The seventeenth-century witchcraft confessions of Isobel Gowdie, a crofter’s wife from Auldern in eastern Scotland, are extraordinary on a number of levels. They are first and foremost among the most fantastic, lengthy, and detailed of any European witchcraft confessions, combining vivid personal narratives of fairy encounters and spell-work with darker, diabolical material. They have long puzzled historians, leading some to conclude that Isobel must have suffered from mental illness. Despite, or perhaps because of, their atypical nature, they were among those most cited by Margaret Murray, the Egyptologist-turned-historian whose 1921 book The Witch Cult in Western Europe argued that witchcraft was an ancient pre-Christian fertility religion persecuted as devil-worship by early modern church and state authorities. In turn, Murray’s thesis inspired the emergence of modern Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca, one of today’s fastest-growing religious movements. Many Wiccan elements in fact derive, through Murray, from Isobel’s confessions, including the word “coven” for a group of witches, the idea that covens ideally consist of thirteen individuals, and even specific formulas that have become part of modern Wiccan rituals. In many ways, therefore, Isobel Gowdie has had a tremendous influence on modern history and folklore—arguably more than any other victim of the European witch hunts.
In this bold and imaginative book, Emma Wilby attempts to understand Isobel by taking us deeply into her culture and spiritual worldview. Using primary historical documents, she begins by contextualizing the four confessions, given over a period of six weeks in 1662, during which Isobel was imprisoned and repeatedly questioned by a number of local ministers and landholders in the kirk assizes. With meticulous attention to detail, she reconstructs Isobel’s life as a poor, illiterate farmwife: her cultural horizons within the fermtoun, or small agro-pastoral community where she lived; her spiritual worldview, which combined Christianity with many aspects of folklore rooted in earlier cosmologies; and the likely sequence of events that led to her arrest and imprisonment. Wilby gives equally careful attention to the personalities and agendas of the men who questioned her, showing how a unique combination of personal, religious, and political ideologies came together in the small interrogation room, culminating in her remarkable performance.
Of great interest to folklorists is Wilby’s assertion that Isobel was probably a gifted performer of legends whose wide repertoire, complete with plots, rhymes, and verbal formulas reminiscent of those of the ballad corpus, is reflected in her unusually dramatic and detailed narrative style. The first part of the book is essentially a performative analysis of the confessions in the micro- and macro-contexts in which they took place. Wilby makes good use of recent scholarship on false memory and forced confession to show how under extreme anxiety and pressure, elements of folk narrative may come to be experienced as memories by the victim. Here Wilby deftly shows readers how notions from folklore and vernacular religion syncretized with emerging ideas about diabolical witchcraft to create new kinds of narrative themes.
But Wilby’s most controversial claim is that Isobel may have been part of a shamanistic dream cult, akin to the Friulian benandanti documented by Carlo Ginzburg (1983) and the Sicilian donne di fuori (Gustav Henningsen 1990), who also fell afoul of the witch persecutions. These groups reported journeying in spirit to gatherings where they battled evil sorcerers for the fertility of the fields, or to the homes of their neighbors, where they feasted, danced, made merry, and healed the sick accompanied by fairies and spirits of the dead. Wilby defines shamanism broadly as the practice of magic that includes entering into alternate states of consciousness to experience visionary phenomena (252). She argues that Isobel’s visions of visiting the fairies and entering the homes of her neighbors unbeknownst to them belong to a similar body of European folklore. Isobel, however, also reported decidedly harmful doings, such as killing neighbors by shooting them with elf-arrows at the devil’s behest. Using comparative data from non-Western societies, Wilby argues that shamanism can also involve darker practices, such as harmful counter-magic, illness-transfer, and a kind of fatalistic culling of the human population, whereby those who are to die are randomly selected and spiritually killed by the shaman. Wilby asserts that this kind of belief complex may have existed in Scotland well into the seventeenth century, where it intermingled with demonology introduced by Christianity to produce the kinds of narratives that emerged in Isobel’s confession and those of other accused witches.
While Wilby’s interpretation is elegant, thought-provoking, and satisfying, in that it explains many facets of Isobel’s confessions that have otherwise remained opaque to modern readers, there are aspects of it that raise significant doubt. While cultural comparisons have their uses, they tend to work best when the cultures being compared have a certain number of similarities. Wilby draws from cultures as divergent as Corsican shepherds, South American kanaimà, and New Guinea’s Sambia, which differ significantly from that of seventeenth-century Scotland. Furthermore, the hypothesis that Isobel may have experienced her visions as part of a dream cult seems highly speculative. Legends of fairies and devils such as those that emerged in witchcraft confessions can best be compared to modern ones about space aliens and satanic cults. While there are significant numbers of people today who report having had direct contact with space aliens, or having suffered from satanic ritual abuse, there is no evidence that they belong to any sort of dream cult. It is not necessary for a dream cult to exist in order to have legend material emerge in the spiritual visions of individuals; that is simply how legends behave.
Nonetheless, no other author to date has come up with such a cohesive interpretation of Isobel’s confessions. In the end, this book does what good research should: provide us with provocative, original interpretations and raise questions for further exploration. Wilby’s book will be of great interest to folklorists, anthropologists, historians of witchcraft, and of course modern Pagan Witches.
WORKS CITED
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1983. The Night Battles. London: Routledge.
Henningsen, Gustav. 1990. The Ladies from the Outside. In Bengt Ankarloo & Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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[Review length: 1012 words • Review posted on June 9, 2011]