Witch balls are decorative glass spheres that have been used for centuries to ward off evil spirits and protect homes from curses and spells. These ornamental ornaments are often made of colorful blown glass and have intricate patterns and designs. The meaning and purpose behind witch balls have evolved over time and vary across different cultures and regions. In some traditions, witch balls are believed to trap negative energy and prevent it from entering the home. It is thought that the shiny surface of the glass attracts and captures evil spirits, which become trapped inside the ball. Once the spirit is captured, it is believed to be unable to escape and will eventually die or be exorcised.
History of The Witch Ball
Witch balls are some of the most beloved pieces of glassblowing. Delicately hung in a window or dangling from a stand on a table, they add a unique touch of colour and sparkle to a home.
But, did you know they started out as more than just pretty ornaments?
What's a witch ball?
A witch ball is a sphere of glass with stringers or threads of glass stretched across the inside of the ball.
What's the origin of witch balls?
Witch balls are believed to have originated as one of many folk practices involving objects designed to protect the home. Originally they were made of clear glass and hung in cottage windows in England in the 1600 and 1700s to ward off evil spirits and spells. By the 1800s witch balls crossed the Atlantic to New England. They also spread to other parts of Europe, being found in Italy, France, and Constantinople in the early 1900s outside of drugists' shops.
Over time, glassblowers started to make witchballs in their spare time in the hot shop, adding colours, shapes, and patterns to the balls, and their uses shifted from spirtualist to decorative. In the 1840s in Germany and Austria witch balls were commercially blown, placed on wire poles, and set in flower beds, adding colour the garden and catching the sunlight and in America they were also placed on pitchers or jars to keep insects out.
By the 1930s, witch balls had become immensely popular. Thought to harken back to the Victorian era, they were sold in boutiques and adorning the pages of women's magazines. It was around this time as well that they started to attract the attention of artists. With this shift from spirtualist use to decorative use came beliefs as to where one could purchase an "authentic" witch ball, with the true witch balls thought to be found in shops owned by spirtualists.
Why hang a witch ball?
According to legends, the shiny surface of witch balls entice evil spirits into the ball and then the strands of glass inside capture the spirits and keep them from escaping. In other legends, it was thought that witches would see the reflection of their intended victim in the ball and mistakanely curse the reflection instead of the actual person, or evil influences would gather as dust on the surface of the ball and could then be wiped away with regular cleaning.
Today they might be hung for a similar purpose, while for other people they are just a nice way to add a pop of colour and interest to a window or living space.
What about other glass balls that aren't witch balls?
As opposed to having colour all around the ball and meandaring strands of glass within, Tree of Life balls have colourful "leaves" just on the top of the ball and the strands inside resemble a tree trunk and outstretched branches.
These balls and the Tree of Life is considered to be a symbol of personal growth, strength, and beauty — a perfect reminder of where one comes from and how much they can still grow!
Looking for a beautiful piece of blown glass for your own collection? We may have just the thing, or we might be able to make it for you! Explore our online shop or email us at [email protected].
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Witch Ball Folklore
Witch Balls have been very popular since the 18th century. First in England, then in New England, but their actual origin is considered to be much older. For well over 3 centuries hollow glass spheres have been hung in windows to ward off witch's spells, evil spirits and ill fortune. Hanging these decorative glass balls in the window or on the porch is thought to tantalize mischievous spirits which may be threatening a home's tranquillity. The wayward spirit is mesmerized by the ball's reflective beauty. When the spirit touches the sphere it is absorbed and trapped in the web-like strands of the glass inside the ball.
A witch ball or speculum was a device used for scrying or divining things. Sometimes the speculum was a magic mirror, a polished stone, or a crystal ball. Some witches fashioned specula from black bowls filled with water. By gazing into the reflective depths, a witch could find answers to urgent questions, predict future events, or see faraway places. In maritime villages, witches sent out the glass globes fishermen use to hold their nets afloat. The globes were usually made of dark blue or green glass and appeared quite innocuous. Biddy Early, a well-known Irish witch, had a favorite blue glass bottle with which she used to view the future.
