Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. My regular co host Joe is out on parental leave. But today I'm going to be chatting with independent researcher into the archaeology of folk magic, Brian Hoggart. He's the author of the excellent book Magical House Protection The Archaeology of counter Witchcraft, which I highly recommend. So without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Brian, thanks for coming on the show. So much of your work, and certainly your twenty nineteen book, Magical House Protections, revolves around the archaeology of counter witchcraft artifacts secreted uh in many cases within historic homes. So before we get into the varieties and the particulars, what parts of the world and what time periods are we predominantly dealing with here, Well, it's actually worldwide, and I think it's been going on forever, to be honest with you, because humans seem to innately believe in the power of some kind of supernatural evil and they fear it wherever they exist, whether it's sort of tribal society, is all up to sort of quite sophisticated societies, and so it's been happening for as long as humans have been around. I think I want to come back to specifics in detail later, but but what generally, what sorts of objects are we talking about and where do we tend to find them positioned in? Okay, so I normally work with Western Europe, but also receive reports of objects from much further afield as well. And you know, within the home, we're talking mainly about hearts and thresholds. So wherever there's a fireplace or a chimney, that tends to be the aime point of focus for a lot of this a lot of these objects and practices. Um. And that's because the chimney is always open to the sky because it kind of has to be, and so it's also the most vulnerable point in the building for that reason, so at night people fear things coming down the chimney and also thresholds. So windows and doors obviously are also points where the house could kind of leak essentially, and they would often be protected. And yeah, but literally any boundary point within a house, any precious object or precious person or precious artifact, can you know you can find that people have gone to some efforts to protect them. I hadn't connected the darts and this stil just now about mentioning the hearth as being an entry point. I guess we see this reflected at least distantly in traditions of Santa Claus entering a home through the hearth. Yeah. Absolutely, um in indeed, that goes even further than that, really, because yeah, it is the idea of some energy coming down the chimney. But but one of the types of objects that we often find in homes is concealed shoes. And obviously at Christmas you you hanging stocking by the by the mantelpiece, which is a similar kind of thing. So you're kind of trying to trap some good energy instead of some bad energy. Now, early in the book, you do a tremendous and uh and seasonally appropriate, I think job of describing what the experience of church may have been like, Especially to a pre Reformation English commoner. It sounds incredibly spooky and and really and really not at all that comforting. I was wondering if you might sort of summarize just a little bit of the energy here. YEA, So when in the medieval Britain, when churches were still essentially Catholic before the Protestant Reformation, um church rituals were usually conducted in Latin, so most commoners or most parishioners wouldn't necessarily understand the language that was being spoken. And in fact, it's quite widely assested that a lot of priests didn't understand the words of the Latin rituals either. Then they learned a lot of them by rote, so they just they knew the sounds, they knew how to emulate a Latin ritual rather than perform one. And those rituals would take place behind a screen which was called the rude screen, which is basically a wooden screen that's been pierced in a decorative manner so you could see behind, you can see through it, but not really clearly, a little bit gauzy and um. And there would also be incense being burned as well, and candle light, so you've got a sort of spooky language that you don't understand Latin conducted in a kind of foggy, candlelit misty environment, which is quite spooky, as you say. And on top of the rude screen, which was called a rude screen, because it would have the rude on top of it, which is the image of Christ that judgment day quite foreboding. And of course a medieval church would often be decorated with art, sometimes relating to the devil, sometimes relating to saints, So they all kinds of supernatural imagery all around you, as well as the candle lighte the incense, the slightly opaque view of the ritual. Yeah, it's it's really quite a magical environment, and I think that that's how a lot of people felt about it. Yeah. You mentioned in this section that, for instance, one might not have like a clear idea of how the figure of Jesus factors into everything, which of course is very easy to take for granted today, especially with among modern Christians and people in Western society. But it's the idea here that you would have sort of the vague structure of the Christian religion, and then just the common individual is then having to sort of fill in the gaps with other supernatural ideas. Yeah, to an extent, I think it would vary quite a lot depending on how literate someone was or wasn't, and how inquiring mind was as to whether they were actually asking their priests the answer to any of these questions or not. But yeah, I think there's sort of overarching feeling that a God exists, and they would hear about Jesus, and they would hear about Mary, etcetera, but they wouldn't necessarily know what their relationship was. So I'm sure I've read an account before where was someone was asked, you know, do you know who God and Jesus are? And they would think that isn't Jesus, God's uncle, And they would be really unclear about the familiar relationships that that we might now think exists between them. So how does the Reformation change this scenario? Well, technically it's the reformations because there was like several attempts to kind of move it along. But yeah, essentially it was about trying to dispel some of the superstitions that might have aggregated around belief in God and Jesus over the years. I think there was about a thousand years worth of people sort of augmenting what was going on in churches with their own ideas, and the Reformation were supposed to be about stripping all that away and getting back to the actual text of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, not the Old Testament, and trying to worship Jesus principally um, and also God that you know, with the whole Trinity, the Holy Ghost, and pretty much getting rid of Mary um, and getting rid of all the saints and all these other things that have kind of grown in importance over the thousand or tho years before. So how does the period of witchcraft persecution factor into all of this, um, Because I'm to understanding that much of this takes place in post medieval times, no matter how much we might want to shove it back into prior centuries. That's a that's an interesting one because I think that belief in witchcraft and beliefs about witchcraft actually didn't really change very much during the period of witchcraft persecution. There were some new ones brought in, but essentially the core beliefs about witchcraft were essentially the same, in my opinion, They just became magnified. And that was partly through the popularity of new pamphlets and literature and the printing