Helen Cornish

Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC TIMELINE

Late 1930s:  Cecil Williamson set up the Witchcraft Research Centre.

1951-1960:  The Museum of Magic and Superstition was opened on the Isle of Man by Cecil Williamson, he moved it to mainland United Kingdom during the 1950s, first in Windsor and then Bourton-on-the-Water.

1960:  Cecil Williamson relocated the Museum of Witchcraft to Boscastle, Cornwall.

1996 (October 31):  The museum was sold to Graham King.

1998:  The burial of an exhibited skeleton (claimed as Joan Wytte, Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin, 1781-1822) took place.

2004:   A flash flood occurred in Boscastle. The museum was closed for a year, reopening in March 2005.

2013 (October 31):  The collection was gifted to The Museum of British Folklore, Simon Costin.

2015:  The name of the museum was changed to The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY 

“The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic explores British magical practice, making comparisons with other systems of belief, from ancient times to the modern day” (MWM Guidebook 2017:5). [Image at right] The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in the United Kingdom was opened in Castletown on the Isle of Man by Cecil Williamson in 1951, and he had set up the Witchcraft Research Centre in the late 1930s. During his ownership of the museum in Castletown he engaged Gerald Gardner as a resident witch, who bought the building when Williamson [Image at right] moved his collection to the mainland. During the 1950s Williamson briefly set up the museum in Windsor, followed by Bourton-on-the-Water, before settling in Boscastle on the north Cornish coast where it has remained (Patterson 2014; Williamson 2011), and celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in 2020. The museum has had three owner/directors: the founder Cecil Williamson (1950-1996), Graham King (1996-2013), and the Museum of British Folklore, director Simon Costin (2013-present). It is a thriving and self-supporting “micro-museum” (Candlin 2015), with an established “Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.” For a small independent museum, visitor numbers are high, seeing over 40,000 between Easter and Halloween in 2018.

The museum in Boscastle is situated at the edge of the harbour in a low, two storey stone building, once part of the town’s fishing history. Cecil Williamson’s “cabinet of curiosities” approach was replaced by King’s thematic curation, and today more than twenty permanent displays thread through small rooms in a labyrinthine manner. The route encourages a linear direction through the museum, and fosters a sense of immersion into an esoteric world. Downstairs, narrow corridors are edged with themed cases (images, persecution, Christian magic, herbs), a space for temporary exhibitions, and a tableau of a nineteenth century Witch’s Cottage (Joan’s cottage). [Image at right] Upstairs opens into a large room organised thematically (for example, charms, protection, cursing, mandrakes, the Goddess, the Green Man, the Richel collection, the tableau of the Horned God). A second narrow staircase leads to three small galleries (including fortune telling, sea-witchcraft, tools, and Modern Witchcraft). By the exit is the shrine, a quiet seated area for contemplation, where a wooden bench and stone window opens onto a stream that runs along the side of the building towards the harbour. Outside a small herb garden and a bench create a small courtyard, and a large willow sculpture of Pan (on long term loan) looks out across the river and harbour. The collection holds over 3,000 objects, a library with over 7,000 books, and a substantially digitised research archive (viewable by appointment).

During Graham King’s directorship, in August 2004, a destructive flash flood swept through Boscastle, closing the town for many months while repairs to buildings, roads and bridges took place. The museum collection was damaged and contaminated, but the museum reopened in March 2005. After the flood, King set up a trust for the museum collection and formalised the casual Friends association into a registered charity. In light of this, Kerriann Godwin edited a collection of visitor memories, in which rich and evocative accounts demonstrate connections between the museum and its many objects and stories, and visitors, often practitioners of modern Witchcraft and Wicca  (Godwin 2011).

In 2015, the new director, Simon Costin [Image at right] changed the name to The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic and created a temporary exhibition space with annually changing displays. He restored Williamson’s Witchcraft Research Centre through The Enquiring Eye journal. The museum team has established public annual events that celebrate agricultural and folkloric festivals, which are also identified by many modern Witches as the primary events of their ritual calendar, the Wheel of the Year, and reflected in the changing window displays.

