“Gazing at each other eye to eye,
There passed between us, a silent understanding,
And much to my great wonderment,
The humble stone began to tell its bygone story”
– excerpt from ‘A Song of Stone’ composed by Hannah North in response to object number 1908.11.1, a stone charm held in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Ever since working on amulets at the Horniman Museum I’d been very interested in collaborations with Pagans and related communities. In 2023 I pitched the idea of exploring these interests further with Nigel Jefferies of the Museum of London Archaeology Service. Nigel was into the idea, and together we applied for and won an AHRC impact accelerator grant.
Paganism and related faiths like Shamanism, Wicca and witchcraft are rapidly on the rise in the UK, especially amongst young people. Museums across the country hold somewhat neglected collections which speak to British folk magic traditions. So there’s an exciting potential here of linking a fast-growing demographic with collections that have hitherto been overlooked.
The spiritually invested people who might get a huge amount out of these collections, however, either don’t know they exist, or don’t feel very welcomed by museums (we need to bear in mind here the history of clashes between archaeologists and spiritually invested communities over sites like Stone Henge). The challenge therefore is twofold:
1) We need to let spiritually invested communities know that there are museum collections out there that could be very important to them.
2) We need to establish a precedent for museums being welcoming to and working equitably with members of these communities.
With its strong British folk magic collections and its expertise in cultural care, the Pitt Rivers in Oxford looked like the perfect museum partner and we were delighted when they joined the project. We were equally fortunate to team up with Treadwell’s bookshop in London, arguably the intellectual heart of esoteric practice in Britain.
I was keen to explore the creative outcomes of bringing together the two otherwise separate worlds of the museum and the spiritually invested community. Treadwell’s helped in reaching out to collaborators whose spiritual and creative practices overlapped.
As a group we had a series of meetings with the Pitt Rivers to plan two days of workshops at the Museum. To make this process as equitable as possible we made sure that the planning group was made up of 50% spiritually invested members and 50% heritage professionals. We also made sure that a significant proportion of the workshops were led and designed by the spiritually invested members. Finally we brought in expert evaluator Sarah-Jane Harknett. Sarah-Jane monitored the meetings and workshops; her report was to be a key means of gauging just how equitable we’d managed to be.
The two days at the Museum were intense, productive, and, at times, moving:
- On the first day perspectives were exchanged between the spiritually invested and heritage professional participants. Notes were taken about how database entries and display practices could be updated to be more sensitive to the ongoing potency of the Museum’s folk magic collections.
-On the second day there were moving and eloquent workshops led by spiritual practitioners. This was the first time that agency had been fully handed over to these participants. Under their lead we all talked about objects which we had brought in and which were personally significant to us. This move gently shifted the discourse away from an academic perspective towards an emotionally engaged one. Later in the day spiritually invested participants led workshops which combined ritual and participatory practice. These were moving and had a levelling effect, bringing everyone together. It felt like a powerful moment: the lab-like environment of the study room we were in had transformed into somewhere which resonated with wider potency and meaning.
Three months later we had a wrap up event at Treadwell’s. It was now the spiritually invested community’s turn to host. Participants reflected on their experiences, read out poems which they had produced following on from the workshops at the Pitt Rivers, or presented the artworks they had made. Pitt Rivers staff were there to discuss future collaborations and one of the participants presented them with a beautiful amulet which she had made and which brought together different elements of the workshops. The amulet was later accessioned into the Pitt Rivers’ collection.
A principal aim of the project was to disseminate its learnings and outputs. A project website hosts blogs which reflect on the project and suggest next steps, Sarah-Jane’s evaluation report is also downloadable. We wrote up the project in sector journals and blogs including the Museums Journal, Museum Ethnographers Group Blog, Social History Curators Group News, and Folklore Society News. Spiritually invested participants used blogs and social media accounts to share our work amongst their audiences.
The project wasn’t perfect, although overall satisfaction rates were high, Sarah-Jane’s evaluation revealed that the spiritually invested participants could have been afforded more time to reflect during the workshops, and also that -as is so often the case- at times academics tended to dominate discussions. However, all in all, I think we all felt that we had made good progress. Collectively we had shown how museums and spiritually invested people could come together equitably, be inspired by each other, and develop in new, hitherto unimagined directions.
You can read my Museum Ethnographers Group blog post which reflects on the project in the context of anthropology museums here.