press, you know, the advent of the printing press um, and partly through I guess um in a way, I think the stripping away of some of the superstitious aspects or the saintly aspects as well, you know, where you could appeal for help as particular saints, and all of that being stripped away post Reformation, I think meant that people had a bit more of a need to address supernatural feelings in their lives almost, And I think it's possible that witchcraft beliefs and worry about it, we're almost they sort of came into the vacuum, if you like, created by the absence of a lot of the things that people used to do pre Reformation. Um, that's a fairly contentious argument. It's not that simple. You know. It's probably more to do with the printing press than anything else. And the fact that sort of very salacious and exciting story reads about witches and devils were being circulated in pamphlet form and then literate people, people who could read with then uh, you know, regurgitate these two people who couldn't and in this kind of heightened awareness of the fact that there could be more danger around than there was before concerning witchcraft. So you discuss some of this in the book as being like the elite understanding of witchcraft, and I guess ultimately demonology right, that's that's again coming down through printed material. And then is it kind of like bumping heads and then meshing with ideas that would have been more commonly held among more common and and and less literate people. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of, Um, we get we get this kind of very much. History gives this more of a top down look at what went on, whereas archaology tends us to give us a bottom up kind of look at what went on. And and really, other than Ralph Merrifield before before me Um and some of his colleagues have been doing work but not published. Um, there wasn't really an awful lot of people looking at witchcraft from the archaeology angle. So it's all we've ever seen really is from the history side, top down, and I think an awful lot has been neglected or missed for that reason. And so you know, these ideas like like for example, I'm talking about concealed shoes. Again, some of our earliest examples of that from the fourteenth century, but we've also got examples of it from the nineteen seventies, you know, and so so it's been a it's been a complete continuum, you know, the which the period of the Witch Trials, as people think of it, came and went, but this practice has steadily been carrying on the whole time. You know. It's you know, you can say that it had a period of magnification during the witch Trials, Yeah, but it's hasn't gone away and it didn't leave, you know, and it's um, it's always been there. So the common people, if you like, the sort of illiterate people, maybe continue doing what they were doing. And then they started to hear about these apparently new dangers or more powerful witches, or that there was some kind of panic going on, and it just raised everybody's fears. So there was always some fear. You know, there was general fear of the dark, general fear of the supernatural, especially particularly about around sleep, you know, because how could you protect your house when you're asleep. So that's one of the big worries that people had. But but you know, during the period of the some people call it the witch craze. I don't really like that term, but you know, the kind of excitement about which is obviously fear was heightened, so people did more things to try and keep them away. And that's when you know, for example, witch bottles were a direct, in my opinion, a direct response to to the witch trials, to the period of heightened fear. But but the rest that all the other things seemed to have just become magnified, if you're like more important during that time. But they've always been there. Now you've you've mentioned which Bible, so that this might be a good time to to to ask what is a witch bottle? What would it contain? And where were they found? Okay, so witch bottles were there's a there's an awful lot of detail here. They were essentially German stoneware bottles, which in Germany were known as Bartman's stoneware, nothing to do with the Simpsons. And basically Germans had this the ability to make stoneware, which is this non porous, really hard bottle, which in Britain we couldn't make. We only had an earthenware. So so basically when we found out about stoneware, we wanted these bottles, and so they were shipped over by hundreds of thousands, usually filled with beer or wine, and that beer or wine would be consumed, then the bottle will be cast away. But the thing is, because these bottles were so good that often be reused again and again and again. But the significant thing about them is that they have a really evil looking mask of a man on it, so they look quite anthropomorphic. So these bottles are the salt glaze which gives some a kind of leathery skin like appearance. Then they have this beastly looking face on the neck, and then they have a big ground belly which often has a kind of armorial shield on it, which sometimes looks a little bit occult or a little bit kind of a spooky and sometimes as well they're quite sort of petal like, quite flower like, which is which resembles another one of the marks that often crop up in this area of study as well. And so for that reason, you know, if you were going to do anything magical, you would want to use this bottle because it looks anthropomorphic. It's quite spooky looking bottle. You couldn't imagine a better bottle for doing magic with. Put it that way if you want, if you're seeing at home and you wanted to do something, so anyway, these bottles we quite often find them underneath the floor, sometimes up to a meter deep, underneath them flags there in front of a hearth, or directly underneath half sometimes integrated into an ingle nook into the wall, and they're often upside down in the ground. We're not entirely sure why the upside down thing happens. But inside the boss ors this is when we x ray them, they often show evidence of lots of pins and nails that have a created or aggregated and coagulated around the neck, whether whether the gravity has just taking them down towards the neck. And then when we open them and have a look inside, they've often got some liquid, a big lock of hair, sometimes of thorns or other pins. Importantly, the pins and nails which are found inside are usually deliberately bent as well. And when I say deliberately, we have assessed the angle of the bend, and it seems like in many cases these nails and pins all been bent around the same iron pole. So someone's deliberately sat there and gone around lots of pins and nails before adding them into the bottle. So there's clearly an element of sort of ritual or like a quite a lot of effort goes into putting it together, and then of course you have to dig this really deep hole to to put it down there. And so essentially what we've got is an anthropomorphic bottle, so it looks like a human and inside it we have the liquid, it turns out through analysis is human urine, and so we've got a humans urine in there. We often also have nail clippings, nail pairings in there, a big lock of hair, and then all these pins and nails that have been deliberately and meticulously bent before being added into the bottle, which has then been sealed with a bung or a cork and then buried upside down under the earth, covered over and a big flagstone put on top of it. So it's quite an effort, isn't it Quite a lot of effort, right, And what what what I think is happening