The Witchcraft Museum, Boscastle

It is decades since I visited the Witchcraft Museum at Boscastle and the impressions I had in my mind were pouring rain outside and inside a range of bottles queasily containing two-headed piglets and that kind of thing. The Museum has changed rather a lot since being flooded out and virtually reconstructed in 2003 - and the reconstruction is rather impressive. Simply in terms of museum display terms this shows how you can fabricate an entire megalithic circle out of just a couple of stones and two mirrors.

The first bit of the museum has a delightful display of witchy images used in advertising, and then moves on to deal with traditional witchcraft, if it can be called such merging as it does into village wart-curing and love-charming. In one of the displays there are examples of some of the hate mail and death threats received from Christians by Cecil Williamson when he set the museum up: 'I just can't stand bigoted people like that', I heard one museum visitor say. There is one nicely cheeky display on 'The Magic of Christianity' not only pointing out that Christian religious practice has traditionally included many elements that aren't at all far from what might be described as 'magic', but also that most of the people down the centuries accused by the Church authorities of malign witchcraft would have considered themselves perfectly ordinary Christians.

It's upstairs that I began to feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Here is where the cursing items are displayed, little dolls or 'poppets' treated in various ways to bring harm to individuals. Some of the labels are direct copies of Cecil Williamson's original captions and they make this helpfully clear. He made no apologies for magical cursing, seeing in it a form of 'natural justice' resorted to by people who had no other recourse against bullies and harmful individuals. That makes it sound almost reasonable. But the violence of these objects is astonishing. What feelings can make someone fashion a rag doll of someone they hate and then drive a meat skewer through its head and eye? Cecil Williamson's captions, too, are not only unapologetic but take a lipsmacking delight in pointing out when bad fortune did befall the person cursed.

The section on 'Ritual Magic' is where the nastiness and violence of the cursing display is given a consecrated form. There is something about this liturgical kit, painted in weird, bright primary colours and with its bizarre occult syncretism, that makes it a sort of window into a realm of madness. You can see how a certain sort of intellect can get so caught up in this stuff in which there is no anchoring of reason that they risk falling into an insanity lurking behind it (a danger in all religion, of course). Further round the corner are images of the Devil which, I know, for most visitors will be nothing more than historical curios but which for me are at the very least emblems of the malign spiritual forces which wait to take advantage of madness and unreason. That bit culminates with Baphomet, that strange icon which mingles male and female, human and animal, divine and bestial, and seems the very image of chaos and insanity.

After all this horribleness I found it something of a relief to leave. It was something of a relief even to come downstairs, where in contrast to skewered poppets and strange gods you come across nothing more threatening and occult than Gerald Gardner's hat.