Witch Balls measure up to 10 inches in diameter, and are occasionally decorated in enamelled stripes and swirls or varying colors. Some are mirrored for use as convex mirrors. Crystal gazers sometimes claimed they used balls in which the spirits of dead souls had been banished. Therefore, the seer was thought to be dealing with spirits. Hollow glass balls have been suspended in the windows of homes for centuries to ward off evil spirits. Legends say that evil spirits are attracted to the beauty of the ball, and upon touching its surface they are pulled inside and become forever trapped within the glittering web, thus protecting the home from any harm.
Now commonly known as "Witch Balls", these colorful glass balls originated in England during the 18th century, as people hung them in their windows to ward off demons and their evil spells. Witch Balls were originally glass balls used to protect various pieces of glass as they shipped around the world. A glass ball was blown and used as a means to protect the edges of a vase of cup as it was transported. Along the way, collectors began using these leftover pieces of glass as art and the history of the Witch Ball was developed.
Over time the philosophy of what a Witch Ball is and should be has changed and number artists over the years have altered the Witch Ball to include vibrant colors, strands inside, twisting patterns and shape.
We here at Iron Art Glass Designs have been creating Witch Balls for the past 15 years originally starting off by producing designs in six inch diameter and eventually producing our current selection of various shapes and sizes. We currently offer almost a half dozen different Witch Ball shapes and sizes and over 150 different color combinations. We currently offer the largest selection of Witch Balls and colored glass balls anywhere.
Our selection of Witch Balls currently include almost 100 different designs of six inch Witch Balls in various color combinations. We have also expanded our selection of four inch Witch Balls to include almost 50 different color designs. Please browse our inventory often because we are always adding new designs. Our latest Medusa Spirit Balls use a solid color from the bottom that is pulled up to the top to create a mesmerizing sensation that protects your home like ancient times.
Our Witch Balls are blown spherically round and include numerous colors. All of our Witch Balls include blown glass strands that protrude through the bottom of the ball and meet near the top. The majority of our Witch Balls are approximately colored 66% of the glass and include at least three strands. Some designs may vary. All of our Witch Balls are hand blown from recycled glass one at a time. We use a special glass produced only in Germany that provides for vibrant colors that can not be replicated anyone where else.
We offer a 100% buy back guarantee* on all of our Witch Balls. We offer the best selection, price and service when it comes to Witch Balls and we promise you won't be disappointed.
Let the magic of our Witch Balls protect your home.
Inner Lives
Once the spirit is captured, it is believed to be unable to escape and will eventually die or be exorcised. Witch balls are also thought to have a divination aspect to them. Some believe that the patterns and colors inside the glass can reveal omens, messages, and glimpses into the future.
Emotions, Identity, and the Supernatural, 1300–1900
Spheres of Influence: The Magical History of the Witch Ball
A multicoloured nineteenth-century witch ball. © Horniman Museum and Gardens, London.
Witch balls are globes of glass, with a hole in the top, often suspended in doorways or windows. They were made in most glass factories across Europe as glassblowers’ ‘whimsies’ or showpieces and then later sold as decorative items. [1] They appeared in a variety of geographical contexts and had numerous uses, but the name itself refers to the belief that these balls were protective devices that could ward off evil spirits, especially the evil eye and the malevolent influence of the witch.
Beginnings
Garden ornament: Dodo Smith and her ‘Tyrolian’ witch ball in The Sketch (1934).
Initially, the witch ball was a decorative object. Its earliest antecedents were the ‘broad plates of round coloured glass’ placed around the gardens of early modern gentlemen and women ‘for the sun to play upon’. [2] This marks the beginning of the witch ball as a garden ornament – its main use in continental Europe. German and Austrian versions (sometimes simply called kugel) were commercially blown from the 1840s onwards and placed on wire poles, driven into flower-beds, or set atop walls and fences. In some parts of Britain these imports can still be seen. American ‘witch balls’, [3] which date to the mid nineteenth century, were placed upon flared-rimmed vessels such as pitchers and jars in order to keep insects out.