here is that because of all of these bottles are found by the hearth, or in the immediate vicinity of the hearth, so that we again we've got this focus on the hearth. And so the idea is, if something bad like a spell or an energy or maybe a demon or something like that is potentially traveling down your chimney trying to attack you, it's plunging down the chimney trying to find you, it detects this human like figure that smells like you. It's got your hair and it, it's got your finger nail clippings in it, it's got your urine in it, and it dives down to attack you. And when it gets inside the bottle, it then gets impaled on all these dead pins, which you've deliberately killed one by one before putting them into the bottles. So there's kind of like the ghosts of pins there to work against the ghosts that's trying to attack you. And so there are some some bits of folklore that suggests that spirits and which is aren't very good at traveling backwards, so once they get into a spot, they find it difficult to get out. So maybe there's an element of that like a kind of trap as well. So like a trap slash impaling people, you know, a decoy that has a trap within it. That seems to be what's going on, but confusingly there is there are some texts that relate that talk about witch bottles that describe something different, right, So there are several texts in the late seventeenth century that talk about this idea of boiling a witch bottle that if you think you're being bewitched or if you know someone who's been bewitched. You can take a bottle and you can get them to urinate into it, and you can add some and nails to it and boil it on a fire. You've got to bug it up and boil it on a fire. And the idea is that this will that the bottle will act as kind of a substitute bladder for the you know, and by boiling it, you're causing pain to the witch. Because they had this belief that if you're bomber witched, there's something of the essence of the witch inside you as well. So so if you then urinate into this bottle and do something to it, it's going to have an effect on the witch. And so the the thinking is in these texts um that excruciating pain is course to the witch, who will then come seeking you out and will come knocking on your door begging for you to stop boiling the bottle, and in return you can barter your freedom from the spell, whatever spell has been put on you. And generally speaking, it says that if that fails, you should then bury the bottle. So that's interesting, but it's different to what we find in the buried bottles. Okay, so the buried bottles obviously have hair, which isn't meant and in any of these texts. The texts also don't mention bending the pins to kill them if you like, you know. So what we've got is two separate ways of working that are thought to be behind these two practices. The boiling things seems to be depending on the idea that you can cause pain to the witch is bladder by sort of acting upon a substance that might be infused partly with the witch, whereas the ones that are buried seemed to be acting as a decoy in a trap. And I think that that practice, the one where the bottles are buried, actually resembles and has a lot in common with other practices like shoes and like some of the marks and all sorts, whereas the one with the boiling seems to be well. One of my friends who was studying that called dr Annie Swaite. She was studying it for a long time, and she called it the urinary experiment and saw it as a kind of pseudo medical practice that people at the time thought that supernatural energies were real, and that this was a way of potentially removing them from someone you know, they were sort of using medical theory, if you like, to try and remove the presence of a witch, whereas the one where you bury them seems to have more in common with folk practices that are going on for a very long time. So I'm not sure, you know, they certainly both use the same type of bottle. They both emerge about the same time, which is the third quarter of the seventeenth century or there about, um, but two separate practices. And I wonder if you know that you have the written one that's more about medicine and science, and you have the the other one that buried one that's like more going with the the real old school kind of folk magic to how how do you get rid of a witch? Yeah, it's just just so so amazing and and and so like very roughly speaking, like what what sort of numbers are we talking about in terms of surviving witch bottles that have been recovered since I last started counting? I mean, I think when I published there was about a hundred and thirty odd Bella means, which is the German German type ones, and there was probably another eighty or ninety of glass ones that I had on the file, and I wouldn't be surprised if the German stoneware ones was easily an access of two hundred by out with the amount of reports. But but you have to bear in mind that these things are only ever found when someone demolishes an old building or excavates under an old building. So there's probably a vast amount more that have been discovered that just weren't reported. Because these bottles are actually quite valuable, so you know, you can sell you can sell one that wasn't used as a witch bottle for potentially four or five dred pounds on an eBay, and if it was used as a witch bottle, I've seen people selling them for up to fifteen hundred pounds, so you know, so, yeah, they're reasonably valuable when it comes to the black market. So I think a lot of builders and homeowners when they find these they're they're curious, but they also see an opportunity for making a bit of money. And and so we don't know exactly how many there were, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were maybe fifty times more common than my figures suggest, No, maybe even more than that. Yeah, thank now we've twice mentioned shoes so if you, if you would explain how to shoes factor in office, because on one hand, we have the witch bottle here, which you know, once once explained, has all of these obvious occult and supernatural aspects to it. But but but shoes, So we we take for granted any number of us just have shoes probably piled towards the front of our house, and we don't attach any any kind of special importance to them, that's right, And that's because we have an amazing factory production system that makes them cheap and easy to buy. But once upon a time they were you know, artisan made things. And of course we do actually still have a culture of the professional artisan shoemaker still exists, and there's still people who care about the history of shoes and and still make very expensive made shoes. But of course, once upon a time that was the only kind of shoe you could get would be a handmade shoe, and they were quite expensive, and so they were repaired and repaired and repaired until you eventually could wouldn't you couldn't use them anymore, basically, so they were quite valuable in more ways than you can imagine now. But but yeah, they are that probably The most common object that's found in buildings is concealed shoes. They're usually concealed on their own. It's usually just one shoe. In the old days, shoes weren't made to fit a left foot and the right foot. They were just the same, and they would take the shape of the wearer's feet gradually over time. But these ones that we find, they are as I say, they're almost always an odd shoe. I think there's slightly less than ten percent I found as pairs, and they're almost always extremely well worn, because who would get rid of a brand new shoe with