Witches

  Even now Gilles continued to assault and kill children. His last murder was committed in August 1440, he had a page-boy suit made for a boy who entered his service, but the child was quickly assaulted and killed. The corpse was burnt.

  In September 1440, Gilles was arrested, and taken to Nantes. His trial began on the 13 of October, 1440. The indictment was forty nine paragraphs long, one of which declared that for fourteen years ‘possessed by the Evil One’, he had ‘took, killed and cut the throats of many children, boys and girls’. The indictment insisted that Gilles’s crimes had begun in 1426; Gilles himself insisted it was 1433, and at this point he had no reason to lie.

  At first, Gilles answered all charges with arrogance and defiance. But after being subjected to strong moral pressure and threat of excommunication, he caved in and recognised the competence of the court. The Duke and Bishop must have heaved a sigh of relief; if Gilles had persisted in refusing to co-operate, he would almost certainly have escaped.

  The prosecutor representing the secular authorities tried hard to make Gilles say that his crimes were inspired by the Devil; but Gilles insisted—truthfully—that ‘he did them in accordance with his own imagination’. Nevertheless, he seemed to be willing to confess everything and to throw himself on the mercy of the court. He shed tears and begged the forgiveness of the parents of the children he had killed—the charge mentioned a hundred and forty, but the true number is probably more than twice that—and parents in court wept and forgave him. There can be no doubt that they were awed by the prospect of his eternal damnation. The Bishop covered over the crucifix and Gilles confessed to one murder after another.

  Gilles was sentenced to death—to be hanged first, then burned. His two servants Henriet and Poitou were sentenced to die with him. Prelati was sentenced to life imprisonment—in fact, he escaped, only to be hanged for further crimes. Another procurer of children, a woman named Perrine Martin, hanged herself in her cell. Gilles’s two cousins, who committed so many of the murders, seem to have escaped unpunished. Gilles was thirty six when he died; his lands were seized by the Duke and the Bishop.

  Some writers on the case have suggested that Gilles was ‘framed’—that he never murdered anyone. That view is inadmissible. His murders were quite unconnected with his attempts to repair his fortune by means of the black arts; there is no evidence that he used children as human sacrifices to the Devil—although he let Prelati make magical use of parts of the dismembered corpses. He was sentenced for heresy, and the Church could have burned him for heresy without charging him with the murders.

  CHAPTER 18

  Mother Shipton

  The famous ‘witch’ and prophetess Mother Shipton may be a figure of legend; but there is some evidence for her real existence. A book of her prophecies published in 1797 by ‘S. Baker’ gives the following biographical details: she was born in Yorkshire near Knaresborough in the reign of Henry VII, and baptised by the Abbot of Beverley as Ursula Sonthiel. Her stature was larger than common, her body crooked, her face frightful; but her understanding extraordinary ...’ But there seems to be some doubt about her birth some attributing it to 1448, others to 1488; since one of her most famous prophecies concerns the arrest of Cardinal Wolsey (1530) the latter seems more likely.

  She is described as a ‘very pious person’, married to a carpenter named Toby Shipton. They lived in the village of Skipton four miles north of York.

  Like Nostradamus, she seems to have made many of her prophesies in rhyme. The most famous reads:

  ‘Carriages without horses shall go

  And accidents fill the world with woe.

  Around the earth thought shall fly

  In the twinkling of an eye.

  The world upside down shall be

  And gold found at the root of a tree.

  Through hills man shall ride

  And no horse be at his side.

  Under water men shall walk

  Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk.

  In the air men shall be seen

  In white, in black, in green.

  Iron in the water shall float,

  As easily as a wooden boat.

  Gold shall be found and shown

  In a land that’s now not known.

  Fire and water shall wonders do,

  England shall at last admit a foe.

  The world to an end shall come

  In eighteen hundred and eighty one.’

  In view of her excellent guesses in predicting motor cars, aeroplanes, submarines, iron ships and gold in California (or the Yukon or South Africa), it seems a pity that she should spoil it by naming a date for the end of the world.

  The most famous story of her concerns Cardinal Wolsey. When she heard that the Cardinal intended to come and live in York, Mother Shipton went on record as saying he would never reach that city. The Cardinal sent three lords of his retinue to check on her. She was living at the time in a village called Dring Houses, to the west of York. The story states that although they were incognito she knew who they were. When asked if she had said that the Cardinal would never see York, she replied that he would see it, but never reach it. One of them remarked: ‘When he gets to York he will surely burn you as a witch’, whereupon Mother Shipton tossed her hankerchief in the fire and said: ‘If this burns, so shall I’. The hankerchief remained unscorched. One of the Lords, Thomas Cromwell, asked her about his own future, and she replied that ‘the time will come when you shall be as low as I am’. Cromwell was, of course, beheaded.

  Her prophecy about Wolsey proved correct. He arrived at Cawood, eight miles from York, and viewed the city from the top of the castle tower. Before descending the stairs, he received a message saying the king wished to see him immediately. He turned back towards London but became ill on the road, and died at Leicester.

  The astrologer William Lilly published several of Mother Shipton’s prophecies in 1645. Of twenty prophecies he mentions sixteen as having been fulfilled, and singles out as unfulfilled a prophecy about mariners sailing up the Thames and the master weeping for what was once a goodly city and now there is scarce left any house that can let us have drinke for our money. S. Baker, in his edition, points out that this was fulfilled twenty one years after Lilly’s edition, when the city was burnt by the Great Fire.

  CHAPTER 19

  Isobel Gowdie

  The case of Isobel Gowdie is baffling because the confession was made freely, without any form of compulsion. Margaret Murray believes this is because Isobel was, in fact, a member of a fertility cult in which a man dressed up as the Devil for their earth-rituals. Rossell Hope Robbins takes the view that she was simply insane. Montague Summers, naturally, believes every word she confessed. None of these explanations seems to cover the facts.