Witch balls became immensely popular in the 1930s. They were sold in well-to-do boutiques and were a common feature in women’s magazines. To many they were an antidote to modernity and evoked a ‘gentle Victorianism’. The Sphere magazine recommended ‘faded chintz chair-covers and a witch-ball’ to impart a degree of ‘charm’ to one’s cottage by the sea. [4] Some people planted their witch balls to make terrariums, others filled them with rocks, glass beads, and water to create shimmering light effects. This latter caprice was marketed as the ‘Wizard Bowl’ – in every respect the same as a witch ball but with a larger aperture at the top. [5]
Detail from M. C. Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), one of several artworks in this period to feature witch balls. ArtStack.
They also started attracting the attention of artists around this time. H. D. Richter exhibited The Silver Witch Ball at the Royal Academy in 1929 to popular acclaim, while a few years later M. C. Escher’s experimentations with witch balls, perspective, and self-portraiture elevated the witch ball to the category of objet d’art.
A witch ball suspended in the house of actress Olive Nedell in Britannia (1 November 1935).
Tales were spun that authentic witch balls were only to be obtained from spiritualists and nomads. In 1924 Petronella O’Donnell was advised that ‘one could buy witch balls in a shop not far off, kept, I believe, by a spiritualist’. [6] Olive Nedell, an actress, and her husband were pictured in a magazine with ‘their only superstition – a dark green witch ball sent to Mr. Nedell by a gipsy youth whom he befriended’. [7] For a particular class of well-to-do consumer, then, these objects were a material expression of their thrilling transactions with those on the ‘occult’ margins of society (albeit in a form that was suitable to their style and taste).
Apotropaic Meanings
The idea that witch balls could offer magical protection appears to be an innovation of the early nineteenth century – but the ways in which they were used drew upon a much older tradition of apotropaic magic and its attendant fear of witchcraft. The name witch ball is probably a corruption of ‘watch ball’ [8] – an allusion to their use in reflecting an extended panorama beyond the usual line of sight – helping people, in essence, to look around corners. [9] This made them especially useful for shopkeepers to spot thieves, for householders to see who was coming up the garden path, or for parents who reportedly hung them in nurseries or above cradles. [10] These prosaic uses unlocked their potential ritual value – from objects of vigilance and observation, ‘watch balls’ became ‘witch balls’, and developed into objects of magical protection.
The oldest example of a witch ball that makes explicit reference to its magical protective properties is in the National Museum of Ireland: ‘[A] Fine old Sapphire-blue glass witch ball… to be suspended from ceilings, and… supposed to ward off evil spirits and witches. English c.1800’. [11] As mentioned, balls were usually placed at liminal points within the home such as windows or doorways, areas that in times past were guarded by witch bottles, daisy wheel marks, or other apotropaic devices. The hollow transparency of witch balls is important, as their evil-averting function was dependent, in some cases, upon their contents. One source from the 1930s records a belief that the ball should be filled with ‘tiny pieces of wool… since it was believed that no witch could cast an evil eye on the owner until she had counted every single bit of wool in the house’. [12] This custom extends to other types of glass containers – three ‘witch bottles’ in Charles Wade’s collection at Snowshill Manor in Gloucestershire, for example, were stuffed full of silk threads, their suspension loops indicating that they were hung up as charms in the home. Interestingly, two of the Snowshill bottles are glass fire-extinguisher vessels; devices used as safeguards against fire and then requisitioned for protection against witchcraft. [13]
An early nineteenth-century witch ball. © National Museum of Ireland, Dublin.
An explanation of the threads inside the witch ball is offered by modern folklore: evil spirits, attracted to the shiny surface of the ball, become mesmerized by the reflection and upon touching it are caught and imprisoned by the strands inside. This notion of a spirit trap with an ‘enmeshing’ function may also explain why many witch balls, especially the Nailsea derivatives, have intricate sprawling line patterns on their surfaces.
