The Mystic Messages of Bottle Trees

Blue-glass bottle trees, chiming in the wind, catching the light. Simultaneously inviting with their chiming noises and bright colors… and repelling, when the chiming noises turn into eerie moans. If you live in the American South, or you’ve passed by the Appalachian rural expanse, you may have spotted them. Also called “haint” trees after the particular blue color of the bottles, these part-yard-art, part-occult-practice trees have a long and intriguing history that sprawls back millennia.

If you’re interested in learning more about bottle trees and how you can incorporate them into your practice, keep reading!

What are bottle trees?

Bottle trees are entirely barren from leaves, and empty bottles have been attached to them. The most common way of doing so is by inserting a bottle’s neck fully onto a branch so that the branch supports its weight—although in some cases, people simply hang the bottles from tree branches instead, with string or metal wires.

It’s also not unusual to see a more modern version of bottle trees. In these cases, the “trees” are human-made contraptions made out of tree branches or wooden planks thin enough to accommodate bottles around them.

The idea behind bottle trees is simple but potent: bottle trees are created to keep evil spirits out of one’s home or property. However, bottle trees take this protection/repellent magick one step further: the empty bottles are thought to “trap” evil spirits inside them. And when the wind blows, causing these otherworldly sounds we mentioned above, it is believed to be the moans of evil spirits dying.

There are many different traditions and ways to put up a bottle tree. Some believe specific types of trees work better, like the crape myrtle. The crape myrtle has a significant connection to feminine energy, which would balance the masculine energy of the bottles and the spirits (the same way placing your athame inside your chalice balances the two energies and acts as a symbol of hieros gamos between the goddess and the god).

Other traditions, including many Hoodoo practices, believe that it doesn’t matter what kind of tree it is, as long as the bottle tree is placed at a crossroads. Others use glass balls or globes instead of bottles with a similar function: they reflect the evil spirits back onto themselves, canceling them out.

The color of the bottles is traditionally blue, although in some cases, we also see white, red, and green bottle trees. Blue, as a color, carries energetic links to both water and the sky, facilitating (in Hoodoo magick) a link between heaven and earth. Furthermore, blue represents divinity, masculine energy, protection, and safety in many cultures.

The underlying idea behind the practice of putting up bottle trees is that the evil spirits are naturally very curious. They would be attracted to the sunlight that flickers inside the bottles, enter the bottles, and subsequently get trapped in there and ultimately be banished by the light of the sun. To ensure this, many practitioners traditionally grease the throats of the bottles with fat or place stones or graveyard dirt inside the bottles. All these act as “trapping” essences for the spirits.

The history of bottle trees

The lore and tradition of bottle trees are long and winding. To understand it fully, we need to go all the way back to 1,600 BCE, when hollow glass bottles started appearing in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Back then, glass was opaque and usually heavily colored, often in blue and yellow hues, as ancient glassmakers used to crush cobalt into the melting glass to give it color. Perhaps because of its durability and ability to take many different shapes, glass was frequently used to create urns and vessels that contained sacred ointments. Glass urns were often sealed in sarcophagi as part of the burial gifts to pharaohs.

It’s not certain if it’s the connection to pharaohs and the afterlife that first gave our Pagan ancestors the idea of “spirits being trapped in glass.” However, by the time clear glass was invented in Alexandria around 100 CE, people were already sharing stories about spirits, imps, and djinn that lived inside glass bottles—or that they could be captured inside glass bottles. It is thought that the tale of Aladdin and his magic lamp can be traced back to this belief. When clear glass became more common, our Pagan ancestors started using it to capture or repel bad spirits, as they believed that its ability to reflect sunlight made it superior to opaque glass.

However, the art of bottle-tree making didn’t truly flourish until the 9th century CE in the Kongo region in Central Africa, near the mouth of the Congo River. Kongo cosmology views the crossroads as a liminal place, a place of both power and danger—and erecting protection trees there was one of the ways people had to combat and trap evil spirits. In fact, the later idea of “the devil in the crossroads” and blues musicians making deals with him stems from Kongo myths. These protection trees weren’t always made with bottles: people would attach anything from pieces of clay or glass to broken pots to drive away evil spirits. Around the 17th century, the use of specific containers that would be placed on trees, called minkisi, became prominent. Minkisi are thought to have strong masculine energy, a connection to the earth and sky, and would often have white or red colors.

So how do we get from this to the blue bottle trees of the American South? This answer to this question (just like the answer to many other questions that pertain to the occult practices of the African diaspora in the US) is, sadly, colonialism and slavery. With the beginning of the slave trade in the 16th century, enslaved people from Kongo found themselves in the Caribbean and, eventually, in the American South. As many of them were forced to work in indigo plantations, they started using the haint blue color as a way to combat “haints” and “boo hags” (evil spirits who escaped at night to possess, paralyze, injure, or even kill people). The blue color was said to trick these haints into believing they’ve stumbled into water, which they couldn’t cross, or sky. That’s when hanging blue bottles from trees became the norm.

Bottle trees today

Today, bottle trees have crossed over from the realm of mysticism to that of art. Although many are still used with their original purpose in mind (there’s a big tradition in the American South of using the haint blue color in general to repel evil), more and more bottle trees show up in places like East Texas, southeastern Arkansas, and southern Alabama, as an aesthetic choice. There are also other local folk beliefs about these trees, for instance, that they can “scare birds away” or that they can “bring rain.”

Working with bottle trees: what you need to know

If you feel called to work with bottle trees, there are some things to consider. For starters: most Wiccans don’t believe in inherently evil spirits. We believe that there is a balance in the world, as Above so Below, and that most spirits and energies out there are a mix of benevolent and malevolent energies. However, protection magick is completely acceptable within the Wiccan Rede, as it doesn’t actively harm anyone—it just protects you and your physical space from entities and energies that are unwanted. With that in mind, you can use bottle trees the same way you use windchimes, dream-catchers, salt, or other perimeter-guarding magick.

On the practical side, you need to figure out if you’ll be working with a natural tree, a dead tree, or a collection of plans/branches you’ll arrange into a desired shape. The practice works with all these alternatives, but if you choose the latter, you’ll need to ensure you energetically cleanse and charge each plank or branch with your intention beforehand. A good idea would be to place these planks or branches in a circle and leave them outside for one to three days, at the place where you’ll be erecting your bottle tree so that they can get naturally charged by the light of the sun and the moon, and build a connection to the earth.

If you choose to work with a natural tree, dead or alive, pick a type of tree that resonates with you—it doesn’t have to be crape myrtle if you don’t have this kind of tree where you live. You’ll need to cut or clean some of its branches so that they are long enough to hold the bottles and are far enough apart that they won’t clang together. If you want to use any kind of substance, like grease or dirt in the bottles to trap spirits, make sure to charge it first energetically. Avoid any substances like honey that could attract (and trap) birds and insects.