By Charlie Laidlaw
It’s that time of year when our thoughts turn to Santa Claus, turkey and how to keep Aunt Mabel off the sherry. But we’ve also recently celebrated, if that’s the right word, another anniversary of hubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
As we approach Christmas, an arbitrary date that the church plonked down on 25 December to cover the pagan Yule, it’s worth considering how witchcraft and Christianity have an interwoven story that, despite being refined over the centuries to harmless cliché, also defines something less palatable about ourselves.
That is especially pertinent at Christmas when it’s joy to the world and all good things to mankind, because – only a few weeks ago – Halloween was a reminder of a rather less tolerant attitude, and that by defining our scapegoats we also define ourselves.
The witchcraft persecutions of 16th- and 17th-century Scotland offer a more contemporary Christmas parable. Rather than goodwill and forgiveness, the real story is one of social exclusion and intolerance. The same intolerance we still heap on racial or religious minorities and which, in Europe, reached a zenith in Hitler’s Germany.
Simply, we still demonise those we blame for society’s ills, whether they be hoodies, Muslims, gays, junkies, bankers, single mothers or asylum seekers – and through their exclusion define those values we think are important to us. Most recently, it was this summer’s rioters, given lengthy custodial sentences designed to underline our revulsion and their exclusion.
Over the Halloween period, in every supermarket and corner shop, there were contemporary depictions of the witch: masks that portrayed her as a warty old crone with unkempt hair and, perched on her head, a spiky bonnet. Kate Moss she certainly isn’t, and her very ugliness makes her evil – another parable that disability rights groups have been fighting for years.
Those traditional images of the warty crone define witchcraft as essentially Satanic: a pact between its followers and the devil himself. By defining the ugly witch as our annual scapegoat, we are defining the essential goodliness of Christianity and its constant struggle to fight the good fight.
It’s an image of evil that owes much to Shakespeare’s Macbeth – the crones around the cauldron chucking in eye of newt and toe of frog. However, it’s likely that Shakespeare was also poking a bit of fun: eye of newt and toe of frog are actually herbs that were used in a contemporary cough remedy.
But, like all good clichés, it’s an image that has stuck, reinforced through the Brothers Grimm, Snow White and the Wizard of Oz, and constantly regurgitated in books, films and the TV. (The only real exception was Elizabeth Montgomery in the 1960s sitcom Bewitched.)
Witchcraft started out as prehistoric religion, when primitive people peered from their caves and tried to comprehend the universe. Their early gods were an attempt to make sense of the infinite, in a world that was both threatening and magical. That search for the infinite has been going on ever since. Only the gods have changed.
In Britain, those early gods were Cernunnos, the horned god, and the moon goddess Diana, although images of a horned god are also found across much of mainland Europe and have an echo in both Roman and Greek mythology. The wee god Pan who gave his name to our panic, probably gave Cernunnos his horns and, later, gave the Christian church a marketing opportunity.
The early inhabitants of our islands respected the changing seasons, finding resonance in the turning earth. The old calendar is reflected in those earthy realities: Candlemas or Imbolg, May Eve or Bealtaine, Lammas or Lughnasadh and Halloween or Samhain. Four other sabbats at the equinoxes and solstices made up the ancient calendar.
Early witchcraft was a rudimentary and localised religion, bound up in fertility and survival – the two over-riding concerns for our species, then as now. Way back then, society meant only the village you lived in. Abroad was the next village. The other side of the world was ten miles down the road, if there was a road. The concept of organised religion or ordered society was simply a contradiction in terms.
But, by degrees, the world progressed. The concept of society developed; so too the idea of established religion, which quickly began to stamp out the faithless religions that had gone before. The certainty of the new religions, notably Christianity in Europe, made it inevitable that nonconformity would pay a price.
However, paying the price took a while to come. In the early years of Christian imperialism, the church much preferred to assimilate by stealth. For example, until 834, All Hallows was on 13 May – it was moved to 31 October by Pope Gregory IV to overlay the older pagan festival. So too, of course, Christmas itself.
