The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle is indeed the most important of its kind, simply because it is the only one of its kind! There are other museums covering a similar subject matter (there are museums in Germany, France and Iceland for example) but none are as extensive, and none has its pedigree.

Even though folk magic and magical belief in general have been a core part of our culture and history since the dawn of time, it still remains, as a subject, ridiculously underrepresented in museums around the world. In my experience the most hard-nosed academics tend to shy away from it as a subject, even in this modern age.

At a recent conference of the Folklore Society I heard folk magic being referred to as “dangerous”, “nonsense” and those who had any contact with it were not to be trusted. Hence to this day, on the whole, you will find it mislabelled, tucked away, in storage and conspicuous by its absence in many museum collections. It was these attitudes that in part lead to the founding of the Museum.

What are the objects, exhibits or collections that are most important to the museum, and how did it come by them?

The museum was founded by Cecil Hugh Williamson. He was born in Devon in 1909 and had a number of encounters during his childhood with witchcraft and magic. This gave him a lifelong interest in folk magic which lead to the creation of the museum. He had a colourful career; initially he wanted to join the clergy, but then worked on an African tobacco plantation. He went on to work in the early British film industry and for the British secret services. It was in the latter that he first formulated the “witchcraft research centre” as a cover for information-gathering in Germany before the war. This in turn evolved into the museum we see today.

He described the Museum as his “spider's web” from which he gathered not only information and artefacts concerning the ways of the wayside witches, but also the money to be able to continue his researches.

He was very much a maverick in not only his approach to the museum but also in his methods of collection. He presented himself as a kind of occult trouble-shooter. I have come across two accounts of him being called to inspect what was thought to be a find of occult objects. In both cases he declared that the objects embodied magic of the most malefic sort and that he alone had the expertise to dispose of them in an appropriate manner. He subsequently loaded them into the back of his transit van and deposited them in his museum! But as I suggested earlier, if it were not for characters like Cecil Williamson, and it was left to the respectable academic community, we would know nothing of our folk magic heritage.

One example of an object acquired in this way is the “Wondrous Candle” (left). This is an eerie looking object that was said to aid in the search for treasure.

The artefacts are far too many and varied to mention, and my personal favourites change on a regular basis. The best thing to do is to go and see them for you for yourself!

The two men had a radically different vision of witchcraft. Gardner on the one hand saw it as a ceremonial-based pagan religion for the masses, whereas Williamson saw it as a path for only the few. Williamson also saw it as an operative magical system intrinsically connected to the “spirit world”, that had nothing to do with any idea of paganism or what he saw to be the ostentatious rituals of Wicca. Most of all, Williamson felt that Gardner was disdainful of both magic and the old-time witches, neither of which Gardner would have anything to do with.

But, as history reveals, Gardner ‘got the gig’ and Williamson largely disappeared in to obscurity. The reason for this in my mind is quite evident; both men got what they wanted. Gardner got his populist religion and Williamson retired with his underground, chthonic, otherworldly wayside witchery. In his writings however Williamson barely disguises his frustration at the flowering of this ‘new-fangled’ Wicca, which he saw as bearing no relation to the witchcraft he had encountered amongst the folk practitioners, and the wayside witches.

Cecil Williamson consequently was quite dismissive of Wicca in his museum. Over the years this has changed though. In the 1990's Graham King incorporated many Wiccan and Neo-pagan elements into the museum (along with many other contemporary magical practices) in order to be more representative of modern magical beliefs. Simon Costin has continued this and has developed folklore as a theme as a key element in the story.

Curating and showing the collection in a way that gets the balance right must be difficult...

Yes. As I suggested earlier, Wicca has indeed gained enormous popularity and as even Cecil Williamson conceded, it has bought “joy, happiness, peace of mind and self-understanding to many people”. However, in terms of the study of magical traditions, one of the more problematic aspects of Wicca is that it has become the defining paradigm of witchcraft. It has become the lens through which we see it, and the standard by which we judge it. In short its assumptions have become fact.

Many aspects of traditional folk magic have been rejected and sidelined purely because they do not fit in with the Wiccan hegemony. The Museum of Witchcraft has long been victim of this. But it was this that initially attracted me to it. It seemed to be portraying a vision of magical practice that bore no relation to any of the prevailing models of magic such as that of Wicca, Thelema or The Golden Dawn. It portrayed a world of magic born of moors and the wild sea, where the shadowy figure of the wayside witch brooded twixt this world and the shadowy spirit world.

The strange thing was that no one else seemed to know anything of this magic that Williamson claimed was the bread and butter of the ordinary working people of Britain. It was from this that my book was born.

So your book sounds like it was an opportunity to tell Williamson's side of the story a bit more, and convey his ideas about witchcraft. How did it come together?