Supernatural (50 page)

Again, our horror at the appalling cruelty tends to blind us to the important question of whether any of the thousands of witches who were burned were genuine practitioners of magic—in the sense of the
umbanda
magicians described in the last chapter.
But a case that occurred in North Berwick, in Scotland, in the 1590s raises that question all over again.

What happened was this.
A young maidservant named Gilly Duncan was able to cure various ailments by some form of faith healing.
In 1590 her master David Seaton, deputy bailiff of Tranent, near Edinburgh, tortured her with a rope around her neck to make her ‘confess’ to intercourse with the devil, which eventually she did.
She was handed over to the authorities, and soon confessed that her accomplices—about 70 in number—included many highly respectable citizens of Edinburgh, amongst them one Agnes Sampson, an elderly gentlewoman of good education.
Under prolonged torture, Agnes Sampson finally confessed—although not until her inquisitors found on her a ‘devil’s mark’ in the area of her vagina.
John Fian, a schoolmaster from Saltpans, and two other women, Euphemia Maclean and Barbara Napier, ‘reputed for as civil, honest women as any that dwelled within the city of Edinburgh’, were also accused.
Agnes Sampson now gave a full account of her attempts to bewitch the king—James VI of Scotland (later James I of England)—who, understandably, took an active interest in the proceedings.
Fian confessed under torture, but later managed to escape; when recaptured, he recanted his confession, and the most appalling tortures failed to make him change his mind.
He was strangled and burned.
Euphemia Maclean was burned without being first strangled—probably because she was a Catholic—but Barbara Napier managed to get her sentence delayed on the grounds that she was pregnant, and finally escaped.

Certainly, this sounds like a case of horrifying injustice.
James the First, who wrote a famous
Dœmonologie,
later decided that most witchcraft was superstition, and persecution of witches almost ceased towards the end of his reign.

Fuller examination of the case raises doubts about their innocence.
John Fian had been secretary to the Earl of Bothwell, a man with a reputation for dabbling in black magic, and who had every reason for wanting to kill the king, since he himself was heir to the throne.
James was himself sceptical about the confession of Agnes Sampson until—according to the chronicle
Newes from Scotland
—she took him aside and whispered in his ear certain words that had passed between him and his bride, Anne of Denmark, on their wedding night.
No one but the king and his bride knew what they were.
Naturally, James was convinced.

Agnes Sampson also confessed that she and the others had raised a storm to attempt to drown the King on his way back from Denmark—and indeed, the king
had
almost been drowned in a tremendous storm.
She described how she had tied a toad by its back legs, collected the venom that dripped from it in an oyster-shell, and kept it until some occasion when she could get hold of some of the king’s soiled linen, which would enable her to bewitch him to death, making him feel ‘as if he had been lying upon sharp thorns and ends of needles .
.
.’
The method is reminiscent of the one still used by African witchdoctors.

Fian himself seems to have declared that the devil appeared to him in his cell on the night after his original confession.
Since he had already confessed, he was not under the threat of torture, which again leads to the suspicion that he may not have been as innocent as Robbins assumes.

Montague Summers is, of course, convinced that the witches were guilty as charged.
He writes: ‘The most celebrated occasion when witches raised a storm was that which played so important a part in the trial of Dr Fian and his coven, 1590–91, when the witches, in order to drown King James and Queen Anne on their voyage from Denmark, ‘took a cat and christened it,’ and after they had bound a dismembered corpse to the animal ‘in the night following the said cat was convayed into the middest of the sea by all these witches, sayling in their riddles or cives .
.
.
this donne, then did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not bene seene’.’
It all sounds preposterous enough, particularly ‘sailing in sieves’; but if African witchdoctors can cause rain—or (see
p. 304
)—then Summers could well be basically correct.
There is at least a fifty per cent possibility that Fian was involved in a real witchcraft plot to kill the king; and if witchcraft sometimes works, then we cannot rule out the possibility that Agnes Sampson and her associates really caused the storm which almost wrecked the king’s ship.

