The witch bottle

Also called: Bellarmine bottle, greybeard bottle

A jug of pins and urine buried under a hearth, on the theory that the witch would feel every one of them.

At a glance

Region
England, then New England
Period
Chiefly 17th century
Container
Bartmann (bellarmine) stoneware jug, later glass
Contents
Pins, nails, hair, nail clippings, cloth hearts, urine
Buried under
Hearth, threshold, chimney
Excavated so far
Over 200 in England; one intact, Greenwich 2004

What it is

A container, filled with sharp metal and with something taken from the bewitched person's own body, sealed and buried beneath the hearth, the threshold or the chimney of a house.

The usual vessel in the seventeenth century was a Bartmann jug, known in English as a bellarmine: salt-glazed Rhenish stoneware with a bearded wild man's face moulded on the neck. It was an ordinary imported container, and that distinctive face is why archaeologists can pick these out of the record so readily. Later bottles are glass, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century examples get simpler.

Contents are consistent enough to be a recipe: bent pins and nails, often several dozen. Human hair and nail clippings. Cloth cut into a heart shape and stuck with pins. Thorns. And urine, which is chemically detectable in a number of excavated examples.

The logic

This is counter-magic, not protection, and the distinction is sharp. A witch bottle is not a shield. It is a trap and a weapon, deployed by someone who believes they are already under attack.

The reasoning runs on the same sympathetic link the supposed witch is thought to be using. As the archaeologist Brian Hoggard puts it, the urine and hair work as a biometric decoy: they still carry the connection to the victim's body, so a curse travelling down that link arrives in a sealed jar full of bent iron instead of in a person. The pins then do to the witch what she was doing to the household. Contemporary sources are explicit that the intended result is agony, and in some accounts that she will be forced to come to the door.

Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus of 1681 records the method plainly, including a case where the bottle is put on the fire and the cure works only when it is buried instead.

Why it matters for the history of magic

Almost everything in this library is known from texts, museum jewellery or living practice. The witch bottle is known from the ground. Over two hundred have been excavated in England, with a distinct cluster in East Anglia, plus a smaller number in colonial New England. A completely intact, still-corked example was recovered from deep below ground at Greenwich in 2004 and its contents analysed, which is as close as this field gets to a sealed sample.

That gives it something no other charm here has: a real archaeological distribution, datable containers, analysable contents and findable contexts. When historians want to argue about how widespread everyday counter-magic actually was in early modern England, this is the evidence they use.

It sits inside a wider practice of concealing objects in buildings. Shoes in chimneys, dried cats in walls, marks scratched near openings. The building was understood as a body with holes in it, and the holes needed attention.

The end of the practice

Witch bottles thin out through the eighteenth century as witchcraft prosecution ends and the belief loses institutional backing, though isolated examples continue into the nineteenth and even the twentieth century.

Modern revivals exist, mostly in contemporary Pagan and folk-magic practice, and typically without the urine and with a stated intention of protection rather than retaliation. That is a real change in what the object is for. The historical bottle is an act of aggression against a named neighbour, and reading it as a gentle household charm loses most of what was going on.

How a witch bottle was made

Reconstructed from excavated examples and from seventeenth-century accounts.

  1. Take a stoneware jug, in the period usually a bellarmine with a bearded face on the neck.
  2. Fill it with bent pins, nails and thorns; excavated examples often contain dozens.
  3. Add material from the afflicted person: urine, hair, nail clippings.
  4. Add a cloth heart stuck through with pins, which appears in a significant minority of finds.
  5. Seal it, in the period with a cork and sometimes with wax.
  6. Bury it upside down beneath the hearth, the threshold or the chimney, and leave it. A bottle that is dug up is spent.

This is one of the few charms in the library that was aimed at a specific living person. It belongs in the record as history rather than as a method, and the modern protective versions are a different object wearing the same name.

What the witch bottle belongs with

Household counter-magic and the materials it used.

Questions for reflection

  • This charm assumes a specific neighbour is doing it to you. What changes when a fear has a face?
  • The bottle is buried and never opened. Why might a charm need to be out of sight to work?
  • Modern versions have removed the aggression. Is that a restoration or a different object?

Frequently asked questions

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