them being so expensive, like like I said before, And also they then wouldn't be able to if they hadn't taken the shape of the wearer's foot, they couldn't perform the function which I give which I suggest that they have, which is and not just me, other people too, but that they act as a kind of decoy, a bit like we were talking about with the witch bottle, that it's got some hair and some urine in it, so it kind of fools any evil energies that are looking for you into thinking that you're there. Um, it's the same idea with shoes that an evil entity or a spell or something negative trying to get into your house. It's seeking you to cause you harm. And it finds your shoe, which might have been on your foot for many years and has taken every you know, it's uniquely or shoe it wouldn't have anywhere anyone else. Coincidentally, this is also where the Cinderella myth comes from, you know, the fact that she has become a unique thing to someone's foot. And and yeah, so it's so it then plunges down to attack the shoe as a decoy in it, and it attacks it instead of you. So it's essentially acting as a kind of lightning conductor. It's drawing negative energy away from you, which is great, isn't it. And the idea that it's kind of trap, trapping the energy inside it. Now, the idea that the shoe can act as a trap is weird, okay, but there is some kind of historical evidence for it. So there was a fourteenth century priest from England, from a little village called North Marston in Buckinghamshire, and he was when I say he was an unofficial saint, I mean he was never ever canonized by the Catholic Church. So people regarded him as a saint even though he wasn't actually one, and he has reputed to have cast the devil into a boot, which is a remarkable thing to do, as I'm sure you can imagine. But the interesting thing about John Shawan is that, even though he wasn't officially a saint, pilgrimages to his shrine. For a period of about two hundred and fifty years, was the second most popular shrine in Britain, and second only to Thomas A. Beckett at Canterbury Cathedral. In fact, he was so popular that the monarchy in Britain stole his relics from the Church of North Marston and moved them to Windsor so that they could benefit from the money that the pilgrims brought to come and visit his shrine, and then those remains and relics of them been returned to Northomaston when his popularity waned. But the interesting thing is that the little pilgrim badges that people would pick up when they went to visit his shrine, all of them showing him holding a big boot with a little devil poking out of the top. And and we're talking hundreds of thousands of people, maybe even millions of people would have had a badge that showed a devil trapped in a boot. Yeah, and not just that, but an awful lot of churches had imagery obviously to do with all of the saints. He was an incredibly popular saint, and so many many churches would have had an image of john Shaw and holding a boot with a devil trapped in it. Um. So from the fourteenth century onwards, this was a really popular idea that you could trap a devil in a boot, and and and funny enough that some of our earliest examples come from that time. So back to the shoes themselves, As I say, sometimes you find them singly, sometimes you find find them in large groups. Sometimes you'll find they'll be a void in a house just through through some sort of quirk of instruction that people can drop a shoe down. And for example that plow sitting born in Kent, there was over a hundred shoes I believe collected from that building from four different deposition points, and those shoes have been dropped into those voids over generations. So subsequent owners of the building all carried on the same practice of putting old one shoes down the same holes and you end up with this record of footwear over over the ages, as well as evidence of people's desire to draw evil away from the people in the house. Now, what about dried cats, wide dried cats? Oh, the poor little cats. I love cats, So I would never do this to a cat, and I would never advocate anyone ever does this to a cat. This is a tradition from the past. We don't do it these days. So please don't go hiding cats in your houses people. But but yeah, it's it's really really common throughout the whole of Europe and Britain and Australia actually, and the USA, so we have examples from from all over. There's also an example that I have on record from Canada, but I don't have so many records from Canada. I've also got a record from Chili actually, So it's a very, very widespread and it seems to be. Earlier on I mentioned about people having been very concerned with who was or how was the house being protected while they slept, and so there's an element of this going on with cats. Because there semi nocturnal, they are quite mysterious in their behavior in certainly in British Isles, there was a belief about the which is familiar that was often focused on cats as well. So it's that kind of leans towards how mysteriously people thought about them. But yeah, essentially they're benevolent little creatures that are in our lives. They helped control pests and but also we must also consider the fact that they breed like wildfire if they're not new to it in spade as we do in the modern world. Um So, basically, there were too many cats, and they were semi nocturnal, generally helpful, and so people started to they fell naturally into a helpful role essentially, So a lot of these practices. One of the things you'll find in common with them is that people were thinking about how do we how do we affect something that's happening on the supernatural plane as it were. Okay, so most people weren't able to be supernatural. They weren't, which is all wizards, But there were these things happening to them that were coming from the supernatural plane, or they believed were happening to them from the supernatural plane, and so they had to find ways of affecting it, and they had to find special little recipes and special little practices that would have an impact on those things. So, for example, these old shoes that are no longer worth using, no longer longer worth keeping on your foot, are essentially dead shoes. So they've died, they've flipped over to the other side, so they're now effective against the other side, against the supernatural realm. If you're like and then with the witch bottles, you know, you've got a big lock of hair removed from your hair or nail pairings clipped off. These are parts of you that we're attached to you and we're considered to be alive, which are now dead because you're and so they're now on the other side, acting as a kind of allure or bait on the other side. And then the same thing with these nails. And then we come to the point where, in that way of thinking, here's a cat that's alive but friendly and can control pests. If we make it dead, if we flip it into the other side, we can hope that it continues that role on that side as a presence in the house. And so what I think is going on is that these cats are being essentially kind of sacrificed if you like, to the house to act as little protectors of the house while you sleep, because they're awake while you're asleep, and they're catching vermin and they're looking out for things that might come in that might harm you, like, you know, instead of pests, you know, exchange the word pests for spells, you know, and they' itt of energies coming in, you know. And I think that's what people were doing. And there's also there's a little bit of I see. I think that the idea that I've just