Three Ways To Cast A Magic Curse On Someone (Who Deserves It)

~Edit~

Listen up, y’all—take a look at the context of this blog before you leave comments asking me for advice on witchcraft. This is a student travel blog about a semester in Cardiff. The post is about cool trivia I learned at a charming small museum in Cornwall.

While I’ve been enjoying the fact that this post is, somehow, the single most popular thing I’ve ever unleashed online, I’m not a witch, and what follows represents the sum total of my knowledge about, and interest in, witchcraft.

Enjoy. Don’t try this at home. Or if you must, make sure the person you try it on deserves it. 

~Original Post~

Here’s the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle:

It was founded by a scholar who was himself a self-proclaimed practicing witch. As he observes in his exhibit notes, witchcraft (with which he loosely encompasses Wicca, magic-workers, Cornish pellars and ‘cunning people,’ New Age religions, New Druids, and so forth) isn’t just one solid block of dogma—in fact, for many of its practitioners, the lack of unified structure, its openness to personal interpretation, is one of its appeals.

I’d always thought of witchcraft as an archaic superstition, but one of the things that struck me about the MWM exhibits was how many of them are modern. Witchcraft is very much still practiced.

Here are some highlights:

No one knows much about this—a Victorian death-mask grafted onto a taxidermied fox:

The exhibit notes speculate that this is the death-mask of a witch who wanted to be joined with her spirit animal, a fox, after death.

Many of my favorite highlights were from the display case on curses. I’ll let the actual exhibit card explain this one:

Here’s another form of curse. The caption says: “To the accompaniment of an involved and noisy ritual, a goat’s skin is prepared and a right hand cut from it. This is then pierced and teased with a needle and red thread. Finally the hand is nailed on the door of the victim’s house:

Red thread seems to be an essential ingredient in many of these curses. Here’s the recipe for another curse:

“To ill-wish a person and cause misfortune to cross their path, first get from a witch a hurting needle and red thread. Next by some subterfuge obtain from the victim one left shoe. Secretly drive the needle under the sole of the shoe to its full extent and withdraw the red thread. Next capture a black cat and loosely tie the red thread around its neck. Release it and return the shoe.”

(If it makes you feel any safer, one of the generally agreed-upon limitations of cursing is that the curse will only work if the victim deserves it.)

Here’s another charm, two bird skulls tied to a bunch of garlic stuck through with black pins:

And here’s a Cornish piskie, one of the few breeds of fae that works no serious harm on those who offend it (not that you’d know it to look at him!):