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The Witch's Bottle

Sometimes magic is found in the oddest of locations.

By Meredith HarmonPublished 2 years ago 8 min read
2
I'd like to think my archeologist grandmother would cackle in delight over this oddity.

Is magic real?

Every person has a different answer to that - sometimes many answers, or a stack of answers layered up like pancakes. I'll bet just reading that question has gotten the hackles up on many a reader, and I haven't even gotten to describing my project yet.

What if I told you, that wasn't the question I set out to answer?

This pandemic has hit all of us very hard. As of this typing, I've lost thirty-one close friends and family to COVID. That number is staggering. That number does not include the people I know, from various friends and family to neighbors and strangers, who have either died from other non-related causes, or gotten long COVID and are struggling to walk, to remember, to deal with personality changes. Funerals I can never go to, because I'm immunocompromised and still wearing a mask and hiding under a rock while the world opens up around me and two more variants are on the horizon.

Some days, during lockdown, it was hard to get out of bed. I had good friendships fracture under the strain, scared people turn on their own support system and lash out inappropriately in hurt and anger, and people who hurt so much they turned inward and imploded with the help of alcohol and misapplied religious beliefs.

One day I realized it had been two years since I'd been on a torch to make glass beads. ME. Who'd found such joy in the craft, losing myself behind the hiss of fire and melting glass to make something of color and shape evocative of my inner being, had lost my own inner fire.

I'm a cross-crafter. By that, I mean I work in a lot of different media to create works...well, sometimes not of art, sometimes practicality or amusement or whimsy. I have yet to find a craft I don't like, though I know my inner circle of friends has bets riding on which one it'll be. I know one lost by betting on "underwater basket weaving," not knowing I did that as a child while dressed as a mermaid and loved every second of it.

But I digress.

I love history - and therefore I'm in a middle ages re-enactment group. I love anthropology and archeology - I was taught them at my grandmother's knee. I love biology - I was read National Geographic magazines while still in the womb. These things tend to combine in the twisty catacombs of my mind in unusual and ..um... interesting ways, and will spit forth some rather exotic and unusual projects from time to time.

So I created a witch's bottle.

Have you ever heard of them? Archeologists turn them up from time to time, buried in the corners of buildings to ward off bad luck. Some kind of bottle or jug, filled with sharp things, and icky things, and unusual things to collect and trap any curses a witch may level at you or your household.

I have been fascinated by amulets and curse making things and curse breaking things for as long as I can remember. I'm a jewelry maker by trade, so it's the intersection of belief and adornment. Both are very intimate, very personal things. And here I was, with all these feelings bottled up inside, and nowhere to go, wondering what would drive a person to go on a mystical scavenger hunt to put one together.

So many questions! Who came up with this idea? Who dictates what goes into one? Where did they get the idea for what to put into one? What cultural pieces am I missing, when the things that would be obvious to them to put in would be either eww or hunh to me in my time and place? Why that particular number of things? Why that color of cloth? Why cut it into that shape? What was the level of difficulty in collecting these things?

And, of course, the important overarching questions: Does it work? Will it make me feel as if I'm taking back some of my agency in a world that feels completely out of control?

We may be getting a little close to the bone there on that last question...

Since I had to play wise person and scrounger in this self-imposed hunt, I had to ask myself further questions. Sharp things: nails, bent pins, shards of pottery or glass or shell, thorns. Some were very valuable at the time, and it would hurt to forfeit them. Some might be illegal to collect, if the roses were in the church yard or the hawthorn trees were in the king's forest. Even glass shards could be rare, though pottery or local flints might work in a pinch. Was part of the magic in finding things that had a bit of risk, or danger, or Wrath of Family Matron if She Finds You With Your Hands in Her Valuable Pin Jar? Or Dad If He Finds You Took Some of His Precious Nails? Or was it worse if the hunters were those matrons or patrons, not only forced to sacrifice something valuable, but destroy it in the process?

More questions...in the Eww department, something personal. Hair, fingernails or toenails, urine. The middle ages were a different time, and urine was used for a lot of projects, including dyeing of cloth. There are plenty of articles on the Beefeaters and the dunnymen's fights over their high quality product, and taxes levied on collection. Was it considered naughty, to take away from someone's livelihood for this portion? If someone was vain of hands or feet or hair when such things were forced to be a low priority for peasants, was a request for such things painful?

From the Unusual Things department, there were personal objects like a seashell (nowhere the ocean) and a folded up cloth cut out into a heart shape and stabbed with pins. Some witch's bottles actually used a bird's egg or an animal heart stabbed with pins. For me, where I live, the first one is definitely illegal, and the second one is questionable, even if I go to the butcher's shop and buy chicken hearts by the pound. I skipped both. I thought about resonant magic, and how some bottles had red felt hearts instead. Red was an expensive color at the time, and scissors were pretty expensive too, so getting a fabric snippet and trimming to shape would have been a dicey project. I did add a seashell from my collection, since I pick up many at the beach. I think, in period, this would have been more of a hardship, since I'm sure a household would only have one or two IF they were rich enough to ever travel that far away.

Assembly was tricky too. Getting a bottle with a wide enough neck to accept the pieces, choosing which pins and nails from where (or whom)....pins from my great uncle's WWII sewing kit that he took with him, nails from my dad's stash, fishing hooks from my own supplies (and also an expensive item at the time). My own hair and toenails, because why not? No urine, thanks all the same, but some vinegar as a substitute. Thorns from my period rose bushes, taken in winter so I had to be careful not to destroy the branch. Yes, I got rather scratched in the process. Glass shards from my glass bead kit, a pottery shard I picked out of the town's rubbish heap that goes back to the 1800's. Red felt from my craft stash, carefully trimmed with a tiny scissors, and stabbed with more pins.

The mixture is supposed to be boiled in alcohol before being stuffed in a bottle. While I appreciate the effort to make it sterile, I'm rather allergic to alcohol, so I went with topping it off with rubbing alcohol instead. I sealed it up with a cork. Now, a completed bottle is supposed to be either tucked into a warm hideaway, or buried in the house. My house is on a cement slab, so I rather sneakily "tucked" it behind my computer monitor, where the heat given off by the computer itself gives it a steady stream of greater-than-ambient temperature.

Did it work? I did feel better after making it. People didn't stop dying, and certain family members were still giving me unnecessary grief for keeping a proper distance and not going to holiday events, but something had changed inside myself.

You see, I'd been looking at the darkness. I wasn't creating, I wasn't looking to push myself at all. Some days it was hard to get out of bed. You'll recognize the signs; I did so myself, and I didn't care. My friends were awash in the same grief I was feeling. Friends gone, never to come back, and we couldn't even say goodbye and cry on each other's shoulders...

I was drowning in all of it. But focusing on making a thing - and ironically, a thing designed specifically to push the darkness away - gave me a focus outside myself. By looking at it, and getting off my tush to do this, create this, made me miss the joy I took in the very act of creation.

It led me to look at a lot of short stories I'd never fully written, and I got back into my mindset on them and finished them to my satisfaction. I looked at my piles of jewelry components, and poked them a bit, and started making things I'd set aside. I thought about the garden, lying under the snow, and what seeds I'd like to plant in upcoming months.

I thought about others, and reached out to talk or video conference.

When freedom is not allowed for the body, then turn inward to the mind. My creativity began to wander about again, free to think about future projects and what I'd need to accomplish them.

Yes, it was a little bit of magic in a dark, dark place.

healing
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About the Creator

Meredith Harmon

Mix equal parts anthropologist, biologist, geologist, and artisan, stir and heat in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, sprinkle with a heaping pile of odd life experiences. Half-baked.

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