Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - June 27, 2025


Pine Cones： Witch Bottles ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Freaky Folklore 1： Bigfoot Boss ｜ NSFW Patreon Preview Episode Forty-Five： Inanna, The Final Girl - Full bush⧸no bush (with Ewan)

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

122.03

Word count

1,674

Sentence count

83

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I act the spell upon you from my whole heart, wishing you to never rest, nor eat, nor sleep
00:00:09.800 the rest or part of your life. I hope your flesh will waste away, and I hope you will
00:00:15.880 never spend another penny I ought to have. 19th Century Curse, found in East Street,
00:00:23.580 Hereford, England.
00:00:30.000 there's something unsettling about a sealed room especially one hidden inside a home
00:00:39.260 in 1976 a phone call to the national museum of ireland reported the discovery of a quote-unquote
00:00:46.900 cave during construction work outside wicklow town dr joseph rafferty keeper of irish antiquities
00:00:55.440 sent young archaeologist Eamon Kelly to investigate on what would turn out to be
00:01:00.900 his first ever fieldwork assignment.
00:01:08.280 The report was misleading. It wasn't a cave or even a souterrain, but a sealed up brick oven
00:01:15.820 connected to a fireplace in Coolbeck House. The structure had been blocked off in the early 20th
00:01:21.960 entry. Inside that bricked up oven was a strange and silent cache. The chamber had been sealed with
00:01:30.640 corrugated iron and stones and when builders breached it they found a curious collection of
00:01:36.100 items. These were removed at the time of discovery and the archaeologists brought what was found to
00:01:42.200 the museum though it's unclear if this was everything. Iron objects, a candle snuffer, a
00:01:48.900 cramp, a bar, a bolts, a broken hoop, a pewter spoon fragment. At the time, all were assumed
00:01:56.900 to be 19th or early 20th century. But years later, a re-examination of the spoon's photograph
00:02:03.520 by British expert Simon Moore revealed something unexpected. The spoon likely dated from around
00:02:10.940 1600. There were also glass bottles, three green, one light blue, as well as clay pipe bowls and a
00:02:21.060 scrap of leather with machine stitching on one edge, likely from a shoe. Bones from cattle,
00:02:27.500 pigs, and a bird the size of a goose. Wood fragments, charcoal, an hourglass shaped wooden
00:02:34.260 object. At the time no one could explain it but decades later at a 2012 conference on the
00:02:43.620 archaeology of folk magic in Baltimore it became clear. This oven deposit from Wicklow may be one
00:02:51.820 of Ireland's few known examples of a spiritual midden.
00:03:03.100 In late medieval England, during a time of mounting fear of witchcraft,
00:03:08.680 protective deposits known as spiritual middens began to appear. It was believed that witches
00:03:14.780 could slip into homes through chimneys, doors or windows, liminal spaces, but especially chimneys.
00:03:21.820 People responded by hiding assemblages of everyday or personal objects in cavities near fireplaces or behind hearths.
00:03:31.920 These weren't just discarded items, they were layered with intention.
00:03:36.820 A spiritual midden might include domestic debris, bones, broken pottery, worn shoes,
00:03:43.640 but it could also be infused with magical logic.
00:03:46.860 Sharp metal objects to pierce or trap.
00:03:49.640 Shoes to attract spirits and confuse them into staying
00:03:53.760 Glass to confound or repel
00:03:56.980 The practice followed settlers to America and Australia
00:04:03.080 The contents of these mittens often overlap with another form of protective folk magic
00:04:08.980 The Witch Bottle
00:04:10.780 Witch bottles were made as magical countermeasures
00:04:19.900 Most often to ward off illness or misfortune believed to be caused by a curse
00:04:24.780 Some were apotropaic, built into houses as protective amulets
00:04:30.740 Others were reactive, created in moments of fear or suffering
00:04:35.240 In the latter case, a person might bottle their own urine
00:04:40.180 sometimes with hair, nail clippings, bent pins, thorns or pieces of iron.
00:04:46.680 The sealed vessel, usually glass or ceramic, was buried or heated.
00:04:51.920 Heating intensified its effect.
00:04:54.120 The witch who caused the suffering might fall ill, appear in distress or even die.
00:04:59.760 Some believed it forced the witch to reveal themselves.
00:05:03.000 Others saw it as pure defence.
00:05:10.180 One case, found at the Old Bailey in London, records a man testifying that his wife had
00:05:16.300 been subject to the ill machinations of a local witch. The judge, understanding the 0.55
00:05:21.500 severity of the man's dilemma, gives him clear advice. Visit an apothecary and create
00:05:27.020 a witch bottle to turn the curse back on the witch who cast it.
00:05:33.600 Another key ingredient in witch bottles, if you could get it, was sulphur. If you think
00:05:39.300 about it the attraction of using sulfur makes sense. It spewed out of volcanic fumaroles from
00:05:45.160 the underworld. It would have been the ideal thing to kill a witch if you wanted to. Witch bottle 1.00
00:05:52.140 practice is also referenced in 17th century texts. In 1671 Joseph Blake Rave wrote
00:05:59.940 another way is to stop the urine of the patient close up in a bottle and put into it three nails
