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.
The case
may not be as simple as it looks. Even Rossell Hope Robbins admits ‘motives are very elusive’. Clearly, these children were not really ‘bewitched’. But they behaved in some ways like the ‘possessed’ nuns of Loudun or Aix-en-Provence, or like some teenagers who are the ‘focus’ of poltergeist occurrences.
The Revd. Samuel Parris was not a popular man, for he seems to have been an unpleasant character, mean and bad-tempered. He had brought with him from Barbados a number of black servants, including a woman called Tituba, and her husband, ‘John Indian’. During the long winter evenings, Tituba talked to the children about witches and spirits. His daughter Elizabeth, aged 9, her cousin Abigail Williams, aged 11, and a friend called Ann Putnam, 12, soon began behaving very oddly, having convulsions, screaming and talking disconnected nonsense. A doctor called in to ‘cure’ Elizabeth said he thought she was bewitched. Other ministers were consulted, and decided that the Devil was involved. Questioned—and beaten—by Parris, Tituba agreed that the Devil had inspired her to ‘work mischief’ against the children, and named a pipe-smoking beggar woman named Sarah Good as an accomplice. The children also mentioned Sarah Good as well as a bedridden old woman, Sarah Osborne. When a magistrate named Hathorne asked the girls about their convulsions, they began to moan with pain, and declared that the ‘spirit’ (or spectre) of Sarah Good was biting and pinching them. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne both denied in court that they knew anything about witchcraft, but Tituba admitted it all with a certain relish; she went on expanding her confessions for three days. Tituba declared that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne had been present at a witches’ Sabbat, and added that there were two more local women whom she did not know. This caused widespread gossip and speculation. 12-year-old Ann Putnam put an end to this by declaring that one of the witches was a woman called Martha Cory—who had laughed unbelievingly when the girls threw their convulsions—and that the other was a saintly old lady named Rebecca Nurse. A farmer named Proctor—another sceptic—was also accused.
The whole area was now in the grip of a witchcraft scare; people were afraid to go out after dark because witches were supposed to be able to turn themselves into animals or night-birds—a remnant of legends of werewolves and vampires. Eight more local children became ‘afflicted’ and screamed out the names of ‘witches’ who were tormenting them. A woman named Bridget Bishop—who had a reputation for being ‘fast’—was tried and executed in June 1692. Sarah Osborne died in prison, but Sarah Good was tried and executed, together with four others, in July. A minister named George Burroughs was denounced, and he was also tried and executed.
The more hysteria increased, the more the girls—now eleven of them—seemed to be tormented by devils. By September, the death toll had increased to 20, and one unfortunate man—Giles Corey—was literally pressed to death under enormous weights in an effort to force him to confess. He refused (although it would have saved his life) because his goods would have been forfeit to the state, and he had no intention of dying a pauper. His wife was hanged as a witch.
The various girls were called to neighbouring towns to identify witches, and it looked as if the trials and executions would spread to Andover and Boston. The Andover magistrate declined to sign more than 40 warrants and had to flee with his wife to escape being tried as a witch. Then the girls began to overreach themselves. They named the wife of the governor, Sir William Phips, as a witch, and the president of Harvard College; the magistrates told them sternly that they were mistaken, and this was the beginning of the end of the persecutions. When Governor Phips returned from fighting Indians on the Canadian border, he dismissed the court and released many of the accused. In further trials, ‘spectral evidence’—the notion that the disembodied spirits of witches could torment their victims—was disallowed, and only three people out of 52 were condemned. Phips reprieved them, released all others from prison, and the Salem craze ended abruptly about a year after it began. One of the girls, Ann Putnam, later confessed that she had been ‘deluded by Satan’ when she accused Rebecca Nurse and others. The Reverend Parris, now attacked and denounced, left Salem with his family. Abigail Williams, according to legend, became a prostitute.
Even Montague Summers agrees that the Salem trials were the result of hysteria and the ‘diseased imaginings of neurotic children’. But he was convinced that there is positive evidence of involvement in witchcraft in a few of the cases. It seems probable that George Burroughs, Bridget Bishop and Martha Carrier were members of a coven—although they had nothing to do with ‘bewitching’ the children.