expressed you is probably the main one. But people have often thought about where the cats were killed as a foundation sacrifice, that you give a life to the house so that it went then take a life later by falling down on you. And I once had a very brief discussion with Terry Pratchett about dried cats, and that was that was his idea, was that he thought that was what was going on. Um. But I think it's more to do with this, um, you know, the role of a cat in death. I think it's more to do with what I said to you earlier about how, you know, you take some of the qualities of the cat and by essentially killing it but keeping it within the house. You've hopefully got a helper within your house who's going to even why would it want to help you if you've just taken its life, right, But I think that that was thinking that was going on there. And we find them in all sorts of places find them, Like the first one I ever came a cus was actually in a village I used to live in, which is weird because I've moved away. And then the first report that came through my website was of just a few streets away from where I used to live, and a dried cat was found but sandwiched in between some layers of thatch in a house. There was basically a sixteenth century cottage, but they think that the cat dates from a hundred years later. Yeah, and it was squashed quite flat, you know, the way, quite serious pressure have been put on it. There's no way it could have got there by itself. It had been placed there quite deliberately. And but yeah, we find others that are sometimes strapped to floor joists, you know, they literally could not have got their by accident. And there were others that I found, not not mere personally, but there was another one found sandwich between titles and plaster in the roof of a church clearly had been placed there by the builders. You know. That's another thing we're thinking about. Some of these some of these methods and practices were put there by the builders, and some were put there by the homeowners. So we sometimes, you know, when we're looking at an old I was looking at all the fines to get from an old house, which tried to discern, you know, which of them were put there by the builders and which were added later. So was there generally an idea that the builders were sort of on the side of the house and on the side of the occupants. Because I'm I'm reminded of something I was reading about in in Chinese traditions. I believe this was from a book by Philip A. kN about the Chinese Sorcery Scare of seventeen sixty eight, And in this one, a lot of it had to do with with written magical protections that were used during a during a home's construction to protect against potential curses leveled by the actual laborers against like the the owners or future occupants of the house. That's that's that's an interesting one. I quite you consern me that reference later, I'm gonna read that one. But yeah, but yeah, I think that generally speaking in England for sure, because as far And tends to know the most about it. But in England it seems like it was an additional service that the builders could provide. Look it off that So, say you got two builders and you're trying to assess which ones do you want to pay to give them a contract to build your house. You know, one of them has clear expertise in marking the timbers in such a way that it will actors and you know that it will repel evil just through the timbers that have been put up there, you know. And so you're going to You're going to go with the builders that can help protect you in a supernatural way slightly more than you would another company that wasn't so good at doing that. Um. Yeah, So it's a it's another service that some builders offered, and but it's a bit more nuanced than that, because I think that you know, you might have somebody who is the principal builder might employ a cockplenter and a stonemason, and they might both have individual practices that they could do, and whether they would do them on that project or might depend on whether they liked you or not, or you know, how skilled they were in that in that field. So there's quite a few different, you know, elements at play here. I wouldn't say it's necessarily as simple as one builder would give you the all round service. You know, they give you their cat the marks that hell, this kind of stuff. And I think some of these practices were a direct response to people feeling that they've been bewitched as well, so that would have definitely come after the building have been put up. But there were certain things that certain marks in particular, and you know, I do I do think that builders leave shoes, for example, and sometimes they include glass bottles, sometimes empty ones in buildings as well as part of you in addition to some of the other mason's kind of traditions like the topping out ceremonies and things like that. But in terms of specific counter witchcraft, there was quite a few things builders and their trains people can do. Thank thank Now this is too big of a question, we can we can skip this one. But I was also fascinated by the whole topic of horse calls being included in foundations and in floors, because on one hand, it makes sense that it would line up with some of the things we've already talked about here, like the horses as an important animal and having an important role and for for for the humans that are doing this. But then there's this whole potential acoustic angle, right, Yeah, it's I've been grappling with the whole notion of horse skulls and the different theories that play for quite some time. I don't think I haven't quite finished thinking about it all yet, but but I think I've got more answers than I had before. Um So, when we were talking about cats earlier being nocturnal and people worried about who was looking after their house and they were asleep, I think that the horses play a role in that. And it's at me awhile to realize this, but basically, horses can or that they don't always choose to. They can sleep standing up and with their eyes open, so they can be there in a sleep state but look like they're awake, you know, and they're and they are basically in a shallow sleep. They're ready, ready for action and ready to be alert for the benefit of the other horses that they are with who might just be um, literally falling asleep on their back with their hoofs in the air. You know, some of them are like that, but there there'll be one or two of them that can be awaken this kind of light sleep with their eyes open. And I think that people knew that. So this idea of horses as incredibly vigilant creatures was I think part of what's going on. And then we also have the fact that if you take a horse's head and you d flesh it, to use a horrible word, U a d fleshed horse skull is a really dramatic looking thing. Presume you've the big tradition of using horses in the States. Obviously, I presume you're seene a horse skull. You know they are. They're they're quite quite impressive looking beasts. And I think that when when they're in that state, you know, when it's just a horse skull, they seems to have almost a supernatural power out them. Um, you know, they take on a different persona. It's not like, you know, a dead cat is a dead cat, you know, whereas a horse skull as opposed to a living horse, is a kind of supernatural thing. It looks different and it's regarded differently, I think as well. And then some of the ideas that play in counter witchcraft are about basically being scarier than something else. So you know, so if you've got something that's really