Easily spooked? Then don’t look now. . .
Lucy Davies meets the curator of an irresistibly creepy new show about the supernatural, and bravely takes a first look around
Sorry to mention Christmas in August, but how does Father Christmas enter your house? If you have one, likely it’s via the chimney, at night, when all the windows and doors are locked. It’s a legacy from long ago, when chimneys were thought to be the means by which magical visitors, such as witches and demons, could enter your home to perform their malicious acts. In folklore and paintings from the Renaissance era on, the hearth is a liminal space overrun by fairies and spirits creeping up or downward, connecting the natural and supernatural worlds.
It wasn’t just chimneys, either. Witches and their spiteful kin could slither through a key hole, or tiny gaps in the floorboards. And the front door was thought particularly vulnerable, especially at night when ghosts wandered abroad – who knew what befell your household when you were asleep?
As Spellbound, a new exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford, reveals, many and inventive have been our attempts to protect our homes (and bodies) from such terrifying intrusions over the centuries. Among the 200 or so objects on display are dozens of the horseshoes and brooms, knife blades, shoes, desiccated animals, human hearts and bottles filled with iron filings that people have buried in fireplaces, or in wall cavities, or hung over their thresholds. If your house is more than a couple of hundred years old, it probably has something similar secreted away, too.
Village and town, rich and poor, intellectual and illiterate – if your crops failed, or your house was infested with vermin, or your children fell ill, “you’d probably start with a medical practitioner or a priest,” explains one of the exhibition’s four curators, the medievalist Sophie Page, “but if those methods failed, there’d be a tipping point where you might try magic. It was another chance to achieve what you desperately wanted.”
Interestingly, when builders find a buried glove or a mummified cat during renovations, the owner often wants them put back. If they are lent to museums, it’s almost always on a temporary basis, part of a just-in-case mentality that even in our rational, scientific ally informed age, means we still occasionally indulge in magical thinking.
At the Ashmolean, the objects on show span 800 years and come from all over Europe.
Some, such as the crystal the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee used to commune with angels, or the 15th-century chart that helped physicians calculate the position of the Moon before an operation (required by law in many countries from the 14th century) are immeasurably beautiful.
Others, such as manuscripts outlining how to conjure demons, thought to be the most transgressive kind of magic during the Middle Ages, or a German “unicorn” horn are incredibly rare. Most, though, are hairon-the-back-of-the-neck creepy. The poppet doll with a dagger through its face, for instance, or the torn and stained, coarse linen gown worn at trial by Anna Kramerin, a suspected witch interrogated, found guilty and burned in Germany, in 1680.
Then there’s a nightmare curdling replica of a witch scale, an apparatus used to weigh women against a bible, the idea being that an unholy witch would be outweighed by the gravitas of scripture.
Of course, it could be fixed. “We only realised when we were installing it,” says Page, “that it wasn’t just a case of whether they used a small or a heavy bible; there were also a series of notches on the bar that links the chair to the balance, meaning you could change the odds entirely of whether someone outweighed the bible or not.” Magic’s relationship with religion has pitched back and forth over the ages. In medieval times, for instance, even clerics tried to summon demons (often writing about their experiments afterwards), claiming to be driven by curiosity, or by a thirst for knowledge. Many also did it because they coveted the secular trappings of success that they were otherwise denied: necromantic manuals are full of rituals to gain beautiful women, extraordinary flying horses and the favour of powerful men, as well as visions of the future, and cloaks of invisibility.
You might find these practices quaint, and stashed safely in the past, but they happened well into the 20th century. Indeed, on show at the Ashmolean will be the contents of a witch bottle dating from the Eighties. Popular from the 17th century, they contained bits of the person who was bewitched (such as hair or urine), and sharp objects (such as thorns or nails) intended to harm the person who had cast the spell, because it was thought that enchanter and enchanted were forever linked.
This particular example had been cast into the Thames (throwing things into water often gives a spell ritual force) and inside were coins (which enabled the dating process), clove oil (thought to banish negative forces), iron filings (iron scraps are a common find in ritual caches) and 17 teeth. Not just any teeth, either. Tests proved they were much, much older than the other contents of the bottle, and – look away now if you’re easily spooked – had been dug up from a graveyard.
In the exhibition, the real teeth have been replaced by fake teeth bought on the internet and then aged by being dropped into tea, “but even though I know that,” admits Page, “they make me feel uncomfortable. Somehow, they lose the distance you usually have with museum objects.” No one, she tells me, has dared open the sealed silvered flask from the
‘There’d be a tipping point where you might try magic. It was another chance to achieve what you wanted’
1850s, unearthed in Brighton, that’s supposed to contain a witch, either.
Why is it so difficult for us to let go of these ancient fears and impulses? The curators have worked with two psychologists to try to understand: “It’s partly that it’s easier for our brain to imagine bad things happening than good,” says Page, “so magic – touching wood or something, to ward off bad luck – offers a quick way to stop thinking about it and move on. It’s an evolutionary tactic – something we’ve needed to survive.”
Was there a particular item that made her blood run cold? “We talked about this a lot when we were installing,” laughs Page, somewhat nervously, I might add.
“And every day it’s been a different one. The curse poppet is horribly visceral, and some of the fragments of clothing found in houses, too, I think because they were never intended to be found. I’ve probably watched too many horror films set in houses, but that idea of what might be in the walls is just terribly creepy.”