Witchcraft and magic, vaulting ambition, a
battle between the forces of good and evil,
and epic fight scenes: what's not to like
about Shakespeare's Macbeth?
But what I really love about this play is
the way it provides us with an opportunity
think about what witchcraft may have meant
to Shakespeare's contemporaries. When early
audiences saw the play's witches on stage,
did these represent mere superstition, to
be mocked rather than feared, or did they
strike terror in their hearts, representing
something altogether more frightening, a genuine
concern about the dangers of the dark arts?
I want to think about this question through
an object: a humble bottle. But what has a
bottle got to do with Shakespeare's Macbeth?
Well, this bottle represents a phenomenon
revealed to us through archaeology: that phenomenon
is countermagic; countermagic being a ritual
practice designed to ward off or stop witches'
magic. So, the object I really want to explore
is the witch-bottle; an object which opens
up for us an occult world by giving us an
insight into how witchcraft was believed to
work. What is a witch-bottle?
This one was only fairly recently discovered
in Greenwich, London, and can be seen at the
Old Royal Naval College. In the seventeenth
century you might make up one of these peculiar
receptacles if you believed a witch was practicing
evil magic against you. So what went into
it? Well, here's a demonstration: you take
a bottle, add to it a few nails or pins, and
a lock 
of your own hair. Oh, and another important
ingredient: human urine. Excuse me 
a moment while I demonstrate! Only joking,
this is water with a little food dye in it.
So, when the Greenwich witch-bottle was opened
what did they find? They found bent iron nails,
brass pins, and cuttings of the victim's hair.
These cuttings belonged to someone suffering
from a particularly bad infestation of head
lice! Looking closely at the hair, I could
see that the lice are still clinging to it!!
The sufferer also added their own urine! 250
mils of it surviving in these glass vials.
Examined by Dr Alan Massey, the contents were
believed to belong to a smoker, for the urine
revealed traces of tobacco. Amazing! 400-year-old
urine! You can also see here that the victim
added their own finger-nail cuttings. These
are now blackened by time.
Lots of 
witch-bottles
have been discovered by archaeologists and
these, and other ritual objects designed to
protect the home against witchcraft, were
often buried near the thresholds of homes,
under doorways, or near windows. These were
considered the weakest points of the home,
most in need of special protection against
demonic forces. The prevalence of such practices
indicates that many people were genuinely
afraid of witches and sought ways of protecting
themselves against them. But how were witch-bottles
believed to actually work? Well, we have some
evidence from an account by Joseph Blagrave:
a kind of recipe for how to make a witch-bottle.
This is what he says
[S]top the urine of the Patient, close up
in a bottle, and put into it three nails,
pins, or needles, with a little white Salt,
keeping the urine always warm: If you let
it remain long in the bottle, it will endanger
the witch's life... The reason why the witch
is tormented is because there is part of the
vital spirit of the Witch in it, for such
is the subtlety of the Devil, that he will
not suffer the Witch to infuse any poisonous
matter in the body of man or beast, without
some of the Witch's blood mingled with it.
So, the witch-bottle worked because the victim's
own bodily matter (their fingernail cuttings
and hair for instance) were saturated with
the witch's poisoned vital spirits. But what
are vital spirits? Well, this was believed
to be part of the blood, an ethereal essence
which sustained life. Witches magic therefore
worked through the pouring of their dangerous
and corrupted blood and vital spirits into
the bodies of their victims. Placing biological
matter from the victim in the witch-bottle
meant you were actually placing some of the
witch's own vital spirits in it. This reversed
the magic, turning it back against the witch,
breaking the spell. What I find interesting
about Shakespeare's play, however, is how
these elements of witchcraft and the way that
vital spirits act as a vehicle for them are
transferred to Lady Macbeth. We see this when
Lady Macbeth thinks about convincing her husband
to kill King Duncan and seize the throne;
a speech we might view in a new way in light
of the archaeological evidence afforded by
these witch-bottles:
LADY MACBETH ... I fear thy nature,
It is too full o th milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be
great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it ... Hie thee
hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear ...
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,
Stop up th access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th effect and it
Lady Macbeth here imagines herself as a vessel
filling up with thickened blood. This thickening
would stagnate and consequently corrupt and
poison the vital spirits contained within
her blood spirits which she wants to pour
into Macbeth, to corrupt his milk of human
kindness with the illness she believes is
lacking. Her influence over Macbeth is here
presented as working in almost exactly the
same way as witches' magic was believed to
function.
Today, when we think about witches, we might
imagine them much as Hans Buldung Grien did
in these illustrations: outlandish, other-worldly,
alien. But perhaps Shakespeare is telling
us that the most dangerous, most disturbing
form of witchcraft isn't really magic at all:
it's the influence of someone dangerously
familiar to you. This kind of influence doesn't
take place out there in strange and alien
landscapes, in mysterious witches' sabbaths
and demonic rituals, but happens in the home
and through those closest to you. This charges
the idea of witchcraft with a troubling intimacy,
and in ways which may have lent the play a
different, altogether more personal, dimension
of terror for Shakespeare's first audiences.