And what of this statement of Fian that the Devil appeared to him?
This would seem to brand the confession an invention wrung from him by fear of further torture.
Yet again, we should not assume that this is the only possible explanation.
As we have seen, in his book about magic and witchcraft in Brazil
The Flying Cow,
Guy Playfair advances the theory that he himself has come to accept through the study of many cases that ‘black magic’ involves the conjuring of ‘low grade’ entities or spirits.
And this is, of course, consistent with the view of magic held by witchdoctors and
shamans.
If we are willing to admit, as a possibility, that magic involves non-human entities, then Fian may have believed that he saw—or heard—the Devil on the night after his confession.
We may reject Summers’ view that the Devil actually exists as the adversary of God—after all, most of what we call evil can be regarded as stupidity or the outcome of frustration—but there is a certain amount of evidence in psychical research for ‘mischievous’ entities (who, in many cases, seem to be half-witted).
‘Evil’ spirits may be exhibiting the same kind of stupidity and malevolence as evil human beings.

The same disturbing questions are raised by the extraordinary case of Isobel Gowdie and the Auldearne witches, which took place in Scotland in 1662.

Isobel Gowdie was an attractive, red-headed girl who married a farmer of Lochloy, near Auldearne in Morayshire.
She was childless and her husband is said to have been a stupid and boorish man.
In April 1662, she startled and shocked the elders of the local kirk when she announced that she had been a practising witch for the past fifteen years, had attended Sabbats, had sexual intercourse with the Devil and even killed people by witchcraft.
She was tried at Auldearne, near Inverness, in the summer of 1662, together with others she had mentioned in her confession.
Astonishingly enough, some of these confirmed what she said in detail.

According to Isobel—who made four confessions between April and her trial—she encountered the Devil, a man dressed in grey, when she was travelling between two farms, and she seems to have promised herself to him and agreed to meet him at the church in Auldearne.
She did so, and the Devil stood in the pulpit with a black book in his hand, and made her renounce Jesus.
A woman called Margaret Brodie held her while the Devil sucked blood from her shoulder, making a Devil’s mark, and baptised her.
She described the Devil as a big, black, hairy man, who came to her a few days later and copulated with her.
He would copulate freely with all the female witches, who thoroughly enjoyed it.
(Another of the accused, Janet Breadhead, described how the women sat on either side of the Devil at a meeting, and next, how the Devil copulated with all of them—which, unless he was phenomenally potent, seems to dispose of Margaret Murray’s belief that he was a man dressed in a goat skin.) Sometimes the Devil changed himself to an animal—such as a deer or bull—before he copulated.
It was Isobel who first used the word ‘coven’ of a group of witches, and declared that the number was 13.
She said that each member had a spirit to wait upon her, (or him—there seem to have been male members).
They had a Grand Meeting four times a year.

The confessions become wilder and stranger.
She flew to Sabbats on a little horse.
The witches could change themselves into any shape they wished, such as a cat, a hare, a crow.
They would blast people’s harvests and kill their children—Janet Breadhead says they made clay images of children, which were continually watered and baked until the child died; in this way, she says, they killed two children of the local laird, who was himself later bewitched to death.
Isobel Gowdie says she killed several people using arrows given to her by the Devil, She also described a visit to fairyland, when the Downie Hill opened, and they were all generously fed by the Queen of Faery, who was clothed in white linen.
Afterwards they went shooting with the Devil; Isobel shot a woman, and the others brought down a ploughman.

It is a pity that no trial records have been found, so we have no idea of whether the witches were all sentenced to be burned—most commentators feel reasonably certain that they were, and, given the verdicts in similar trials at the time, this seems highly likely.

The mystery remains.
The whole thing could not have been Isobel’s fantasy, or the others would not have confirmed what she said (no mention of torture is made).
And so we seem to be left with only two possibilities: either that Isobel and her fellow witches were insane, or that the various ‘demons’ were as genuine as the ‘spirits’ conjured up by modern
umbanda
magicians.

By the second half of the 17th century, the witchcraft craze was coming to an end.
In Germany, this was largely due to the influence of Protestantism, and its reaction against the kind of ‘popish’ hysteria that had fuelled the great persecutions of the previous century.
In England and America, ordinary commonsense finally prevailed.

