Walking the Hedge

I love Walking the Hedge’s Wild Geek Hang aka the forum (FYI: “wild geek hang” is an anagram for “walking the hedge” hehehehe)

Here’s the start of a great thread going right now called Seeking help with protective charms:

pa_hsia says:

“I want to make a couple of protective charms for my new house – goodness knows we need some if this last month is anything to go by – so I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the topic, focusing on English folk magic and East Anglian (Anglo-Saxon) charms as my particular area of interest.

I think I understand how they work – sympathetic magic, mostly, as well as warding sigils and protective spirits – and I can more-or-less extrapolate reasons for why the charms are made how they are, but the reasoning behind one eludes me.

According to the Times Online, at least one Witch’s Bottle contained a leather heart stuck through with an iron nail.
I know that this is a symbolic representation of a charm for the protection of livestock – a bullock’s heart pierced by pins or nails and placed in the chimney – but I cannot find out how the original charm is meant to work.
I’m sure I’m overlooking something, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?”

Juniper (that’s me) responds:

I know the bottle you speak of, as I studied it when researching for the Witch Bottle article I wrote a while back.
http://walkingthehedge.net/wildgeekhang … ;Itemid=68

I do not think this bottle was made to protect livestock at all, I think it is love related. Let me explain.

First of all this bottle was found in a home in Greenwich which is part of London, meaning this bottle and the person making it was in the city. The person who owned this home may have had a horse, but not livestock. Also there are a number of charms and such for livestock protection; they are always found in the pasture itself, in the barn, tied to the fencing etc … near the animals themselves and not in the home.

If someone wanted to signify a bullock’s heart, it was easy enough back then to simply go to the butcher and buy a heart, and add a slice or two of actual heart to the bottle.

Symbolic hearts <3 mean the heart in the sense of love, desire, romance. For the person making this bottle, it is less likely the leather piece cut into a symbolic heart shape meant a real organ heart; it meant love/desire/romance to their mind.

From Wikipedia:

“In European traditional art and folklore, the heart symbol is drawn in a stylized shape. This shape is typically coloured red, suggesting both blood and, in many cultures, passion and strong emotion. The hearts have constituted, since the 15th century, one of the red suits in most playing card decks. The shape is particularly associated with romantic love; it is often seen on St. Valentine’s Day cards, candy boxes, and similar popular culture artefacts as a symbol of romantic love.
What the traditional “heart shape” actually depicts is a matter of some controversy. It only vaguely resembles the human heart.
The seed of the silphium plant, used in ancient times as an herbal contraceptive, has been suggested as the source of the heart symbol.

… Inverted heart symbols have been used in heraldry as stylized testicles (coglioni in Italian) as in the canting arms of the Colleonis of Milan.”

The fact that the heart is made of leather may or may not be significant. After all, leather was a readily available material at the time, easier to come by than many textiles in fact. Using leather may have just been using what was at hand, much like one of us using a left over piece of broadcloth from the scrap box.

The fact that it was pierced makes me think of Cupid’s arrow, or a broken heart. The symbolism of a pierced heart was around back then, and means much of the same thing as it does today.

Other than the heart this bellamine bottle also

“contained 12 bent iron nails (one of which pierced a small leather heart), eight brass pins, 10 adult fingernail pairings (not from a manual worker, but a person “of some social standing”), a quantity of hair and urine with traces of nicotine, indicating it had come from a smoker. There were also traces of sulphur, then known as brimstone, and what is thought to be navel fluff.” ~ Fortean Times

A Witch bottle was made using ingredient from the person, place or thing it was meant to protect. Aside from the leather there is no pieces of livestock in the this bottle.

An Old Bailey court record from 1682 documents that a husband, believing his wife to be afflicted by witchcraft, was advised by a Spitalfields apothecary to

“take a quart of your Wive’s urine, the paring of her Nails, some of her Hair, and such like, and boyl them well in a Pipkin.”

We know the finger nails come from an upper class man. That the urine came form a smoker and that most women did not smoke back then. So we know the person mean to receive this spell breaking or the effects of the charm was probably male and reasonably well to do.

I think most likely this bottle was meant to cure someone of a particular curse … love. Perhaps the person making it was trying to be free of someone who was not taking no as answer, perhaps this person was trying to make someone fall in love with them.

I think the most likely case is this person felt they had a love spell cast on them and needed to break it. What kind of love spell? I don’t know, maybe an unlucky in love spell, maybe they thought someone had been enspelled to fall in love with them, or maybe they were having a hard time getting over someone and felt it was a curse.

Maybe, just maybe they were trying to make someone fall in love with them. There are twelve nails in the bottle, the last one piercing the leather. Perhaps someone was hoping for another to love them a little more or a little less, each month over the course of a year?

It is possible the person making the bottle was not the person who needed the magick. It was common to hire someone, such as Cunning Folk to do it for you; it was also common to do it for a family member, with or without their permission. Maybe a concerned parent, wanting to keep his or her child away from a lover or someone they had affection for created the bottle.

Certainly one of the more common spells requested today is to help someone move on from a relationship that has ended, that they want to end, or to stop obsessing over someone. People 300 years ago were not so different.

Well that’s the first two posts, there’s more and hopefully you’ll join in, either in that thread or another one … or start one!

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