Hidden Witches of Cornwall

Archaeology magazine, vol 61, no. 6, Nov/Dec 2008 has a cool article about UK witchcraft.

An experimental archaeologist named Jacqui Wood bought some land in Cornwall, and ended up discovering all kinds of unusual things, like a filled-in pool that used to be spring-fed, lined with white quartz dating back 6,000 years, but also containing bits of cloth and artifacts from medieval years. Lots of other witchcraft artifacts have survived all over the UK, Cornwall isn’t unique in that aspect.

The weirdest things she found were pits containing inside-out swan skins filled with other artifacts, and a pit lined with the skin of a black cat, filled with 22 eggs that were buried very close to hatching. More ominously, some of the pits lined with inside-out animal skins date to the 1950s. Apparently these are artifacts from a tradition of witchcraft that’s never before been documented. It was kept a secret for hundreds and maybe thousands of years.

A secret kept for hundreds of years is what’s really interesting. I mean, it appears that no location in the UK is more than 100 yards from an archaeological mystery, finding neolithic places of worship isn’t that unusual. Here we have knowledge kept hidden for centuries. Ben Franklin is quoted as saying that “three may keep a secret if two are dead”. It’s probably not quite the scale of 10,000 Bletchley Park people keeping Ultra secret for nearly 40 years, but it far surpasses that in time-kept-secret.

Finding a secret school of witchcraft hidden for centuries behooves us to think critically when people claim that conspiracies can’t exist, or at least can’t exist for very long, because people will just talk about them. Evidence like these witchcraft artifacts doesn’t support that view.