Just in front of me, visiting Spellbound at the Ashmolean last week, was a very rational boy of about seven and his proud mother.
‘I don’t believe in magic, witches or Father Christmas,’ he announced to the girl presiding over Room One.
‘Perhaps you’re spiritual but not religious,’ said the girl.
The rational boy gave her the look she deserved.
In that first room pride of place is given to a squat little silvered bottle with a hand-written label: ‘Obtained in 1915 from an old lady living in Hove, Sussex. She remarked: “and they do say there be a witch in it, and if you let un out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble”.’
The witch bottle usually lives in the Pitt Rivers down the road, where it’s a star turn, and it’s clear why. The little bottle has menace, charm and it conjures a crowd: the old lady, keeper of the witch; the mysterious ‘they’ who caution her; the spectral witch inside, plotting her escape. And it made the rational boy smile — which, as it turned out, was quite a feat.
Behind the bottle, in that first room, there is also a modern-looking ladder attached to the wall. We’re conducting an experiment, said the girl attendant. Do you dare go under it? And I’m afraid it’s at this early stage that Spellbound loses its magic.
There are interesting objects: manuscripts picturing the earth at the centre of a cosmos teeming with demons; 15th-century ‘zodiac man’, from the Astronomical Calendar by Nicholas of Lynn, over from the Bodleian. A third room contains the weird witch-like charms found in medieval homes: a toad run through with thorns, a ‘witch-ladder’ tied with feathers. But everywhere, as a refrain, this message: aren’t we all a bit superstitious? Are you sure you’re not irrational too?
But, of course we are.
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