Continuous international travel, from one map pinpoint to another in endless succession has subjected me to a series of dramatic shifts between hemispheres, time zones, daylight hours, climates, and cultures (food, customs, laws, currency, etc.)—a dizzying pendulum swing from dopamine to dysphoria, attachment to absence, endings-for-now to ever-new beginnings/ returns. I never fully alight and never commit to a complete goodbye, wistfully whisked on in a protracted orbital gesture, a body familiar and distant as constellate glitter.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been navigating the seasonal dysphoria (and jet lag) of landing in a chilly UK springtime from a winter-over in Hawaii. The departure from family in Haiku was counterbalanced by the long-awaited reunion with my son in Edinburgh—just as the departure from Perth and my beloveds was somewhat mitigated by arriving into the familial embrace of Maui. I do not necessarily locate my self according to place, but according to people, simultaneously always leaving and arriving, from farewell to welcome home. This vertiginous lifestyle of academic and artist makes my ‘address’(es) an ellipse rather than fixed; I wonder when I’ll possibly stay put somewhere, and where that might be. For now, I am scheduled to continue surfing the abyss.
My dear friends at The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle (Cornwall, UK) are hosting me again this month for a residency to complete my research and install an exhibition in their main floor gallery and upper floor display rooms. This exhibition, which will be titled Arcanum Sanguinis : Occult Blood will run for their full 2024 season, from sometime in early April until October 31 (exact opening date TBD). Over the past several days, post-viva voce (an archaic academic assessment tool reinforcing the very institutional hierarchy I disavow), I’ve been excitedly diving back in to research around the developmental trajectory of biotech, from folk magic to alchemy to in vitro stem cell culture. This research engages not only with books and documents, but also objects—and importantly, the documentation of the objects.
As I sift through the archive database at the museum, and then the archival objects and box files themselves, I am struck by the organic and ephemeral nature of this collected body. I have always envisioned the ‘archive’ as a dusty epistemic categorium of stuff which can simply be called up and extracted from—a fixed body of bureaucratized evidence from which I might pluck historical happenings, trends and other cultural constructions. However, this is not exactly my experience of the archive here at the museum.
I’ve discovered here that conducting archival research can require a negotiation of several complicating factors, particularly with a privately held collection absent of rigid bureaucratic conformity found in public institutions. These factors include a discontinuity of record-keeping habits from person to person, such as incongruous tagging/ labelling/ keywords (creating divergent data over time); lack of identification or citations for source material such as magazine clippings, photostats, etc.; numerous misspellings and/or later corrections that sometimes confuse meanings; also, a varia of handwritten (some loosely legible) and typewritten notes; and, inclusion of anecdotal information relayed between sources across decades, often as word-of-mouth re-tellings and/or carefully rendered but artistically liberated re-drawings. It is a fascinating glimpse at magic through the meander of myth-making. As the museum founder, Cecil Williamson notes in one anecdotal record, “…the facts are right as seen and understood by the people living in that time.”1 It is with respect to these lively truths that I collect (for inclusion in my exhibition) some of the documented information from the museum’s archives.