The museum is not exclusively by and for practitioners of Modern Witchcraft, or Wicca, or other Pagan traditions that are part of global and rapidly growing Nature Religions. It must entertain and inform diverse audiences with different interests as it sets out accounts of modern and historical forms of magic and Witchcraft. It aims to serve both passing tourist visitors without previous knowledge of Wicca or witchcraft as well as an international audience that includes Witches (or other Pagan, Occult, and esoteric traditions), and those interested in folklore and folk magic. The repeated visits and heartfelt comments from many practitioners demonstrate its attraction as a valuable repository of artefacts and a site of meaningful heritage. For these visitors the museum is a pilgrimage destination, and its location in Cornwall is seen to resonate with esoteric histories. While there is no documented history of witchcraft or other magical activities taking place in Boscastle, and Williamson claimed that it was an ideal “tourist honeypot” (Williamson 1976:26), it has been suggested that witches may have been “selling the wind” to sailors in the harbour here, [Image at right] as depicted in the museum sign. One of Williamson’s museum labels explains that “three miles away from this spot you can find this pre-historic maze stone carved into a living rock face … that is why this Museum of Witchcraft is located here, one is standing on the edge of the beyond.” The labyrinths at Rocky Valley, the waterfall at Nectan’s Glen, and the memorial stone to Joan Wytte in Minster Woods tread a web of sites which hold the museum at their centre, as interconnected numinous places.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

The museum has a substantial collection of West Country folk magic, ritual magic, and Witchcraft items, including possessions of well known twentieth century Wiccans and Witches (such as Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Alex Sanders, and Stewart and Jannet Farrar), the Golden Dawn, and the Dutch Richel-Eldermans Collection (King 2016), and donations from practitioners who do not have a public profile (Brownie Pate, Iain Steele). The museum has a large collection of popular images of witches from the media and literature, and it explains witchcraft accusations in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe from a more sociological perspective. Joyce Froome, member of the museum team, published an account of the trial of the Pendle witches in the context of folk magic in the museum collection (Froome 2010). Primarily, it takes magic and witchcraft at face value and rooted in practical and material skills. These core ideas have been sustained over the history of the museum, across Cecil Williamson’s, Graham King’s, and Simon Costin’s directorships. They show the efficacy of magic as understanding and deploying natural forces in an animistic world (Patterson 2014). For practitioner visitors the museum provides insights and histories through tools and ritual artefacts, and the final permanent display showcases personal occult possessions of renowned twentieth century practitioners, and it is labelled “It still goes on today.” [Image at right]

Cecil Williamson’s museum included theatrical tableaus that showed popular and historical ideas about witchcraft rituals. However, it is evident from his research notes, museum labels, and articles that he was primarily interested in the magical expertise of Cunning Folk and Wise Women, who he described as “Aunty May” or the “Wayside Witch” and is shown through the tools and artefacts of local, usually women, and mostly from the British West Country (Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset). In the centre of the museum sits The Witch’s Cottage, inhabited by the mannequin Joan who is surrounded by the tools of her trade, for fortune-telling, healing, spells and amulets for protection:

Our wise woman ‘Joan’ demonstrates the many different methods employed to aid people seeking help, for example: fortune telling using tarot cards or scrying ball; herbs to make a healing powder for a farmer with sick livestock, or a bag of amulets to hang by the fireplace to ward off malevolent spirits” (MWM Guidebook 2017:15).

This witch is described as a professional who once held the place of the doctor, midwife, social worker and vet. For many practicing Witches today, these are seen as ancestors, although as historians explain, this is not supported by documentary evidence (Hutton 1999; Davies 2003).

RITUALS/PRACTICES  

The entangled threads through the museum document the rituals and practices of histories of domestic magic and the role of professional occult experts as well as modern Magical-Religious Witchcraft. Wiccan rites are represented through the collective tools of modern practitioners. The practices of Wise Women and Cunning Folk are shown through spells, charms and amulets, apotropaic motifs, sympathetic magic for protection or healing, and poppets manufactured for curses. There are witch bottles filled with pins, nails and urine to ward off danger or repel bad magic. Repetitive ritual actions, like knotting, knitting, counting, stepping, chanting, are shown as effective magical processes. Selling knotted lengths of rope to sailors as a weather spell is illustrated on the museum signage. It literally shows this transaction occurring on Boscastle’s harbour, while these decorate the walls of Joan’s Cottage along with other examples of the Wise Woman’s practices, and the sound of chanting can heard (Patterson 2016). These displays show how objects from the natural world, sticks, stones, bones, flowers, are deployed for magical purposes, and integrated into rituals using the weather, the turning seasons, the waxing and waning moon, or the power of the tide. The material world is animated and the objects here are literally alive, invested in human intention and non-human energies (Hewitt 2017).

