The Witch Bottle: The Jar Sealed Under a House, What Was in It, and a Safe Version Today
A witch bottle is a small stoneware jug or glass bottle, filled with sharp iron and something of the household, corked tight and hidden under a hearth, a doorstep or a floor. English writers of the 1600s describe making one when a household believed it had been harmed, and they say it sends the harm back to its source. Archaeologists have recorded a few hundred in England, nearly all of them found open, broken or long since emptied.
One came up whole. In 2004 a sealed stoneware jug was lifted from the Thames foreshore mud at Greenwich with its cork still in place and its contents still inside. It was analyzed and the results were published, so for once we do not have to guess what went into one of these jars.
Here is that find, the two seventeenth century writers who printed the method, and a house jar you can put together tonight: nothing taken from any person, nobody named, and nothing heated.
What a witch bottle was, and what the Greenwich one held
The container was a Bartmann jug, the salt-glazed Rhenish stoneware with a bearded face molded on the neck that stood in ordinary English kitchens through the 1600s. Collectors and older books often call that shape a Bellarmine. It was a household object, not a magical one, which is part of the point: the thing was made from what the house already had.
The analysis was carried out by the chemist Alan Massey and reported in British Archaeology in 2009. The jug held urine, bent iron nails, brass pins, hair, nail parings, a small piece of leather cut into a heart shape and pierced, and traces of sulfur. The urine carried nicotine, so whoever filled it used tobacco. It was reported as the first English witch bottle recovered still sealed and intact.
So the recipe in the old books is not a story about the old books. One household in the seventeenth century really did fill a jug this way, stop it, and put it somewhere it was meant to stay.
Joseph Blagrave prints the method
Joseph Blagrave, an astrologer and physician in Reading, set the bottle down in print in his Astrological Practice of Physick (1671), among the things he offered a patient who believed they had been bewitched.
His method, in our words and not his: take the sick person's own urine, stop it in a bottle with nails, pins and needles, cork it fast, and either set it to the fire or bury it in the ground. What he records as the belief behind it is that the one thought to have sent the harm feels it coming back.
Two things are worth noticing. The bottle uses what any house had: a jug, a cork, iron from the workbench. And it is built around a body and a suspicion, which is exactly the part that does not come forward into a house jar today.
Glanvill's Suffolk bottle, told to its honest end
Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), collected by Joseph Glanvill and published after his death, gathers reports of witchcraft sent in by correspondents. One of them, from Suffolk, is the story most often retold about witch bottles.
A woman of the house was ill. An old man advised her husband to take her water, put it in a bottle with pins, needles and nails, cork it and set it on the fire. The first bottle burst in the heat and the attempt came to nothing. On the old man's advice the next one was buried in the ground instead, and the report says the woman got better.
That is what the record says. It is not proof of anything, and the book it sits in is full of named neighbors under suspicion, many of them poor, several of them women who healed for their village. The bottle in these pages is a weapon pointed at a person. The people in those reports were people. That part stays in the record, and it is the reason the version below takes nothing from anyone and names no one.
Five dates in the life of the witch bottle
The jug itself
Bartmann jugs, salt-glazed stoneware with a bearded face, are common kitchen ware in England. The Greenwich bottle is one of them.
Blagrave prints the method
Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick: urine, nails, pins and needles, corked tight, then the fire or the ground.
Glanvill prints the Suffolk report
Saducismus Triumphatus: the first bottle bursts in the fire, the second is buried, and suspicion falls on a neighbor.
Morrison on the Hadleigh bottles
Arthur Morrison, "A Wizard of Yesterday", The Strand, October 1900, on James Murrell of Hadleigh in Essex and his bottles that burst in the fire.
The Greenwich jug, still sealed
Found in the Thames foreshore mud with its cork in place. The analysis by Alan Massey is reported in British Archaeology in 2009.
What is old here, what is adapted, and what is modern
Most of what gets posted as a witch bottle online is a mix of three different things. Separating them is the whole job.
- Old. A sealed container of sharp iron and something of the household, hidden under a hearth, a threshold or a floor, made when a household believed it had been harmed. Blagrave 1671, Glanvill 1681, and the Greenwich jug itself.
- Old pattern, adapted. The jar below. The shape is the old one, a sealed container of iron kept out of sight in the house. What changed: no urine, no hair, no nail parings, nobody suspected and nobody named, nothing on the fire, and a cupboard instead of a hearth floor, because most of us cannot lift one.
- Modern. Layers of colored salt, crystals, assigned herb correspondences, written intentions, charging under the moon. None of that is in the seventeenth century sources. It is allowed, it is just ours, and it should be said out loud rather than sold as old.
Labeling every working this way is how The Practical Grimoire of Protection handles the old guards for the door, the hearth, the bed and the road: the source, the year, and an honest line between what the book records and what we changed for a house today.
A house jar for today, step by step
What you need, all of it kitchen and workbench things: a small glass jar with a screw lid or a cork, a handful of iron nails, pins or tacks, a sprig of rosemary, a spoon of salt. The rosemary and salt are our choice, not the old recipe. If you have no iron, a few steel pins or an old key will do.
- Wash the jar and dry it completely. Work on a table, not near the stove.
- Put the iron in first. Nails, pins, tacks, points pointing inward, enough to cover the bottom.
- Add the sprig of rosemary and the spoon of salt.
- Say what the jar is for, in your own plain words, about your home and the people in it. Name no one else. Nothing in this jar is aimed at a person.
- Close it cold. Screw the lid on or push the cork in. No wax, no flame, no heat at any point.
- Put it out of sight and out of reach: the back of a cupboard, behind the books on a high shelf, under the sink, or pressed into the soil of a heavy planter by the door.
- Write the date and what you used in your own book, so a year from now you know what it is.
That is the whole working, and it looks like nothing. A jar at the back of a cupboard reads as a jar at the back of a cupboard.
Fire and pets: the part the old books learned the hard way
Never heat, boil or bury near heat a sealed container. The pressure has nowhere to go. Glanvill's Suffolk report already has one bottle bursting in the fire, and Arthur Morrison, writing in The Strand in October 1900 about James Murrell, the cunning man of Hadleigh in Essex, describes bottles that burst in the hearth with real force, and iron ones made by a blacksmith so they would not. Glass in a modern kitchen behaves the same way. Keep the jar cold, keep it off the stove, keep it away from a radiator.
Keep it where paws cannot reach. A knocked jar means broken glass and loose pins on the floor. Rosemary is on the ASPCA non-toxic list for cats and dogs; holly, ivy, bay, garlic, yarrow and St John's wort are not, so leave those out of a jar that lives in a house with animals.
If you want a light beside it, use a candle standing in a jar, on a plate, never unattended, never beside dried herbs. An LED tealight is fine and the old books would not have minded.
The safety notes sit inside the workings themselves in the complete Practical Grimoire series, on the page where the fire or the plant actually turns up, rather than in a warning at the front nobody reads twice.
