Museum of… Magic, Fortune-telling and Witchcraft, Edinburgh

Where

The Museum of Magic, Fortune-telling and Witchcraft is on the historic Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

What

Ash William Mills opened the museum in February 2023. “I’m known as the geek of the witch world,” he jokes. “I don’t just want to practice it; I love the historical context of magical and folk traditions, and the horrific history of the witch trials.”

Mills felt drawn to witchcraft in his early teens and went on to become a researcher of Scottish ethnology. He amassed such a large personal collection of items related to the history of magic that he ran out of space in his flat to display them, and started a museum so that other people could enjoy them.

“The visitors are a mixed bag,” he says. “You get people like me who are practitioners, but also people who’ve gone to all the touristy stuff about Harry Potter in Edinburgh and want to see something closer to the truth and learn about the history of witchcraft.”

Collections

The museum is split into four areas: Scottish witch trials; the devil; magical practices, such as folk magic; and spiritualism.

Since opening the museum last year, Mills has been flooded with donations, swelling the collection to about 200 items.

He says people have often inherited objects or found them underneath floorboards or behind fireplaces in their houses.

“People will say they don’t believe in witchcraft, but then they don’t want to risk having the objects in their house. So, I go ‘yes, I’ll take it’.”

The donated items include an altar used by a coven in the 1990s and one of only three copies of the Book of Shadows bound by the British Library.

Highlights

Must-see items include a divination book from 1662, a Victorian crystal ball and an original Ouija board made by William Fuld, who manufactured these boards between 1890 and 1920.

Visitors often gawp at the 250-year-old mummified cat that was buried in the walls of a house in Paris to ward off evil. Mills also hosts a variety of events in the museum such as tarot and bibliomancy readings, healing circles, film nights and talks.

Help at hand

The museum is cared for by Mills, two volunteers and a team of tarot card readers.

Future plans

After a successful first year, Mills is renovating the museum to make more space for tarot readings and a display about the neo-paganist group the Ancient Order of Druids, of which former British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill was a member.

“It’s so nice to see that people are interested in this stuff. We did have a bit of trouble with some people from the church opposite, but once they got to know that we’re not devil worshippers and that this is a respected museum about the historical context of magic, they’ve been alright with us,” he says.

“I hope that this won’t die with me and the right person will take it over so that it will go down several generations.”

Claudia Cox is a freelance writer