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP  

Cecil Williamson’s lifelong interest in the efficacy of magic remains visible in the museum today. In his early life, he had family connections with high society seances, he witnessed an village witch being abused by neighbours, he was encouraged by another to harness magic to protect himself from school bullies, and he had a friendship with a “retired Witchdoctor” while working on a colonial plantation in Rhodesia in the 1930s. On his return to Britain he worked in the film industry, and was an “occult advisor” for the Foreign Office during the second World War, during which he set up the Witchcraft Research Centre (Williamson 2011). He explains in A Report from the Enquiring Eye of Witchcraft how his experiences provided an excellent foundation to set up his first Witchcraft Museum on the Isle of Man (Patterson 2014:272-77).

Graham King walked 200 miles from Hampshire to Cornwall to take ownership of the museum at midnight on October 31, 1996 (King 2011). King’s radical reorganisation of the Williamson’s “cabinet of curiosities” maintained the same focus on folk lore, Cunning Folk, and a magical worldview. He engaged volunteers from the Cornwall and Devon Pagan Federation to help with the overhaul; a stone circle was constructed on the ground floor (a quarter circle made whole through mirrors), and Joan’s cottage was built at the turning of the stairwell. Cornish artist Vivienne Shanley repainted the museum sign “Selling the Wind” and depicted the Wiccan Wheel of the Year through agricultural and seasonal festivals. King established the museum library and archive, and he organised volunteers to begin the long task of digitising letters and notes. The stream that ran alongside the museum was cleared and the shrine established. The skeleton that had hung from the ceiling during Williamson’s era was laid out in a coffin for a couple of years before being buried in nearby Minster woods in 1998. Boscastle had a flash flood in August 2004; the museum closed as King and his team worked hard to repair the damage. Simon Costin coordinated the Natural History Museum’s donation of Victorian display cases as part of the renovation (Costin 2011).

In 2013, the collection was gifted to The Museum of British Folklore. The director, Simon Costin, and his museum team have set up workshops and events, revising research interests through The Enquiring Eye, and updating displays. Like King, Costin retains Williamson’s interests in showing folk magic, Cunning Folk, and the efficacy of magic, as well as developing the museum’s potential as a repository for the donated items of modern practitioners. In 2015, the name was changed to better reflect Williamson’s original museum on the Isle of Man, and the stone circle was replaced a gallery space. The space has seen an exhibition of Jos A Smith’s illustrations of Erica Jong’s book Witches (Jong 1981), “Poppets, Pins and Power: the Craft of Cursing” (2016), “Glitter and Gravedust: Halloween Past & Present” (2017), “Dew of Heaven: Objects of Ritual Magic” (2018) and “Betwixt and Between: Isobel Gowdie, the Witch of Auldearn” (2019). Growing popular interests in witchcraft and magic have seen several collection items loaned to other exhibitions.A photo essay of items in the collection was published in 2016 (Hannant and Costin 2016). At the time of writing, the museum team members are preparing for Museum Accreditation.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES  

Challenges arise around questions of acquisition and authority. Williamson’s records were scant and incomplete, perhaps to disguise the reality behind the story (Fenton 2013). His labels were often long and complex, and they contributed to the theatrical flavour of many of his displays. Today, while some visitors recall them fondly, others have been concerned that they undermined the collection’s authority, and King was keen to modernise processes. Concerns about the display of human remains are reflected in King’s decision to remove from display the skeleton which had been exhibited since the 1960s. Described by Williamson as the “mortal remains of Joan Wytte, Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin,” she had been considered a witch, and died in Bodmin jail for assaulting two strong men. King buried the bones in the woods outside Boscastle on October 31, 1999. As the story of Joan Wytte has been related by folklorists and storytellers (Jones 1999, Wallis 2003), it moves closer to those of Wise Women and Cunning Folk as a practical magical expert, in ways that borrow from modern Wiccan rituals and beliefs. The life and death of Joan Wytte is resonant for many visitors, especially practitioners, but there is still no documentary evidence that she actually existed (Semmens 2010; Cornish 2013). Many visitors include a walk to the memorial stone in Minster Woods [Image at right] as part of the web that has spread out from the museum into the Cornish landscape.

