An Eighteenth-Century Pocket And Heart-Shaped Token: A Material Culture Investigation Of Emotional Interactions With Magick

And The Supernatural

Katy Meade

Invisible supernatural forces were suspected to inhabit the earth, air, fire and water in the early modern period in Britain. Ghosts, fairies, elves and witches supposedly caused harm by mystical means, although, witches were considered to be the greatest threat to people and their homes, due to their abilities to raise and direct energy; and these anxieties surrounding the supernatural persisted well into the eighteenth century. Ordinary people used ‘magickal’ thinking every day, through their emotional interactions with the supernatural, by ritually recycling their heavily worn clothing to use as lightning conductors for malevolent forces, people sought to magically fortify themselves and their homes.

The dissertation aims to reframe magick and the supernatural as frivolous subjects, by proposing that they are instead complex and worthy of attention. The research unites two thematically linked objects, a deliberately concealed pocket discovered within a wall space in a house, in Abingdon and a heart shaped textile token from the London Foundling Hospital. The two artefacts are studied through two different forms of magick, one that is protective and the other which is imitative and draws on similarities between two things that resemble each other. The dissertation is an investigation of how the self is distributed through mundane and everyday things that are not inherently magickal, such as a pocket or pieces of cloth, to explore how the objects are transformed into spin-offs of their maker or wearer, as they gain new forms of magickal power.