practicesBurying

The English witch bottle is the clearest case of burial as the working position. Joseph Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus of 1681 records an old man's advice to a Suffolk household: put the wife's urine in a bottle with pins, needles and nails, cork it and set it by the fire — and when the cork blew out and that failed, bury it in the earth instead, which is what the account says worked. Folk practice holds the bottle to be active as long as it stays hidden and unbroken, and people went to trouble to hide them: bottles under fireplaces have turned up only after the rest of the building had gone.

The finds carry dates and names. Marshall Becker identified the first American witch bottle in an archaeological context, the Essington bottle, recovered on Great Tinicum Island in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. A mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century enslaved or tenant site in Dorchester County, Maryland, produced a buried bottle whose cork bristled with straight pins. In 2016 a bottle full of nails came out of the hearth of a Civil War site in Virginia. A glass bottle found buried in a threshold in Trelissick, Cornwall, was analysed at Loughborough University and found to hold urine, a little alcohol and one human hair, with brass pins dating from the late 1840s and an ostracod. In 2020 a sixteenth-century jug turned up during the renovation of the De Zwarte Ruiter pub in Turnhout, Belgium.

The Greek and Roman world buried to deliver. Curse tablets were rolled, folded or pierced with nails and then put beneath the ground — buried in graves or tombs, thrown into wells or pools, put in underground sanctuaries or nailed to temple walls — and the ones in graves were often addressed through the dead person whose grave it was, usually somebody who had died young or violently. Mesopotamian incantation bowls were buried face down under the threshold, in courtyards, in the corners of the homes of the recently dead and in cemeteries. In Egypt, execration texts naming enemies were written on clay figurines or pottery, then smashed and buried beneath a building under construction, so that the names were symbolically smothered, or buried in a cemetery.

Burial is also how some traditions end a charm. In Ireland a discarded Brigid's cross was burned or buried, and burial was preferred because of Brigid's associations with agriculture. In Korea, a mudang who does not want a relative to inherit the vocation may have their ritual gear burned or buried at their death, which severs the connection between their personal deities and the surviving family. A Bulgarian martenitsa can be put under a stone rather than tied to a tree, and whichever creature is closest to it the next day reads the year.

Inference — burial is why the record is shaped the way it is. A charm hidden under a hearth was meant to be permanent and to be unseen, so it survives and it is undocumented; the finder is usually a builder, and the date usually comes from the bottle rather than from anyone's account of putting it there.

Dig at the place the tradition specifies — hearth, threshold, far corner, grave, well, under a wall going up — put the object in, close the ground, and say nothing. In the counter-magic cases the object stays there and stays whole; in the disposal cases it does not matter what happens to it afterwards.

Still done, and mostly found by accident. Witch bottles continue to be buried at the corner of a property or under a hearth in present folk practice, and fewer than a dozen probable examples have been identified in the United States to date. Objects turn up in renovations across England, Belgium and the American northeast, which is why the reporting is patchy and the dating comes from the glass.