# Witch bottle *Bellarmine jug* **Known today as.** A bottle, often a bearded German stoneware “Bellarmine,” filled with urine, pins, nails, and hair or nail clippings, and buried under the hearth or threshold. Kind: Amulet ## What was it used for? A counter-spell against a witch: the pins and nails stood for the victim’s pain, and the bottle was meant to turn that pain back on the witch. ## What does modern science say? Around 250 English witch-bottles are on record. They are the one kind of concealed house charm for which contemporary writings survive, and the Greenwich bottle, found still sealed in 2004, was X-rayed and CT-scanned before it was opened: the liquid was urine, with a metabolite of nicotine and with sulfur, and inside were nails, one driven through a leather heart, brass pins, hair, and nail clippings. ## What lore surrounds it? The practice appears to have begun in England in the mid-seventeenth century. One found unopened at Greenwich in 2004 still held urine, pins, nails, and a nail-pierced leather heart. The bearded jugs were named Bellarmines as a slur on the Cardinal, and their masks and round bellies made them look human. Around 250 have been recorded in England, half of those excavated at the hearth and a quarter under thresholds; in America one was dug up at Essington, Pennsylvania, a glass bottle of about 1740 holding six pins; a bottle from the threshold of a Cornish house, shown on television in 2016, held urine, a human hair, and brass pins of the late 1840s, and Hoggard finds such practices continuing well into the twentieth century. ## What did the older authorities say? **Joseph Blagrave.** In his *Astrological Practice of Physick* gives the method: the patient’s urine stopped up in a bottle with three nails, pins, or needles and a little white salt, and kept always warm, so that the witch, part of whose vital spirit is in it, is “grievously tormented making their water with great difficulty” and will desire to come to the place for ease. **Joseph Glanvill.** In *Saducismus Triumphatus* tells, from Mr. Brearly’s report, of a bewitched woman in Suffolk: a bottle of her urine with pins, needles, and nails, set to the fire, burst its cork and did her no good; a second, corked and buried in the earth, cured her, and a woman came from a town some miles off crying that they had killed her husband, a wizard who had bewitched her. **The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia's article on witchcraft lays out the charges Innocent VIII's Bull of 1484 specified, “their intercourse with incubi and succubi, their interference with the parturition of women and animals, the damage they did to cattle and the fruits of the earth, their power and malice in the infliction of pain and disease, the hindrance caused to men in their conjugal relations,” and calls the Malleus Maleficarum, published a year or two later, “probably the most disastrous episode,” a book which “professed (in part fraudulently) to have been approved by the University of Cologne.” In England “one statement declares that 30,000, another that 3000, were hanged … during the rule of the Parliament,” and Stearne the witchfinder “boasted that he personally knew of 200 executions.” ## Sources - Hoggard, B. (2019). *Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft*. New York: Berghahn. - Blagrave, J. (1671). *Astrological Practice of Physick*. - *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Witchcraft.” newadvent.org/cathen/15674a.htm - Hoggard, B. “Witch-bottles.” *Apotropaios*, apotropaios.co.uk/witch-bottles.html. - Patel, S. S. (2009). “Opening a witch bottle.” *Archaeology*, online feature, archive.archaeology.org. - Becker, M. J. (1980). “An American witch bottle.” *Archaeology* (March/April 1980): 18–23; online reprint, archive.archaeology.org. - Birmingham Live (2019). “Antiques Roadshow specialist finally discovers he drank urine instead of 150-year-old port on programme.” birminghammail.co.uk. - Glanvill, J. (1700). *Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions*. 3rd ed. London: A. L. --- *Witch bottle.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/witch-bottle Historical description, not medical advice.