And what about the children? All writers on the affair assume that they were mischievous, ‘prankish’, and that the whole thing snowballed out of a harmless game. But what was this game? The answer, fairly certainly, is some form of ‘magic’. Tituba was familiar with voodoo and obeah. And the essence of voodoo rituals—as David St Clair emphasises in Drum and Candle and Guy Playfair in The Flying Cow—is the evocation of ‘low grade’ spirits to do the bidding of the magician. The three children, bored with the long winter in the dreary New England village, undoubtedly ‘tried out’ what Tituba had taught them. Their intentions were harmless enough—rather like a modern child playing with a ouija board or automatic writing. But two of them at least were at the dangerous age when children become the focus of poltergeist phenomena—Ann Putnam was twelve and looked older. We do not know very much about ‘possession’, and the usual theory is that it is pure hysteria; but again, anyone who takes the trouble to read T.K. Oesterreich’s classic Possession: Demoniacal and Other, or Martin Ebon’s anthology Exorcism: Fact not Fiction will see that there is a very thin dividing line between ‘possession’ and being a focus of poltergeist activity. This is a matter to which we shall return in the next chapter.
The storm that ended the witchcraft craze in France emphasises once again that witchcraft can have a genuinely sinister face.
In 1673, during the reign of Louis XIV, two priests informed the police in Paris that a number of penitents had asked absolution for murdering their spouses. No names were mentioned, because of the secrecy of the confessional, but it alerted the Chief of Police, Nicholas de la Reynie. What was happening, it seemed, was that a ring of fortune-tellers and ‘sorcerers’ were supplying ‘succession powders’—a euphemism for poisons—to wealthy men and women who preferred lovers to matrimonial entanglements.
De la Reynie could only keep his ear to the ground. It took him four years to fit together the clues that led him to the recognition that there was an international ‘poisons ring’—much as there are now drugs rings—headed by men of influence. A remark of a fortune-teller, Marie Bosse, about being ready to retire when she had arranged three more poisonings, provided the lead he had been waiting for. A disguised policewoman consulted Marie Bosse on how she could get rid of her husband, and made an arrest when she was sold poison. Many poisons were found in Marie Bosse’s house. She and her husband and two sons were arrested; also, another fortune-teller known as La Vigoreux, who shared a communal bed with the family.
Interrogations began to reveal the names of their customers, and the revelation shocked the King. It seemed that half the aristocracy were trying to poison one another, and that two ladies had even approached another fortune-teller for means of getting rid of one of his own mistresses Louise de la Vallière.
But this was not simply a matter of murder or attempted murder. The customers were also convinced that the fortunetellers could produce charms and magic potions to secure the affections of their admirers, and apparently had no objection if the Devil was involved.
Stern and decisive action was called for—after all, the king might be the next victim . . . He created a special commission, a kind of Star Chamber, which sat in a room draped in black curtains and lit with candles—hence the Chambre Ardente—the lighted (or burning) chamber.
What made it so frightening was that the methods of poisoning were so subtle. A Madame de Poulaillon, who wanted to kill her aged husband so she could marry her young l
over, had been impregnating his shirts with arsenic, which would cause symptoms similar to those of syphilis; she would then rub the sores with a ‘healing ointment’ that would kill him in ten weeks—and there would be no suspicion.
The chief defendants were Marie Bosse, La Vigoreux, an abortionist known as La Lepère, and a well known fortune-teller called Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin. La Vigoreux and Marie Bosse were quickly condemned—on May 6,1678—to be burnt alive and one son, Frangois Bosse, hanged. La Voisin was horribly tortured, and, when she refused to confess to poisoning, burnt alive in an iron chair—Mme de Sevigné described in a letter how the old woman cursed violently and threw off the straw half a dozen times, until the flames became too strong and she disappeared in them.
All this was kept secret; one reason being that the king’s mistress Mme. de Montespan was deeply involved. And more investigation revealed that various priests had performed Black Masses and even sacrificed babies to the Devil. A hunchback, the Abbé Guibourg used as an altar the naked body of a woman, placing the chalice on her belly; Mme. de Montespan had often served as the altar. A baby would then be sacrificed by having its throat cut, and the body thrown into an oven. La Voisin confessed at her trial that she had disposed of 2,500 babies like this. On another occasion, Mme. des Oillets came to make a charm for the king, accompanied by a man. The priest said that sperm from both was necessary, but since Mme. des Oillets was menstruating, he accepted a few drops of menstrual blood from her, while the man masturbated into the chalice.
Many other priests proved to be involved, and it became clear that an alarming number of churchmen had no objections to dealings with the Devil. One had consecrated a stone altar in a brothel, another strangled a baby after baptising it with oil reserved for Extreme Unction, another copulated with the girl who was serving as an altar in full view of his audience; another fortune teller described how she had sacrificed her own new-born baby at a Black Mass.