There have always been challenges in the museum around the question of magical efficacy and the place of witchcraft in the modern world. There are also continual demands of balancing the needs of multiple audiences, to entertain and inform passing tourists, who provide the bulk of the museum’s income, as well as satisfying those with more particular or personal interests in the collection. As modern Witchcraft and Wicca grows, and its profile becomes more public, the emphasis on its history and members increases. However, the sense of a magical universe remains central, and the museum, with its extensive collection of magical artefacts states that:

The objects you will find here are rare, commonplace, unusual, ubiquitous. All are magical objects: they possess a unique potency and significance, and reveal a magical heritage that is still alive today (MWM Guidebook 2017:6).

IMAGES
Image #1: Museum of Witchcraft and Magic © Helen Cornish (2014).
Image #2: Cecil Williamson (c) Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.
Image #3: Simon Costin with Graham King (c) Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (2013).
Image #4: Joan’s Cottage © Helen Cornish (2014).
Image #5: Selling the Wind © Helen Cornish (2012).
Image #6: Modern Witchcraft display © Helen Cornish (2014).
Image #7: Joan memorial stone © Helen Cornish (2010).

REFERENCES

Candlin, Fiona. 2015. Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Cornish, Helen. 2013. “The Life of the Death of “The Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin”: Storytelling around the Museum of Witchcraft.”  Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22:79-97.

Costin, Simon. 2011. “Be Careful What You Wish For: Time, Perception and Wish Fulfilment.” P. 29 in The Museum of Witchcraft: A Magical History, edited by Kerriann Godwin. Bodmin: The Occult Art Company and The Friends of the Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft.

Davies, Owen. 2003. Cunning-Folk: popular magic in English History. London: Hambledon Continuum.

Fenton, Louise. 2013. “A Cabinet of Curses: A study of people behind the poppets held in the Museum of Witchcraft.” Tools of the Trade: A day of talks for The Museum of Witchcraft:The Wellington Hotel, Boscastle, May 2013, unpublished paper.

Froome, Joyce. 2010. Wicked Enchantments: a History of the Pendle Witches and Their Magic. Lancaster: Palatine Books.

Godwin, Kerriann, ed. 2011. The Museum of Witchcraft: A Magical History. Bodmin: The Occult Art Company and The Friends of the Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft.

Hannant, Sara, and Simon Costin. 2016. Of Shadows: One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. London: Strange Attractor Press.

Hewitt, Peter. 2017. “Collecting and fashioning magical objects with Cecil Williamson.”The Enquring Eye 1:44-60.

Hutton, Ronald. 1999. The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Kelvin. 1999. An Joan the Crone: The History and Craft of the Cornish Witch. Penzance: Oakmagic Publications.

Jong, Erica. 1981. Witches. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

King, Graham. 2011. “A Journey to Beyond.” Pp. 127-28 in The Museum of Witchcraft: A Magical History, edited by Kerriann Godwin. Bodmin: The Occult Art Company and The Friends of the Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft.

King, Graham. 2016. Images and Artefacts of the Richel-Eldermans Collection: Three Hands Press.

MWM Guidebook. 2017. Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Guidebook: Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.

Patterson, Steve. 2014. Cecil Williamsons Book of Witchcraft: A Grimoire of the Museum of Witchcraft. Penzance: Troy Books.

Patterson, Steve. 2016. Spells from the Wise Woman’s Cottage. London: Troy Books Publishing.

Semmens, Jason. 2010. “Bucca Redivivus: History, Folklore and the Construction of Ethnic Identity within Modern Pagan Witchcraft in Cornwall.” Cornish Studies 18:141-61.

Wallis, Kathy. 2003. Spirit in the Storm: The True Story of Joan Wytte, Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin. Wadebridge, Cornwall: Lyngham House.

Williamson, Cecil. 2011 [1966]. “How the Witchcraft Museum Came into Being.”  Pp. 12-19 In The Museum of Witchcraft: A Magical History, edited by Kerriann Godwin. Bodmin: The Occult Art Company and The Friends of the Boscastle Museum of Witchcraft.

Williamson, Cecil. 1976. “Witchcraft Museums – and what it means to own one.”  Quest 27:4-6.

Publication Date:
3 May 2019

 

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