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Kristof SmeyersImage of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, featuring the "Spellbound" exhibition.  Photo by permission of the author.Enteringthe ‘Spellbound’ exhibition, you are confronted with a ladder leaning against awall like a menacing question mark. There is no avoiding this ladder. Do youwalk under it or do you go round? Even before you are inside the Ashmolean’sexhibition space, ‘Spellbound’ asks big questions about magic, ritual, andwitchcraft. The ladder is a clever prelude: it shows how magical thinking isnot part of a past inhabited by our ‘superstitious’ predecessors, but smuglypoints out that we live in a magical world today (and will still do so tomorrow).The ladder sets the tone: visitors are encouraged to engage with their ownmagical thinking. By the time you have made your decision, you know not toapproach the magical objects in the exhibition as unenlightened remnants ofdelusions and misconceptions. They are, instead, intrinsic parts of people’s ‘innerlives’—not incidentally, research from the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity and theSupernatural, 1300-1900 lies at the foundation of the exhibition. ‘Spellbound’ stretches out across three thematic exhibition spaces divided between learned magic, witchcraft, and folk magic, though they are best experienced in dialogue with each other: retracing one’s steps between rooms can help make sense of some of the more enigmatic objects, and help one draw emotional or sensory connections of one’s own. Together, the spaces immerse the visitor in more than eight centuries of magical thinking and feeling, simultaneously encouraging us to reflect on our own thoughts and feelings. The thematic set up invites us to draw connections across ages and cultures without, importantly, trying to convince us of a ‘universalist’ interpretation of magic. Its innovative approach—across themes and ages—raises questions of its own.How do you create an exhibition that aims to capture interiority and emotions,in particular when those emotions and their related practices are related tosubjects as wilfully elusive as the magical and supernatural? The invisible isa tricky thing to display in a glass case of a museum. Thankfully for thecurators (and for us), magic has been captured in a wide variety of writingsand objects—sometimes literally—for example, the small flask which famouslycontains a witch came with a warning from the woman who donated it to the PittRivers Museum in the early twentieth century: ‘…if you let him out there’ll bea peck o’ trouble.’ In fact, several objects in ‘Spellbound’ hail from thecabinets of Pitt Rivers and are re-imagined in what at first glance seems likea more sterile and modern museum environment. The supernatural and the magical,so this exhibition convincingly shows in the form of hundreds of things, wereprofoundly material categories. A second question that arises when looking at the many, very differentobjects is: How do you recreate a museum context in which a worn shoe or afeather can be ‘seen’ and ‘experienced’ by visitors as magical and emotional,ideally without having to read essay-length labels that explain itssignificance for the person who made it, kept it, or used it? Labels are used sparingly,and to effect. The meaning and emotional significance attributed to everydayobjects instead becomes apparent when you take the time to look. Objects ofmagic show signs of emotional practices throughout the ages: pages of grimoireswere read until they fell apart, things were carved, bound, charmed, pierced,tied, burnt, scratched, bottled. &#160;In other instances, the fact that they were kept is revealing in itself:the worn leather of a shoe found concealed under floorboards by homeowners, forexample, attests to a patina of emotional and magical meaning that remainsvivid despite—or because—of its mystifying character. The accompanyingcatalogue poignantly quotes Sara Ahmed’s Thecultural politics of emotions on how emotions ‘stick’ to objects, whetherwe recognise them as magically material like the steel of a horse shoe and theobsidian of John Dee’s black mirror—or not. It is to the curators’ credit thatvisitors are compelled to figure out precisely how a shoe or corset were magical. That materiality becomesparticularly powerful when the exhibition lets different kinds of objectscommunicate with one another, as in the case of the Boy with Coral painting and the piece of red coral depicting StMichael defeating the devil. Several modern art installations beautifullyenrich the visitor’s sense of wonder as they wander between objects.St Michael © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Boy with Coral © Norfolk Museum Services. Both images courtesy of the author.‘Spellbound’ makes clear how structures of magical thinking remain vibrant and flexible; they are not, nor were they ever paradigmatic, rigid belief systems. Rather, they constitute of pragmatic, idiosyncratic amalgams of beliefs, practices, and objects that made sense to individuals and shaped communities. They are profoundly human. This popular and charming exhibition will do much to rid us of the persistent dismissal of magical thinking as ‘superstition’ and to begin to take people’s experiences—past and present—seriously. Touch wood.Kristof Smeyers (Twitter: @kristof_smeyers) works as a doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. His research attempts to untangle the grey areas between science and religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by focusing on supernatural religious phenomena in Britain and Ireland. 