Archaeologists have found a 17th-century witch bottle meant to fight evil spirits close to a former pub in England.
Experts say that in the earlier days the so-called cursed people often filled bottles with bent toenails and fingernails, urine, and hair to keep dark spirits away.
However, the x-ray of the newfound beer bottle, originally made in Germany, revealed that it does not contain any such bodily parts.
“It’s not an everyday find. Most of what we find are broken bits of pots and people’s rubbish,” National Geographic News quoted excavation manager Andrew Norton of Oxford Archaeology, a U.K. archaeological-services company, as saying.
The salt-glazed stone bottle is stamped with the face of a grimacing man.
The archaeologists believe it could be an image of anti-Protestant Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine who lived from 1542 to 1621.
Legend dictates that Protestants damaged the jugs to despoil the Catholic leader.
Norton added that another reading suggests it is “green man,” a mythical evil spirit living in the forests.
He also described a crowned lion engraved on the base of the bottle, which is assumed to be the bottlemaker’s trademark.
The witch bottles during the seventeenth age can be compared to “a modern equivalent of hanging a horseshoe on your door,” according to Norton.
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