Witchcraft’s journey from early acceptance to demonic intolerance took several centuries. In eighth-century Saxony, the death penalty existed for anyone killing a witch. In 11th-century Hungary, Charlemagne decreed that there was no legal remedy against witches, “since they do not exist.”
Bit by bit, the church flexed its muscles and tolerance was chipped away. By the 15th century in Hungary, the memory of Charlemagne now dimmed, a first offender found guilty of witchcraft was made to stand in the town square wearing a Jew’s cap, a symmetrical punishment alongside Europe’s other principal scapegoat.
Indeed, in many parts of Europe, the social exclusion of the Jews was only matched by the social exclusion of witches. It was merely a matter for individual societies to pick the scapegoat who best suited their particular circumstances. Intolerance, stoked by Renaissance enlightenment, became the catalyst that fuelled a dual persecution of the Jew and the witch across Europe.
In the Alps and Pyrenees they burned witches, in Spain they burned Jews – for the simple crime of being either a witch or a Jew. In 14th- and 15th-century Germany, it was the Jews who suffered; by the 16th century it was the witches. In the 20th century, it was the turn of the Jew again, the cycle of persecution turning full circle in the ovens of Auschwitz.
The witch persecution simply reinvented Cernunnos as the other horned god, Satan, neatly avoiding the fact that Satanism is a corruption of Christianity, not of witchcraft. In the wiccan creed, there is no equivalent of the devil. However, two horns bad, no horns good: another cliché to demonise nonconformity.
As often or not it was the local wise woman who suffered first. This local worthy had, from earliest times, been doctor, pharmacist and midwife. Now it became a calling with a bleak future. Indeed, there is some evidence that during the witch persecutions women started giving birth on their backs as a male-dominated medical profession took over – and decreed it more decorous for women to give birth lying down.
The epidemic was self-fulfilling because the more of them you tortured, the more you found. In Scotland, unlike England, judicial torture was allowed – and who wouldn’t confess and name all their friends and relations when their fingers and toes were being crushed by the pennywinkis? In England, the witch persecution was relatively mild. In England, another difference, witches were hanged.
All that was required in Scotland for a guilty verdict was for the accused to look nervous. If the court was in any doubt, dooking was a favourite route to justice. You chucked the poor unfortunate into running water and, if she floated (most of the witch victims were women), she was guilty. Such was the fate of Elsie Peat in 1589: she floated in Edinburgh’s Nor’ Loch and was then taken to the castle esplanade to be strangled and burned.
In East Lothian, the witchcraft epidemic was particularly severe. Many were either carted off to Edinburgh or burned more locally, notably at Spott, near Dunbar, where a stone still commemorates the village’s grisly history. In the Highlands, relatively few witches met a fiery fate. Highlanders, it seems, had better things to worry about.
James VI of Scotland swept away the distinction between good and bad witches, a policy that he also pursued on his accession to the English throne. The epidemic only receded as judicial torture fell out of favour. By the time the last witch was killed in Scotland, in 1722, the persecution had claimed some 3,500 victims.
The last person to be prosecuted for witchcraft was Scottish housewife Helen Duncan, jailed for nine months in 1944 because, as a spiritualist, she seemed to know too much about the war effort. The last Witchcraft Act in the UK was passed in 1951. In other parts of the world, notably Africa, witches are still feared and still persecuted.
The cult of the scapegoat is alive and kicking, as Sir Fred Goodwin knows only too well. But the trouble is that by defining scapegoats we are also defining our own intolerances, and looking for somebody to blame. Sir Fred should have seen opprobrium coming a mile off.
But behind the clichés we should remind ourselves that several thousand Scots died in the witch persecutions, innocent victims of a society that still needs to find its hapless scapegoats. In there, as we scrape Aunt Mabel off the floor, is a Christmas message worth remembering.
– Charlie Laidlaw is a director of Laidlaw Westmacott Communications, the Edinburgh-based PR firm.
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