scary, a lesser scary thing might be scared away by it, you know, like there's um there's one tradition, for example, with rug working that I've heard about where certain rugs that are put in front of the fire would often have a red diamond pattern on them also like just a red diamond in the middle or in the corners or something. And some of the folklore around this is that a devil poking his head down the chimney would poke his head down the chimney and think, oh my goodness, there's already a devil in the house. I won't go interfering with this, and would go scar forget the other way it's going to find a house that doesn't have a devil in it, because the men just meant to represent this devil's eye. And I think in a way this idea with the horse skull is that they are particularly frightening and quite large, so they could actually intimidate and frighten away, um, other things. And I think that the sort of proof of that is that horse skulls are used in some of these folk dance traditions which appears to be about scaring away spirits like the mary Lewd and you know the certain other ones that like the abbios and what's the other one called the hood and horse as well. You know, these kind of dances and rituals that have these kind of horselike figures that go dancing around and convorting around the countryside. And you know, with with the mary leud for example, there's there's also a custom in that of sweeping the hearth and cleaning the hearth away with this figure that's a horse skull and a big cape, and and that again seems to sort of tune in with this idea of protecting the hearth as well. Um. So yeah, I think that the horse skulls, you know, and on top of that, there's all this ancient myth about horses as well, you know, and the idea that horses were thought to literally tow the sun up, you know, you know, at sunrise, and and chariots of the gods almost you know, and and they were also the way that people access to the underworld sometimes as well as they you know, you would ride your horse to Valhalla or it would take you to the underworld. There's all these really old ideas about horses as um supernatural beings that had access to other worlds. Almost yeah, at the same time, therefore this really multi sort of sort of multi functional role almost on a mythic level in human life, you know. And but ultimately, when we're talking about the period, this period of the Witch Trials, if if you want to look at that period, for example, we're talking about animals that are broadly benevolent to humans. You know, we don't see them simply as eating animals, you know, although they were eating and still are in some countries. But yeah, they were you know, kind of a benevolent role in our lives. But also this kind of incredible vigilance about them, and also there's kind of fierce some aspect to them when they are in the shape of a horse skull. And in my book, I do site one example from I think it's eighteen where this is actually reported in a really good book about folklore in Cambridge, where this building company we're essentially laying the foundations for a new chapel in Cambridgeshire, and they sent the builder's lad off to get a horse's head from the knacker's yard because they had a very strong tradition of placing a horse's head in the base of the foundations, which at first you think this is a foundation sacrifice, but it's not that simple, because after they've poured some beer over it, and they've all shoveled various bits of stonework and everything and earth over the top of it, they then said that they were they were doing this quite clearly to ward off evil and witchcraft, you know, So it's not it's not as simple as thinking foundation sacrifice appeasing local spirits. They very clearly believe this was for warding off evil and witchcraft. This idea of including a horse's head in the base of a foundation trench in which you know, is well into the industrial era. And and we know that there are many examples of horse skulls and horse bones found underneath nonconformist chapels throughout all of Whales and probably much of much of England as well. UM, and these many of these chapels were built well into the nineteen forties, you know, Um, and yet we also know that horse skulls were concealed under under dwellings in the fifteenth century because we've got archaeological records of them. Yeah, and that's the whole idea of horse skulls being concealed instead of the whole horse. I'm not sure exactly when that happened, you know, because the Viking has used to conceal whole horses, or not conceal them but bury them and have lots of rituals to do with them. But at some point between that period and the fifteenth century it became much more about the horse's head or the horse's skull. But I'm not sure exactly when. It's fascinating and confusing, No, no, now is there is there also an idea that there might have been an acoustic benefit in some of these cases to having the horse skull under there. I'm glad you brought me back to that because I clearly wandered away from that topic. But yeah, so there there is this idea that somehow horses act as natural amplifiers or acoustic enhancers in buildings. So when people first started looking at the practice of concealed horse skulls, and particularly in Ireland actually papered by Shawn O'Sullivan. I think it was in nine um, but the references in my book if I got that wrong. But yeah, he was asking, you know what, what was the reason for them conceiving these horse skulls underneath them stones in front of the hearth in many of these cottages. And the answer he got from any of these people was that it made the dancing sound better in the evening, you know, so when they were gathered together in the evening around the fire and they were doing some Irish dancing, it sounded an isa by having a horse skull underneath the stone. And then similarly in England when they found twenty four horse skulls beneath the floor of the ports way in in Herfordshire, which is in Staunton on why this village um, they said it made the fiddle go better, made the fiddles sound better. And then in Sweden, for example, when Albert Sandcleff was researching horse skulls beneath barnes threshing barns in Sweden, you know, he came to the conclusion mostly through what people told him, that it made the flails sound better when they were threshing wheat and uh, but you know, I find it. I struggle with it a little bit because you know, I'm when I'm not doing this kind of research, I am also a musician. I've been playing guitar for over thirty years. I think I'm quite good at it. And actually, but but yeah, I have a horse skull on top of the bookshelf behind my head right now. And I also played guitar in this room quite a lot. And I've so and you not noticed any kind of ringing or pleasant harmonious sound because of it. Um. It may be that I need to attach the horse skull to a floorboard with a big screw in order to to notice any benefit. Um, I haven't yet tested that. Let's let's just say that I'm dubious about the acoustic benefits of horse skulls, especially because i'd say about the examples I am aware of in locations where a lot of the sound that they could produce is absorbed by the earth that they're setting, or they're in a part of the building that wouldn't you know, sound wouldn't reach that part of the building, you know, So you know, um, so I'm a little bit dubious about that. And I think that a lot of the reasons why people gave this explanation is because it was a way of saying that you weren't doing something heretical or superstitious. You know, if you said, you're you