II – The Bottle

The name witch bottle conjures a fairly obvious image. A witch hunched over a table, stuffing unpleasant things into a bottle before sealing it with a cackle and hiding it beneath somebody’s floorboards. The reality is considerably more interesting.

The people preparing these bottles generally weren’t trying to curse their neighbours. According to the surviving seventeenth-century texts, they believed somebody had already bewitched them. The bottle was the cure. Even the name is deceptive. Historian Ann-Sophie Thwaite has pointed out that witch-bottle isn’t the terminology used by the people who actually practised this form of counter-magic. The term appears much later. Contemporary writers described something closer to a medical procedure: an experiment or remedy intended to cure a person suffering from witchcraft. PubMed Central (PMC)

And yes. It involved wee.

In 1671, astrologer and physician Joseph Blagrave published Astrological Practice of Physick. Among his treatments for illnesses supposedly caused by sorcery or witchcraft was a wonderfully unpleasant prescription. The patient’s urine was placed inside a bottle along with three nails, pins or needles and a little salt. The bottle was then sealed and kept warm. The intention was not simply to trap evil inside the vessel. It was to make the alleged witch suffer.

The logic depended upon sympathetic connections. Blagrave believed something belonging to the witch remained within the afflicted person’s body. The patient’s urine therefore maintained a link between victim and witch. What happened to one could affect the other. Seal the urine. Heat it. Introduce sharp objects. And somewhere, supposedly, the person responsible for the bewitchment would begin having a thoroughly miserable time. Blagrave warned that keeping the urine sealed for too long might actually endanger the witch’s life. PubMed Central (PMC) This wasn’t protection in the gentle modern sense of surrounding yourself with nice herbs and positive intentions. It was magical retaliation.

Stop hurting me, or I will hurt you back.

Ten years later, Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus recorded a particularly spectacular attempt at the same cure. A woman was suffering from an illness attributed to supernatural interference. An old travelling man advised her household to put her urine into a bottle with pins, needles and nails, cork it tightly and place it by the fire. They did.

Unfortunately, heating a tightly sealed container of liquid has consequences that seventeenth-century counter-witchcraft apparently hadn’t entirely accounted for. The pressure forced the cork out and the contents erupted. The patient remained ill. When the old man returned, he offered Plan B. Prepare another bottle. But this time, bury it in the earth. That apparently did the trick. The woman recovered. Soon afterwards, another woman arrived in distress, claiming that they had killed her husband. The implication was obvious.

He had been the witch.

Whether anyone actually believed that conclusion is impossible for us to know. What matters is that the story preserves the logic of the cure: the illness was being inflicted by another person, and by manipulating something connected to the victim, the harm could be sent back to its supposed source. PubMed Central (PMC)

And this is where archaeology becomes particularly interesting, because people really did bury bottles. They put them beneath floors, under thresholds, near hearths and chimneys. Sometimes they buried them outside, and some remained there for centuries.

During archaeological work at Holywell in Shoreditch, London, MOLA excavators discovered a stoneware bottle dating from roughly 1670–1710 beneath the floor of an eighteenth-century house. This wasn’t something somebody had casually dropped. Floor tiles had been lifted. A hole had been dug around a doorway in a basement or latrine area. The bottle had been deliberately placed upright, the hole filled and the tiles carefully replaced.

Inside were around sixty fine bent copper-alloy pins, the remains of iron nails and a fragment that may have been wood or bone. Three hundred years after somebody concealed it, archaeologists opened the floor and found it waiting. MOLA

The location is significant. Thresholds, hearths and floors recur repeatedly among discoveries interpreted as witch bottles. Current MOLA research describes examples recovered from domestic buildings, archaeological sites, churchyards, ditches and riverbanks, with concealed building examples particularly associated with floors, thresholds and hearths. MOLA Those are also vulnerable places in traditional ideas about supernatural protection. A door is where something enters. A chimney opens the house to the outside. A threshold marks the point between in here and out there. If you believed hostile supernatural influence could enter your home, these were sensible places to defend.

But we need to be careful here. Because archaeology has a habit of finding a strange object hidden in an old building and folklore has a habit of shouting MAGIC! before the dirt has even dried. Not every old bottle found beneath a floor is a witch bottle. Not every concealed object had the same purpose. And even among bottles deliberately deposited in unusual places, interpretation can be difficult.

This is one reason the current Bottles Concealed and Revealed research project led by MOLA, working with scholars of magic and witchcraft, is reassessing the evidence rather than simply repeating older assumptions. Researchers distinguish between containers that fit the historically documented seventeenth-century cure and objects whose contents or context may suggest quite different uses. MOLA The strongest candidates aren’t identified simply because they’re old and creepy. They’re identified through combinations of date, location, deliberate concealment and contents. Pins and nails occur repeatedly. Urine is documented in contemporary recipes and has been identified or suspected in archaeological examples.