The career of Matthew Hopkins had the effect of virtually ending the witchcraft persecution in England.
Even the Rev.
Montague Summers admits that his insincerity ‘made his name stink in men’s nostrils’, and described him as ‘the foulest of foul parasites, an obscene bird of prey .
.
.’

The career of Hopkins snowballed from his first denunciation of a witch in 1644.
Hopkins was a not-particularly-successful lawyer, son of a clergyman, who moved to the small village of Manningtree in Essex because he was unable to make a living in Ipswich.
It was during the Civil War, East Anglia was on Cromwell’s side, but tensions were considerable.
In March 1644, Hopkins became convinced that there were witches who lived in Manningtree, and that they held meetings close to his house.
He may possibly have been correct—country areas are full of witches.
Hopkins decided that an old woman named Elizabeth Clarke was involved, and denounced her.
She was arrested and stripped, to be searched for devil’s marks.
They discovered, apparently, something like a supernumerary teat.
After being deprived of sleep for days, she confessed to suckling her familiars with it—a spaniel, a rabbit, a greyhound and a polecat.
The witch fever spread through the village, and five other women were arrested.
Four of these confessed readily to possessing familiars.
Thirty-two women were eventually thrown into jail, where four of them died.
Twenty-eight stood trial in a special court at Chelmsford.
Hopkins now had four assistants to help him in routing out witches, and no doubt this taste of power convinced him that he had discovered the road to fame and success.
But it seems fairly certain that he was willing to perjure himself freely from the beginning—he asserted in court that he had seen Elizabeth Clarke’s familiars, and his assistants backed him up.
Nineteen women were hanged, on charges ranging from entertaining evil spirits to bewitching people to death.
Five of these were reprieved, and the remaining eight were thrown back into jail for further investigations.

Before the Chelmsford trial was finished, Hopkins found himself greatly in demand.
In times of war and public misfortune, distractions are welcomed.
Hopkins moved around Essex, finding more witches, and accepting payment for his trouble; at Aldeburgh he was paid £6 for finding a witch, and at Stowmarket the local authorities paid him £23.
In the days when a working wage was sixpence a day, these were large sums.
During his year as witchfinder, Hopkins and his assistants made about £1,000, according to Summers.
In Bury St Edmunds, he played his part in having 200 people arrested; 68 of whom were hanged.
He moved around Suffolk and Norfolk, finding witches in every place that invited him, and in a few that he selected for himself.

In April 1646, a Huntingdon clergyman named Gaule attacked Hopkins from the pulpit and published a pamphlet about his methods of ‘torture’.
Torture of witches was still forbidden by law in England, but Hopkins used other methods—‘pricking’ for Devil’s marks (areas the Devil had touched were supposed to be insensitive to pain), ‘swimming’—which meant that the bound victim was tossed into a pond, and if she floated, she was innocent—and depriving of sleep for days on end, a method still used in ‘brain-washing’.
The pamphlet was widely read, and it turned the tide against Hopkins.
One historian of witchcraft relates that Hopkins was seized by an angry crowd and made to endure the water ordeal.
He was, in any case, a sick man.
He retired to Manningtree, and died there later that year of tuberculosis.

Robbins estimates that Hopkins was responsible for several hundred hangings (witches in England were never burnt, although the North Berwick witches in Scotland were burned for having plotted against the king’s person).
And with his downfall, mass witch trials ceased in England.
In America, the most famous was still to come.
The explosion of superstition and violence that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, is still one of the most puzzling episodes in American history.
For most writers on the case—including Arthur Miller, who dramatised it in
The Crucible
—there is no mystery: a few bored and naughty children became obsessed by the voodoo tales of a black servant, and decided to pretend they were bewitched.
Egged on by the local minister, a man of paranoid tendencies, they accused various people of witchcraft.
The whole thing snowballed until over 200 people were accused, 22 of whom were executed or died in prison.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the hysteria faded away.
And the Salem witchcraft trials virtually ended the ‘witchcraft craze’ in America as the downfall of Matthew Hopkins ended it in England.