Especially Dangerous: The Snowshill Collection
"Of course, no objections to the loan of the witchcraft exhibits to Mr. Cecil Williams."
– R.R Fedden, Deputy Director General of the National Trust, 7th October 1965.
Sixty years ago today, a selection of objects from Snowshill Manor were agreed to be loaned to Cecil Williamson, founder of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle. This ensemble originated from an attic room in the Manor called The Witch's Garret, created and curated by Charles Paget Wade, the Manor’s previous owner who had passed away nine years before. The items Williamson were loaned never returned to Snowshill. Instead, under the cover of a sensational letter claiming the collection had belonged to "an especially dangerous black magician", they disappeared.
It was not until the early 1990s that these objects were re-identified in the display cabinets of Boscastle. In the intervening years, Williamson had granted them new identities, new narratives and new roles which they had convincingly enacted.
Especially Dangerous: The Snowshill Collection is the story of this strange journey.
It explores not only the motivations that birthed these narrative shifts, but also examines the peculiarly parallel lives of Wade and Williamson, the wider cultural conditions that contemporaneous magical practice existed within, and their effects upon it. However, this is not just a history book; Especially Dangerous interrogates the material culture of magical objects using techniques inspired by some of the most exciting current thinkers in anthropology and occultism. In doing so, it reveals that Williamson was very much ahead of his time and that both he and his museum have many more lessons to impart.
Commending both Wade and Williamson and their respective passions, Especially Dangerous builds upon previous excellent work in the field and firmly contextualises the romantic sensibilities of Wade and the sometimes roguish actions of Williamson that will inspire admiration and understanding of these two personalities whose legacies are deserving of a far wider audience.
Hadean Press is very pleased to announce that pre-orders for the hardcover edition of Especially Dangerous: The Snowshill Collection will open on 30 October. Today we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the historic agreement which heralded the journey of these magical objects from their attic room to the museum’s cabinets. The cover shown here is the paperback edition.
"…wonderfully well researched, to a standard of which any scholar would be admiring, and supplies huge amounts of new information upon a linked series of topics into which systematic investigation had often hardly begun." – Prof. Ronald Hutton.
"Especially Dangerous offers a captivating exploration of the uncanny connection between two charismatic figures whose lives have become deeply intertwined—despite never having met. With a touch of magic and mystery on every page, the author expertly delves into the passions that drove these extraordinary men to create their remarkable collections." – Jennifer Rowley-Bowen, Snowshill Manor Collections and House Manager.
"In producing this work, Mark Hewitt has presented a rich set of reflections on the tensions and fruitful interplay between showmanship and curatorship, and on the celebration of craftsmanship as set both towards and against the practice of sorcery. In this investigation of both the theatricality of performance art and what is operatively magical, we encounter consideration of both the trappings of witchcraft and the shadows they cast, between occulted “open secrecy” and the sinister and salacious reputations that cohere once an object becomes untethered from its collector – aspects of the reverse hagiography of necromancers which reanimates and haunts in each new telling of their chilling tales after all – and even between the authenticities of provenance and the affectivity of display." – Dr Alexander Cummins