Other reported ingredients include hair, nail clippings, thorns and assorted fragments of animal or plant material. MOLA

Even the familiar brown stoneware vessels deserve a little caution. Many examples are Bartmann vessels – the distinctive German stoneware jugs decorated with a bearded face on the neck. They’re often casually called Bellarmine bottles, but they were ordinary commercial containers before anyone repurposed them for counter-magic. The magic wasn’t necessarily in the bottle. It was in what somebody did to it.

And perhaps that is what makes these objects so intimate. A grand magical text can tell us what an educated writer thought people ought to do. A buried bottle tells us that somebody actually did something.

Somebody believed they were in danger. Somebody collected the urine. Somebody found the pins. Somebody bent the nails. Somebody sealed the bottle. Somebody lifted the floorboards or dug beneath the threshold and placed it where it was supposed to remain. Then they covered it again. They may never have told anyone. And that secrecy creates another problem for archaeologists. If the bottle was intended to remain hidden and undisturbed, then its original meaning disappeared with the person concealed it.There is no label saying:

WITCH BOTTLE. PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE.

There is only an object in an unexpected place. Which is why context matters so much. And it’s also why finding one today presents an unusual dilemma.

MOLA’s current advice is refreshingly sensible: if what appears to be a seventeenth-century witch bottle is discovered during work on an old building, don’t immediately pull it out, clean it or uncork it. Record where it is, leave it in place if possible and report it as an archaeological find so its context can be properly investigated. MOLA Not because opening it will release a three-hundred-year-old witch into the kitchen.

Probably.

But because the moment you move it, you destroy part of the evidence that might tell us what it actually was.

The people who made these objects lived in a world where illness might have a supernatural cause, where an unseen enemy could reach into your home and where medicine, astrology, religion and magic didn’t always occupy the tidy separate boxes we put them into today. The bottle gave them something they could do. When somebody was inexplicably ill, frightened or convinced that another person meant them harm, they could fight back. They could find a bottle. Fill it. Seal it. And hide it. Perhaps the patient recovered. Perhaps nothing happened. Perhaps coincidence did the rest.

But the bottle remained long after the illness was forgotten. Long after the supposed witch was dead. Long after everyone who knew why it had been buried had disappeared. Whoever concealed it did not expect us to find it. That’s perhaps the strangest thing about these objects. They weren’t displayed or explained. They weren’t left somewhere convenient for future folklorists. They were sealed. Hidden. And forgotten. In some versions of the practice, that may have been precisely the point. Burial kept the preparation contained and undisturbed, allowing the supposed remedy to continue doing its work. Modern scholarship has suggested that concealment could help preserve both the bottle and the efficacy people attributed to it. University of Bristol

Which leaves an uncomfortable little question whenever one emerges from beneath an ancient floor.

Somebody went to considerable trouble to put it there.

Should we really have taken it out?

---

The Card’s Meaning

The Bottle is the card of containment, protection and things deliberately sealed away.

Something has been trapped, preserved or prevented from crossing a boundary.

Sometimes containment protects us.

Sometimes it merely postpones what happens when the seal finally breaks.

Upright: protection · containment · boundaries · countering harm · hidden defences · preservation

In shadow: repression · retaliation · fear · buried hostility · dangerous things contained rather than resolved

The question: What have you sealed away because you are afraid of what might happen if you let it out?

Tomorrow, another card turns. 🖤

---

Sources & Further Reading

Blagrave, Joseph. Astrological Practice of Physick. London, 1671. – Seventeenth-century instructions for treating suspected witchcraft using a patient’s urine sealed in a bottle with nails, pins or needles and salt.

Glanvill, Joseph. Saducismus Triumphatus. London, 1681. – Contains an account of counter-witchcraft involving urine, pins, needles and nails sealed in a bottle, first heated and subsequently buried.

Thwaite, Ann-Sophie. “The ‘Witch-Bottle’ Reconsidered.” Historical Archaeology, 2020. – Detailed reassessment of the historical evidence for so-called witch bottles and their interpretation as counter-witchcraft urinary experiments.

MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology). “Holywell Witch Bottle.” – Archaeological account of a deliberately concealed late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century stoneware bottle discovered beneath a floor in Shoreditch, containing bent pins and remains of iron nails.

MOLA. Bottles Concealed and Revealed. – Ongoing research examining bottles deliberately concealed in buildings and archaeological contexts and reassessing their identification, contents and possible functions.

MOLA. “What Should You Do If You Find a 17th-Century Witch Bottle?” – Guidance on preserving the archaeological context of suspected concealed witch bottles rather than immediately removing or opening them.

Hoggard, Brian et al. Research on modern and historic witch-bottle traditions. – Discussion of concealed bottles, their contents and the continuation and reinterpretation of protective bottle magic.

Sources accessed September 2026.