00:06:07.000 pins or needles with a little white salt keeping the urine always warm. If you let it remain long
00:06:14.180 in the bottle it will endanger the witch's life. Witch bottles functioned within a wider framework
00:06:28.340 of sympathetic magic. Harming a symbolic or magically linked object would in theory at least
00:06:34.980 harm the person it was connected to.
00:06:38.100 It reflects a worldview of early modern Europe,
00:06:40.960 where medicine and magic, as we well know, often blurred.
00:06:45.720 These practices of protecting a building and its occupants
00:06:49.560 were at their height during the hysteria of the witch hunts
00:06:52.700 and witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries.
00:06:56.780 Whether the witch bottle worked or not is unclear,
00:06:59.880 but it is said that once the evildoer was dead, the bottle would break.
00:07:04.400 These are not uncommon finds in buildings of this period,
00:07:08.080 and several are known from London,
00:07:09.800 including a near-complete freaking Bartman jug from London's Guildhall.
00:07:14.560 And because these items were hidden, they're rarely found,
00:07:18.440 only surfacing during demolition,
00:07:21.040 where a builder, a tradesman, doesn't even realise what he's uncovering.
00:07:25.160 one such witch bottle was unearthed in pennsylvania at governor prince state park
00:07:37.040 a small dark olive glass bottle buried upside down inside six round-headed pins and a cork
00:07:45.040 stopper beneath a bone fragment and pottery the bottle dated to around 1740 was likely part of
00:07:54.180 English-style folk magic brought to colonial America. It may have once held the urine boiled
00:07:59.600 with the pins. The bewitchment was being turned back on its source.
00:08:12.520 In Greenwich, England, a builder excavating a basement found a complete Bellarmarine jug,
00:08:18.080 still sealed and still rattling. These billar marine or bartman jugs, often bearing a bearded
00:08:25.500 face, were common 17th century vessels used for their durability. This one was x-rayed and
00:08:33.180 analysed and was found to have held bent pins, nails, hair, nail clippings and a heart-shaped
00:08:39.500 cloth. The liquid tested positive for urine. The nail clippings came from hands that hadn't known
00:08:45.280 labour, perhaps someone of status, which makes sense because the bottle lay in the shadow of a
00:08:51.540 royal palace. Not all attempts to create these witch bottles ended well with us finding them
00:09:03.900 hundreds of years later. In 1804 in Bradford, England, a cunning man named John Hepworth was
00:09:12.240 commissioned to make a witch bottle from iron. He heated it over the fire, believing it would be
00:09:18.240 more potent, but it exploded and killed his client. This is the only known case of a witch
00:09:25.600 bottle fatality. Iron was rare for this purpose, because glass and ceramic were safer, though still
00:09:32.120 volatile. And not every protection was buried or hidden. In 1892, a lead curse tablet was found in
00:09:47.580 a cupboard in Wilton Place, Dimmock. Etched into it backwards was the name Sarah Ellis. The message
00:09:55.220 read make this person to banish away from this place and country amen to my desire amen
00:10:02.460 it included lunar sigils a cross and magical symbols christian astrological and demonic in
00:10:11.280 nature on the reverse was a full lunar table lead was sometimes chosen for its weight and permanence
00:10:19.360 and its classical association with the underworld.
00:10:23.240 Such tablets are rare in post-medieval Britain,
00:10:26.360 but their use echoes ancient Greco-Roman practices.
00:10:30.300 Legend says Sarah Ellis was a real woman and that the curse worked. 0.67
00:10:35.360 She is said to have died by suicide, buried at a crossroads, with a stick through her heart.
00:10:40.460 when workers cracked open the cool bag house oven they couldn't possibly have known what
00:10:53.020 they were stepping into a collection of discarded items or the remains of a quiet ritual long
00:10:59.680 forgotten today we can recognize it for what it was a deliberate act of folk magic born of fear
00:11:06.920 and necessity. The oven, once warm with fire, became a sealed vault of silent protection.
00:11:14.400 From sulphur and salt to urine and pins, from hidden jugs to charmed iron, these remnants speak
00:11:20.440 not only of fear but of ingenuity, of everyday people trying to seize a kind of power in the
00:11:26.220 face of an invisible harm. These remnants of spiritual middens and counterspells tell us
00:11:33.400 something vital about the people who made them. They were not foolish, they were not quaint,
00:11:38.520 they were navigating invisible threats the only way they knew how, with fragments of the body, 0.60
00:11:43.360 bits of the home, the shimmer of a spoon, the salt and urine, and the burn of belief.
00:11:57.540 We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Pinecones, bite-sized folklore from Rowan and Pine.
00:12:03.400 If you did, please be sure to leave us a comment if you're on Spotify
00:12:06.980 or review on your platform of choice.
00:12:09.820 It helps us very much.
00:12:12.080 And until next time, try not to give anybody a reason
00:12:15.100 to create a bottle with you in mind. 0.99
00:12:18.440 Thanks for listening and fuck yeah folklore. 0.99
00:12:33.400 Looking for your next obsession? 0.98
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