Witch Marks and Ritual Design: Magic Returns to the Studio

Two exhibitions on magic and design opened last week at Mudac, the applied arts museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Both run until April 11.

"Hocus Pocus: Design of the Invisible" examines the techniques used by illusionists and spiritualists since the late 19th century. "Encounterology: Design for Magical Worlds" focuses, in the words of the museum's news release, on "new ways of connecting with living beings, non-human entities and unseen worlds." Designers around the world, the shows argue, are drawing on folklore and putting new twists on archaic symbols and rituals.

What did Jay Osgerby find in a 16th-century building?

The British designer Jay Osgerby discovered the pull of folk magic firsthand. Several years ago, he was renovating a 16th-century cart lodge in County Hampshire, England. His builders uncovered geometric carvings on an oak beam. A local woodworker identified them as "witch marks" made by the original carpenters.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, such marks were commonly incised near doors, windows and chimneys, particularly in buildings next to churches. The name comes from the popular belief that they warded off evil spirits.

"It's that moment when the skin goes up on the back of your neck," Osgerby recalled of the unveiling.

His building, as it happens, sits next to a Norman church, and the area is heavy with dark folklore. In the 1950s, a resident at the nearby manor house requested a property-tax reduction based on sightings of the ghost of a suicidal chambermaid. Osgerby is staying put, and so are the witch marks. "There's no way I'm going to sand those away," he said.

Why are designers reaching back to talismans?

A few centuries ago, talismans and rituals served as the home security systems of their time, offering feelings of protection against encroaching terrors. The article compares them to Ring security cameras. Modern strategies to repel danger have become less supernatural, but lately there has been growing enchantment with archaic symbols and practices.

The Italian tradition offers a concrete case. In premodern Italy, and sometimes to this day, salt was routinely placed in the corners of rooms to discourage negative energies, and large ceramic masks were used to blow evil out of the house. Valentina Ciuffi, a design curator and consultant, noted these practices in explaining the design interest.

Whether there was merit in these practices was "beside the point," Ciuffi said. The value lay in the communal, ritualistic gesture.

What does this mean for design?

The takeaway is plain. Designers are treating protective ritual not as superstition to outgrow, but as a design language to reuse — communal gestures, carved symbols, and objects charged with meaning. The Mudac shows, open through April 11, give that current a museum platform, and Osgerby's preserved witch marks show it reaching into contemporary British architecture itself.