Intact Witch Bottle Discovered

Here's an interesting magical relic from the seventeenth century - an intact "witch bottle" recently found in Greenwich, England.

During the 17th century in England, someone urinated in a jar, added nail clippings, hair and pins, and buried it upside-down in Greenwich, where it was recently unearthed and identified by scientists as being the world's most complete known "witch bottle."

This spell device, often meant to attract and trap negative energy, was particularly common from the 16th to the 17th centuries, so the discovery provides a unique insight into witchcraft beliefs of that period, according to a report published in the latest British Archaeology.

As I understand it, the idea behind the witch bottle is that the urine, hair, and fingernail clippings formed a magical link to whoever the bottle was made for and the pins served to attract and trap magical energy. If a malicious magician were able to obtain a lock of hair, for example, the morphic resonance would be stronger between two locks of hair than it would be between the lock of hair and the person it was taken from. The energy of any spell cast on the stolen lock of hair would therefore wind up in the bottle. The same would be true for urine and fingernail clippings.

You could counter such a bottle by using a photograph or some sort of other magical link not included in the bottle, such as blood, but seeing as photographs didn't exist in the 17th Century and by the time you were in a position to extract someone's blood you could probably just kill them on the spot, it sounds to me like it would have worked often enough to be useful. Instructions for making these bottles have been available for years, but this find is important because it demonstrates that they really were constructed as described.

Origin: my-spiritual-path.blogspot.com