know, you're walking down the street with a pair of horse skulls under each arm, and the local vicar comes up to you and said, what on earth are you doing? Oh, it's to improve the acoustics when we're dancing in the evening. Of course it is, you know, um, and I would say that probably a big clay bowl or something would be better at it. I mean, maybe it's more expensive. Obviously we used to have. You know, our transport culture was completely dominated by the horse for centuries, so there was an awful lot of available horse skulls, you know. They maybe this was a use people found for them, and maybe people really believe that there was Maybe there is some marginal acoustic benefit that I'm not aware of, but but yeah, I personally I think that it be that explanation began as an excuse for why someone is walking around with a horse skull trying to dig a hole into their house, rather than because they thought I desperately need to improve the acoustics in my house, and a horse skull must be the way I do that. Now, if we mentioned already these artifacts tend to emerge during cases of demolition or renovation, digging up the ground beneath the old dwellings and on buildings, it's etcetera. And you also mentioned like the black market and so forth. What what is the appropriate court of action? Uh, you would recommend if anyone out there is engaged in construction, renovation, demolition, etcetera, if they find something that that that could conceivably be part of one of these traditions, what what should they do? The perfect thing to do is, first of all, as soon as you see something emerge from the ground or emerge from a wall, it's just pause and take loads of photographs from every angle, just sort of really really record it as well as you can maybe do a bit of video as well, you know, write down when you found it, what you found, before you even touch it, you know, and then ideally then contact someone who is interested in it or as an expert in that field. Obviously, I would like you to consider me if you find those things, you know, and I would like to give you some advisor, maybe look at some photos and have some input about what you found. And then the ideal thing, because obviously I live a long way away from any of your listeners, you know, the ideal thing is that you find some way of keeping it in the house after you've recorded it, as well as you can keep it in the house and keep it where it where where you found it, if you can. Some people find solutions, like they'll put a little window so you can still see it and appreciate it, and it's a kind of fun talking point in the house. Um. I know lots of houses where they've done that with dried cats as well. Actually, even though they're a bit gruesome to look at, lots of people still like to keep them. Obviously, it's something like a dry cat. It's um, it's organic, and it's it could rot if it becomes damp, so you've got to think more carefully about what you do with that, and a lot of people do end up disposing of them for that reason. But you know, if you can keep it dry and keep it visible, or just just just conceal it again, just put it back in and forget all about it. Like the first one I ever came across, went straight back in the thatch after I'd recorded it, and it's still there as far as I know. So that is the best thing to do. That's very by far the best thing to do. Um wherever you live, that's the best thing to do. The shoes, by and large, they're not going to be worth anything, so you know, record them and put them back. You're not going to lose any any money. You're not denying yourself some kind of riches by reconcealing a shoe or a cat, you know, the ones that people assign more monetary value to. The witch bottles, because pottery, you know, nice old pottery with clear witchcraft, you know connections is very interesting. But what I would say to you is sell it to your local museum. You know, your local museum will love to own it, and I'm sure would make you an offer if you have a history, local history museum, and just make sure you offer it to local historians or archaeologists after you've recorded it, and let them buy it off. You don't put it. Don't just put it on the black market, because someone will buy it and its provenance will be lost and no one will know where it is forever after so that's my only request is just record it as well as you can share that information. And if you're going to sell anything, said it responsibly, said it to someone who's going to care about that objects and care about it's relevance and its contexts in your local historical environment. Now, in some cases, they think you mentioned in the book, the individuals who find these these objects then kind of maybe buy into the supernatural ideas around them, even as as modern um you know, there's residents of the modern world. Yeah, in in modern parlance, you could say that people kind of freak out a bit where they find when they find these things in there in their houses. Um So, in England, most of the houses where these objects like this are found are usually very historic houses, usually quite desirable, usually quite expensive houses. See so in modern times, usually the people that live in these houses are quite wealthy or professional, you know, and usually consider themselves to be quite serious professional individuals. So we've got to kind of called a lot of lawyers, academicians, you know, people like that. And these are people who often don't even don't think they're superstitious or have any super rua believes at all, and yet when they find these objects in their houses. They want to know what they are, first of all, and they'll contact someone like me and they start to learn more about it, not just from me, but from other literature online or from friends or whatever. And then they start to get really, really, really really worried that they are, that they're disturbing some form of protection, and that whatever evil that these things were protecting against might come back into their houses. And they're often really frightened of for example, a shoe being taken away from the house, or a cat being moved, or a bottle being broken or something like that. They feel that, um, some dark energy that was being held at bay by this thing might suddenly re emerge. Now, obviously, when you when you look at the way people used to use these things, it was usually in a specific response to them feeling the witched. So the chances of that same cause of the harmful energy, the same witch still being alive and transferring that harmful energy onto you, it's almost zero. But people, for some reason, I feel that this is going to happen to them, and they get incredibly worried. Um. I remember one one house where a witch bottle was found. We persuaded the guys that let us analyze the witch bottles. So we were going to take it to university, have it X rays and have all the contents analyzed. And it took a lot of persuading to get him to do it. And this was for an English TV program on BBC two called History Detectives. Um he he reported the fine because he found it really interesting and as part of the research, you know, myself and my colleague Dr Alan Massey, we we often would investigate bottles like this, and the production team and us we had to work on him for ages, so allow us to take it away. The whole time it was away, he was ringing every day as the bottle Okay, when's it coming back? Was it coming back? I need it back in the house. Really really felt desperately worried about it. And when it did come back to the house eventually after the analysis, he wanted