Archaeologist discovers witchcraft site on her front lawn

As an archaeologist, I'm always wondering what's under the land I'm walking on. I've had the privilege to live next to a Roman road, on a Mesolithic camp site, and near a Bronze age burial mound. That's not too exceptional if you live in England.

Archaeologist Jacqui Wood in Cornwall, however, has me beat. When she decided to do some construction on her land she found evidence of witchcraft rituals dating back centuries. She's uncovered a series of pits dug into the earth that were filled with swan skins covered in feathers. The skins had been turned inside out so that the feathers lined the pit.

One of the pits included not only the swan skin, but the claws of several different species of bird and pebbles found only on the coastline at least 15 miles away. Another pit had 55 eggs sitting on top of the swan-feather lining, including seven feathers that were ready to hatch. Magpie remains had been placed on either side of the eggs. Some of the pits had been emptied but still had a few feathers and stones remaining to show what had been there.

Radiocarbon dating found that the earliest swan skins dated to the 1640s during the English Civil War. Eerily, others dated as recently as the 1950s. One even had plastic in it!

Wood also discovered a spring-fed pool lined with white quartz so that it would glow in the moonlight. As offerings, the locals had thrown in strips of cloth, nail cuttings, heather branches, pins, and bits of shoe.

I'm not well versed in paganism, so I'll put it out to my readers. Anyone know what these rituals could have been for?

Maybe next she'll find a witch bottle!

Busy working on three different fantasy fiction projects

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm preparing two more fantasy novels for publication. Hard Winter and At the Gates, books one and two of the Timeless Empire series, are edited and ready. The covers are being designed at the moment. The artist is incorporating some medieval art into the covers that really sets the mood. Both books will be released in June.

I'm still chugging away on The Maze of Mist, a sequel to my fantasy novel Roots Run Deep and the second book in the House of Itxaron trilogy. It will be out in late 2012. Each book in the trilogy is a standalone novel but can also be read as a series.

My third project involves fellow archaeologist and blogging buddy Sean McLachlan. We're working together on a collection of short stories tentatively titled The Witch Bottle and Other Tales of Black Magic. That will be out sometime this year but I can't be more precise than that. We both have busy schedules!

Upcoming releases

I've been a bit too quiet on this blog lately. I've been very busy at work and finalizing two upcoming releases. One is Down in the Dungeon, a collection of my short stories inspired by classic RPG gaming. So many fantasy authors are inspired by roleplaying games and try to hide it. Well, I don't. I revel in it! This ebook has a wonderful cover designed by Laura Shinn. It will be coming out within a month from Writers Exchange E-Publishing.

I also have a short story titled "The Witch Bottle" in the upcoming anthology Love and Darker Passions. This will be published early next year by Blood Moon, the horror imprint of Double Dragon. It's based on some research into a real item of folkloric magic called, you guessed it, the witch bottle.

If you haven't sampled my fiction yet, I already have two books available. My fantasy novel Roots Run Deep follows the adventures of a female goblin struggling her way out of a slum in a human-dominated world and becoming a leader for her oppressed people. My mystery/thriller Murder at McMurdo tells the tale of flawed man trying to make things right for his wife and himself while trying to solve a murder.

So while I've been a bit quiet of late, I haven't been sleeping! And you're getting a medieval post later this week, so stayed tuned!

Charm to ward off evils spirits found in castle ruins

Archaeologists digging in the ruins of Nevern Castle in Wales have found a dozen pieces of slate with scratched markings of stars and other designs.

The slates were found at a 12th century doorway, hinting that they were put there to ward off evil spirits trying to get into the entrance. I wrote about this practice on a previous Medieval Mondays, in which hidden clothing is used to ward off witches. Dead cats work too!

The archaeologists say they were installed around 1170-1190 when the castle was rebuilt in stone. The castle was originally built by the Normans as a motte-and-bailey castle in 1108. The BBC has a nice photo of one of the Nevern slates. Recent excavations have unearthed a lot of interesting finds from this site, including a game of Nine Men's Morris shown below. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for this photo.

Medieval Mondays: A shoe hidden away keeps the witches at bay

A witch bottle wasn't the only way people in the British Isles protected their homes from evildoers. Traditional folklore gave the nervous homeowner plenty of ways to secure their home, family, and livestock.

The most common method was to conceal one or more shoes in the chimney or other hidey-hole. The origin of this peculiar custom is unclear. One theory says it started with John Schorn of Buckinghamshire, an unofficial "folk" saint from England who in the 14th century caught the Devil in a boot. There was a common belief that witches and spirits came in through the chimney and couldn't turn around, so if you caught them in a shoe you'd keep them out of the house.

More than a thousand shoes have been discovered hidden in old homes in the UK. About 40 percent are from children (considered likely targets for evil spells) and they're rarely found in pairs.

An even weirder remedy was to wall up a cat. (A moment of silence for all those cats). Many cats have been found sealed up in walls or roofs in places where they clearly didn't get to on their own. They've become naturally mummified and are commonly called "dried cats". Since cats were considered semi-magical creatures, perhaps it was thought a dead cat could hunt in the spirit world, or go toe-to-toe with the witch's familiar.

The local cunning man or woman could provide protection without killing Furball or stealing your kid's shoe. A written charm with a mixture of astrological symbols, an abracadabra triangle, and barely literate Latin could do the trick, as could magical marks such as a "daisy wheel" that's commonly found on roof beams, plaster, and furniture in early modern England. This was a good luck symbol.

Another method was hiding a horse skull. At the Portway pub at Staunton-on-Wye there was discovered more than forty horse skulls screwed beneath the floor! Some people claimed it was to help the fiddler sound better, but some sort of magical ritual seems the more likely explanation.

For more on these and other amazing practices, check out the Apotropaios website and the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project. An excellent book is Ralph Merrifield's The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic.

Medieval Mondays: Witch bottles

The folklore of England is filled with odd spells and strange objects. My personal favorite are the so-called witch bottles.

Witch bottles date to at least the 17th century and were used until the early 20th. Folklore recipes and stories tell us the bottles were filled with various "magical" substances and buried under thresholds to keep witches away from the house.

They could also lift curses. If someone was sick and you suspected a curse, you'd make a witch bottle and hold it over the fire. The witch would feel the flames until he or she ended the curse. If the witch was able to tough it out long enough, the bottle would burst and the witch won.

Another variant on the witch bottle theme was to use them to capture witches. The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford has a witch bottle with the witch supposedly still inside! Reminds me a bit of the Cajun tradition of hanging bottles from trees near the house to catch wandering spirits.

I know of only one that's been found with the contents intact. It was reported in the July/August 2009 issue of British Archaeology. A 17th century bellarmine jar like the one pictured here in this Wikimedia Commons photo was found upside down in a pit by workmen in Greenwich. It was still corked and a chemist investigated the contents. These included: human urine, 12 iron nails, a bent nail through a bit of leather, 8 brass pins, hair, a bit of fluff the investigator thinks came from a belly button (!), and ten fingernail shavings from a man who had recently had a manicure.

The fingernail shavings, hair, and naval fluff probably came from the person the bottle was supposed to protect, since folklore spells usually required a personal possession or a bit of the body to work.

I have an idea for a witch bottle story fluttering around in the back of my head. I'll have to write it someday!