The belief that witch balls could protect from ill-wishing is also found in an account from an unknown Dorset hamlet, where a middle-aged man was perplexed to find that he had been bewitched despite the fact that he had always ‘kept [a] witch’s ball in my window’. [14] This story gave currency to the idea that somewhere in rural England every household in the district would hang ‘golden witch ball[s]’ to repel witches. [15] There are many variations regarding the proper meaning and treatment of witch balls. In some accounts the witch, seeing the reflection of her intended victim in the witch ball – and being naturally attracted to the shiny surface – would curse the reflection rather than the intended victim, and so the ball defused the spell. [16] It was also thought that evil influences accumulated as dust on the ball and therefore regular cleaning was necessary. [17]
Edward Lovett, an early twentieth-century banker, collector, and folklorist, reported that witch balls were a common feature in Italy, France, and Constantinople, where they hung ‘as big as footballs’ outside druggists’ shops. [18] The romantic Eastern origins of witch balls were assumed in one newspaper column from 1939, which described how these reflective balls were brought to Europe by the Crusaders, ‘though how they ever got the fragile things home in safety history does not say’. [19]
A witch ball in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem during the first half of the twentieth century. Library of Congress, Washington DC (Public Domain).
Remarkably, a witch ball did indeed hang from a light fitting in front of the iconostasis of the Chapel of the Twelve Apostles in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, from c.1898–1946. The church of St. Hilary’s in south Cornwall also boasted a witch ball – six in fact. In 1932 W. Poynter-Adams visited the church (near St. Michael’s Mount) and to his surprise saw ‘six large silvered glass balls’ hanging between the arches in the chancel. We could interpret these ecclesiastical witch balls as mere decorative whimsies – but Poynter-Adams was told by a parishioner that these reflective objects were in fact ‘witch-watchers… intended to ward off witches from the Reserved Sacrament’.
Divination
Given the belief in their evil-averting properties, it is perhaps unsurprising that witch balls, alongside their spherical cousins crystal balls, were to be found hanging in clairvoyants’ parlours and fortune-tellers’ booths throughout the twentieth century. The Museum of Witchcraft & Magic recently acquired photographs from a visitor, Narelle Sharp, whose grandmother owned a witch ball together with a convex mirror. A family tradition accompanied the objects: ‘The ball should always be hung in sight of the mirror’. The items were used by Narelle’s grandmother in an Eltham china shop after World War II, where she read tea leaves. This modern use of witch balls is intriguing given the context of tasseomancy. Was there a propitious link between the mirror and ball? Did it help the practitioner attain a better reading? Did it disrupt evil influences?
The Eltham china shop in the late 1940s, with the convex mirror and witch ball apparently now displayed for sale. Photo supplied by Narelle Sharp.
Another witch ball was used by Madam Montague Lawrence, who was fined £10 for ‘professing to tell fortunes’, in 1943. Her premises in Sloane Square, Chelsea, were decked out with two crystal balls which she handled during consultations, and what witnesses described as a ‘silver bowl’ on a wooden stand. In an attempt to avoid a guilty verdict, Lawrence claimed that her crystals were only ‘paperweights’ and the large silver object only a ‘witch ball’ – probably a ‘garden globe’ or kugel brought inside to act as a witch ball. [20] According to another piece of folklore witch balls could be of use to the fortune-teller – if the witch ball dims, or becomes cloudy or opaque, it predicted a death. [21]
Bottles, shears, and candles are just some of the domestic items that have been creatively and boundlessly re-appropriated for magical means – it is clear from this brief analysis of witch balls that their meaning is very much in the eye of the beholder.
By gazing into the ball, one may gain insight and guidance on personal matters or foresee upcoming events. Historically, witch balls were hung in windows or near doorways to protect the home and its inhabitants. It was believed that evil spirits and curses would be deterred by the presence of a witch ball, keeping the space safe and secure. The tradition of using witch balls as protective charms has been passed down through generations and is still practiced in some cultures today. In addition to their protective properties, witch balls are also used as decorative ornaments. The vibrant colors and intricate designs of these glass spheres add a touch of beauty and charm to any space. They can be displayed as standalone decorations or as part of a larger collection. Many people also enjoy the mesmerizing effect of the light passing through the glass, creating a soothing and tranquil atmosphere. In conclusion, witch balls have a rich history and diverse meanings. They are symbols of protection, divination, and beauty. Whether used for their spiritual properties or simply appreciated as decorative pieces, witch balls continue to hold significance and intrigue in various cultures around the world..
Reviews for "Witch Balls: Portals to the Otherworldly"
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