Working with Pagans will improve understanding of historic magical collections

In January 2024, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford hosted a two-day workshop entitled Amulets, Charms and Witch Bottles. The workshop was led by the archaeologist Nigel Jeffries of Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) and curator Tom Crowley of Gunnersbury Park Museum.

Together with project partners (see below), members of the Pagan and related communities were invited to engage with the museum’s significant historic magical collections from the UK and beyond.  

The workshop supported a co-designed project with members of the “spiritually invested” community, which explored issues of ethics, access, interpretation and the role of the museum in collecting and displaying Pagan and related material culture.

Census data suggests there are 74,000 Pagans in England and Wales, an increase of c.18,000 since 2011, while the Scottish Pagan Federation has noted that between 2011 and 2024, the number of Pagans in Scotland grew from 5,194 to just over 19,000.

In the Pitt Rivers Museum workshops, it became clear that today’s community members often seek quiet inspiration from art and museums to explore their own beliefs and inform their devotional and ritual practices. 

Central to the practice-based workshops was using folk magic motifs from the museum’s collections to explore contemporary responses. Inspired by an object – a bull’s heart pierced with nails and retrieved from a chimney at Shutes Hill Farm, Somerset – one participant explored the visceral process of making magical objects: what social tensions might have inspired such an object and what was the state of mind of the maker?

Kirsty Ryder, one of the project partners, created a charm in response to the workshops – an object rich in symbolism.

“I wanted to create a tangible link between folk magic past and present, demonstrating that these practices persist and challenging the notion that such traditions are solely past tense, as some museum language might suggest,” said Ryder. 

 It was widely noted during the workshops that a “scientific gaze” and attendant assumptions pervaded the Pitt Rivers Museum’s interpretation of the objects, and that this was quite widespread in museums which held material of this type.

Nuanced understanding of witchcraft and “counter-witchcraft” practices seemed to be lacking; participants queried, for example, why objects used in counter-witchcraft (such as “witch bottles”) were placed alongside objects used in sacred, ritual, spiritual practices.

This left the participants feeling uncomfortable; were museums suppressing the item’s efficacy? Had curation, display and years without ritual use or acknowledgement impacted them as magical objects? 

Several project outcomes are being actively pursued. These include further workshops with other museum partners, a glossary of terminology and reading material to benefit museums with collections of interest to the community, co-curation frameworks, and collecting policy guidance.

In May, a wrap event was held at Treadwell’s Bookshop in London, where participants showcased their amazing work and new networks were forged. 

Amulets, charms, and witch bottles is a Mola Impact Acceleration Account project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The project partners are Sarah-Jane Harknett of University of Cambridge Museums, Christine Oakley-Harrington, founder of Treadwell’s bookshop in London, Kirsty Ryder, a Pagan and PhD student with a focus on witchcraft, and Peter Hewitt of the Folklore Museums Network.