it to be reinterred and he wanted me to do it because I was the first person he was reported it too, and so I agreed. But when I got there, what I didn't know was that he and the production team had employed a group of nuns to pray around me while I was lowering it into the hole. Um so that was a startling end to that little bit of TV work. But then but yeah, it just shows how strongly this guy felt about it. He really wanted the thing to go back where it comes from, and he felt that it needed some kind of religious blessing in the process as well to make it safe. It's fascinating. It really makes me think about you know, early on in the book, you also you mentioned like the different since world of being in a house, you know, in historic times and everything's quieter, and I guess maybe you hear all the sounds or potential sounds a bit more. But then also just thinking about our modern relationship with like the spaces between our walls or the spaces underneath the floor. It's there's the things we know, like we we tend to know or assume they are not spirits or demons under there, but we we don't know for sure that there's not a mouse. Uh. We we know there are wires and uh and pipes under and through our house, and we have at least some level of understanding of how those things work. But then also maybe some some some empty spots and our understanding concerning say electrical wiring. Yeah, it's it's it's really interesting. I mean, I would say that that people in the past often used to feel a bit like our our children do now. You know, so you know, you've got a child going to sleep that the fears there's something under the bed or something you know, hiding behind the cupboard or something like that. You know, I think that it's not quite the same. I mean, I don't. I'm not saying that people have beliefs that were just like children. But if you imagine a more mature version of those beliefs, you know that there there's there's still is a belief in magic. There still is a belief that there are some entities and some things around you that can harm you, but you can't see them, and you haven't got the powers to do anything about them unless you learn some of these practices you know, only, which is can maybe do something about these things, or white, which is, you know, the village cunning person, for example, who's got control over some supernatural powers, could maybe manipulate some of these things. But but you can't. But all these things are around you. And so I think that some of those fears that we you might remember from being a child basically carry over into adulthood as as a legitimate belief that everybody shared. You know, I really do think that even as recently as the early twentieth century and some rural areas, beliefs like this were absolutely normal and and people have very sophisticated responses to them, including the practices I've mentioned plus others. Now, this is not an example that I think has any supernatural aspects to it, but I was wondering, I'm not sure if this is a feature of homes in the uk Orna, if this is just a thing in the States, or if this is found throughout the world. But you look at older medicine cabinets sometimes and there'll be a slot in the back to dispose razors down, like shaving razors um and uh, I couldn't help but think of that now and again whilst whilst reading the book, as being like, you know, a place where we we put things that maybe have some sort of connection to our physical body. And they also reminded me of the bent nails a bit, the bent pins as being these you know, these these bits of iron or metal that are they're no longer useful. Yeah, I've seen I've seen some lots of examples of those. I can't remember the name of the Facebook group, but there's a group about things found hidden in walls and everything, and a lot of the examples from the States are where people have bought a really old house and it's been like a medicine cabinet, and they've found this great, big, massive razor blades all behind the plaster board, you know, that will be pushed through this slot and just been allowed to just sit there and rush the way behind the behind the wall. And yeah, it's very similar, isn't it. You know, you can see why it's it's it's a similar idea, isn't it. You've got this this thing, like you say, closely associated with the body. It's then been disposed of behind the wall. It's very sharp, you know, it's a sharp thing where supernatural mark. You know, he's not going to look there anymore, is it? Because you've got all these dead sharp things. And it's very reminiscent of the belief in knife blades and things that used to be found underneath window sills and sometimes under door lintels where there's there's a you know, we've talked a lot about this idea that things can be sort of killed in order to be activated on the supernatural plane, and that would the same would apply to well, you're hitching utensils, you know, if you've got a broken knife, it now is activated if you're like and it is now a useful form of supernatural events if you were to secrete it beneath a window sill or pop it above a door lintel. And so it's very similar. There's kind of there's definitely a resonance there isn't that. Finally, as as both a witchcraft archaeologist and a musician, do you think there's a shortage of witch bottle mentions in songs about witchcraft and wizardry or there are there some great examples out there that I just don't know about. Are you also a musician that are you going to rectify this situation? I have no ability to to directify it. If there is a lacking, I don't think though I don't, I don't know of any I'm sure that there are some little folk poems that reference the idea of predicting against witchcrash, but I'm not aware of a good song, especially a rock song, which is my my world about witch bustles. But but I do I do know there is there is a metal band called Coast or Ghost, but with a cane in the front instead of a G and I know that they've started writing some crazy songs about counter witchcraft, so there may be a witch bustle song coming from them soon. Excellent. Well, but before we close out here, I imagine that we have perked a number of listeners curiosities about this whole topic. Can you tell our listeners how they can follow you the website so or social media accounts they can go to uh to to to learn more about this study. Sure, so on Twitter and Instagram, I'm there as folk magic Man as one word, But on Facebook and on my website it's a little bit more difficult to convey without seeing it. But the the domain is aperture pious, which is you can probably share a link, can't you in your podcast? But yeah, that's probably the best way to do it. But it's apple sture pious, dot co, dot uk or dot com and the same thing on Facebook it would be forward slash aperture pious. Um. But yeah, that's right. It all is excellent. Well, thanks for taking time out of your day to chat with me here. This has been I've enjoyed it tremendously and I am sure that our listeners are going to enjoy it as well. I've enjoyed it very much too. Thanks again to Brian for coming on the show to chat again. The book is Magical House Protection the Archaeology of counter Witchcraft, and it's available in physical, cool and digital forms wherever you get your books. We only have time to discuss really a fraction of what is explored in the book, So if this topic fascinates you as it does me, pick it up. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show, and if you want to reach out, simply email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.