However, perhaps most fascinating to me, as I rake through records and sequestered information, is what has either gone permanently missing or temporarily askew from its codified place in the archive holdings. Firstly, human handling of objects characteristically includes misplacement, whether intentional or otherwise. One such misplaced document, a note scrawled on a slip of paper, includes the description of a shrub called Southernwood (Artemisia abrotanum), said (on the slip) to be used for bringing on menses—in other words, an abortion potion.2 The absent artifact, now existing as a transcribed digital trace in the database, leaves one to wonder whether its last handler either wished to possess it for their own means, or to perhaps prevent its use by others. Or, it was put away in a now untraceable wrong place or lost by some other circumstance. The town of Boscastle was partially washed into the sea by a massive flood in 2004, and since the museum sits on the banks of the River Valency, some of its items are noted as lost to the flood waters—only elaborate descriptions remain.3 One such lost object includes a black and white print entitled, ‘Witch Consultation’ — its object description explains that, “Quiet people living in out of the way places are still visited by those who have their personal problems, bygone times, the pregnant serving girl sought the witch for her aborting green medicine under cover of the blanket of night. Today the people have their problems, and when the social services fail they seekout [sic] as a last resort the wisdom of the wise ones…”4
What I am somewhat surprised about with this fluid archive is the overall scarcity of materials regarding menstruation, outside the mentions of methods to bring it on in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. With a topic such as witchcraft, I expected to see an abundance of resources relating to said materia magica since not only is blood in general seen as a potent and essential magic ingredient in numerous occult traditions, but even more potent is menstrual blood. There is a small selection of books on the topic, with obvious names like Red Moon; The Red Goddess; The Wise Wound; Her Blood is Gold, and so forth. However, the artifacts are mostly limited to ritual tools like chalices and athames (used for blood sacrifices). Perhaps code language has been used in some instances, as taboo materials and topics often become nuanced in this way. Or, perhaps the museum’s history of exclusively male management has deprioritized menstrual material as a magical interest of witchcraft (though the current management does not fit the average cishet male profile). It may also be that blood relics are so personal that they have simply not been made available for acquisition. Perhaps, too, there are other reasons.
One could spend an eternity here, slipping into a tricksy realm of endless inquiry and discovery. Working within the extensive private library, upstairs from the museum, bears a certain relational quality—it becomes easy to anthropomorphize the library as a mischievous and wily entity, since once removing a book of magic from a shelf, it becomes difficult to replace it in its original spot. It is almost as if the bookshelf asserts a will, insisting the pages of the book I’ve removed haven’t been given their due and I should take another look. Between the mysteries of the organically evolving archive and the piskie-like5 disposition of the library itself, research at the museum becomes an almost otherworldly negotiation with multivalent forms of knowledge.
Thankfully, I’ll be joined a short while, starting next week, by a lovely PhD candidate from the University of Tasmania (and artist in her own right), Heidi Kenyon, who is coming to work with me as part of her research on plants, witchcraft and posthuman relationships therein. I’ve invited Heidi to co-author a section of the text I’m working on to accompany the exhibition, focusing on the fascinating and topically relevant history of mandrakes. Also, we will install a working homunculus experiment I’m fashioning, which, according to alchemical beliefs and protocols I’ve found, could produce a human/monster hybrid (with my new combination of corporeal ingredients).
My reformed understanding of the archive as an organic, shifting entity with secrets that slowly reveal themselves according to semi-happenstance has enriched my perception of self. I think about my own mind and body within the context of the archive, and how I innately refuse uniform categorization and compartmentalization of some chapters of my life but rather keep them living in extramundane perpetuity. To keep vital these living chapters, I tether myself to people I love by merging as textual bodies. These breathe through creative modes of togetherness, as stories that continue to write themselves across timelines. This deeply appeals to my hyperlexic nature and need to find intimacy foremost through an intellectual mingle—desire is limbic and attached to memory. Like many historical writers who cultivated their closeness through word, I require and revel in such spell-casting, where the plasticity of letters and meanings lends itself to shapeshifting. As with witchy abilities to project interdimensionally, I embody an idea as a quantum sense of ‘touch’—touch as a probability cloud of atoms with no hard material state (though embodiment of desire is of course often pleasurable).
Conducting the kind of intuitive research I’ve been allowed here in the museum has been a healing balm, post-PhD and against the pedantic narrative control that can sometimes characterize academia and its academics. A little mystic library space for frolicking in fantasy and conceptualizing novel overlays of truths, histories and present vitalities is just what this (new) doctor orders.
Document no. 7913 in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic’s archival holdings, not available to the public.
Verification of this use can be found in the text, Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England, p53.
For example, see object record 137 on the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic website, categorized under Sea Witchcraft here: https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/object/drawing/
Document no. 7109 in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic’s archival holdings, not available to the public.
Pixies in Cornwall are called piskies, among other variations of the term.