  In some respects the confessions of Isobel Gowdie and the Auldearne witches are amongst the most detailed in the history of such trials. But certain essential details are missing, such as Isobel Gowdie’s age, and the sentence passed on her and her fellow witches.

  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 Devi
l 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, 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 thirteen. 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 the 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). Margaret Murray’s ‘Old Religion’ theory has to be stretched too far to cover so many weird and wonderful events—in many of her accounts of witchcraft trials, she deliberately leaves out some of the more preposterous details, which would conflict with her view that the Devil was simply Grand Master of the coven and a priest of the Old Religion.

  In The Occult I have suggested that the whole thing must be regarded as a figment of Isobel’s imagination, stimulated by morbid sexual imaginings and wishful thinking. And certainly Freud would have no difficulty in recognising sexual hysteria as the psychological driving force behind most of the sessions. But this still fails to explain why the others confirmed Isobel’s confession.

  The likeliest possibility is that a great deal of witchcraft—possibly a survival of old fertility rituals—did exist in that area, and may have been the excuse for sexual orgies. Isolated country areas seem to breed sexual irregularities—as a glance at newspaper records of their local assizes will verify. Once Isobel and the others had become involved in such matters, they would undoubtedly feel convinced that had given themselves to Satan and were damned. Possibly there were even ceremonies to raise spirits—the equivalent of modern seances—and the results of such seances are unpredictable. Possibly Isobel was telling what she believed to be the truth when she said the Devil came to her in bed and copulated with her beside her sleeping husband. All that seems clear is that she believed in her confession, and that there was enough truth in it for others to confirm it. This makes it difficult to dismiss all such tales of Sabbats as illusions.

  CHAPTER 20

  Witches’ Salve

  Professor Erich-Will Peuckert of Göttingen University, is convinced that he has discovered the secret of the ‘witches salve' that enabled them to fly to Sabbats on broomsticks. The journalist John Dunning has described Peuckert’s researches into ancient books on magic and alchemy, and his consequent conviction that many of the magical recipes actually work. Peuckert tried the formula for training a savage dog—feeding it a piece of bread that the trainer has under his armpit for a day. Peuckert claims that this works because the bread absorbs the body-scent of the trainer, and that when the dog eats the bread, it becomes psychologically predisposed to that person—it has accepted him as if he were a fellow dog.

  Peuckert then set out to test similar magical recipes for love potions. Extracts of skin oils and saliva were obtained from male students, purified chemically and injected into candies and fruit. The girl students who ate these ‘showed an irresistable and otherwise inexplicable determination’ to meet the man from whom the extracts were taken, and could single him out from a group of people.

  In a book called Magia Naturalis by Johannes Baptista Porta, Peuckert discovered a formula for witches’ salve, involving ingredients like thornapple (datura stramonium), henbane (hyoscyamus niger) and deadly nightshade, as well as things like wild celery, parsley and lard (which should have been the fat of an unbaptised baby). In 1960, Peuckert and a fellow researcher applied the salve to their foreheads and armpits—and passed out. They woke twenty four hours later with blinding headaches and dry mouths—but both convinced they had attended a witches’ Sabbat. Before comparing notes with his fellow researcher, Peuckert asked him to write down all he remembered of his dreams. He did the same. When the accounts were compared, there were astonishing similarities. Both had experienced dreams of flying, of landing on a mountain top, of wild sexual orgies with naked women, demons and monsters, perverted sex practices and paying homage to the Devil.

  Why should the salve have produced the same dreams in two experimenters? Possibly because both were expecting something of the sort. Peuckert had also suggested that the salve may act upon specific sites in the brain, triggering images involved with sex and ‘wickedness’. Dunning reports him as saying that witchcraft first emerged in the Middle Ages because this was when bands of gypsies introduced the necessary plants into northern Europe.

  Peuckert’s theories are reinforced by a recent book Plants of the Gods by Richard Schultes and Albert Hoffmann (the man who discovered LSD) which reveals that ‘hallucinogenic drugs’ can be manufactured from many plants that can be found in hedgerows, including deadly nightshade, the scotch rose, the male fern and the water lily.

  Yet the mystery remains: why a particular salve should induce visions of Sabbats complete with demons. The answer may lie in a comment made by Aldous Huxley in his book about psychedelic drugs Heaven and Hell: that the mind, ‘like the earth of a hundred years ago, has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins’—an image that suggests that our inner worlds may have their own distinct geography. (This is, in fact, the essence of the system of magic known as Kabbalism.) Huxley goes on: ‘Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable.’ As improbable as the demons and monsters seen by Dr Peuckert and his companion?

  CHAPTER 21

  Possession

  Writers on witchcraft and demonology distinguish between ‘obsession’ and ‘possession’. An obsessed person is simply ‘haunted’ by a demon or spirit; the possessed person is ‘inhabited’ by it. The view most widely held nowadays by psychical researchers is that a ‘possessed’ person is simply expressing an unconscious part of the personality which has been suppressed. This view is taken for granted in the best known of modern works on the subject, Aldous Huxley’s Devils of Loudun. But the assumption may be questioned. Guy Playfair’s book This House Is Haunted tells the story of the ‘haunting’ of the Harper family in Enfield by a poltergeist; the two daughters seemed to be the ‘focus’ of the manifestations. One day, the poltergeist had been making barking noises, which seemed to emanate from the girl named Janet. Playfair and his associate, Maurice Grosse, tried to persuade it to speak, and eventually, they succeeded in getting a growling voice which made comments like ‘Shut up’ and ‘Fuck off’. The entity, which seemed to be speaking from Janet’s mouth, named itself as Joe; a few days later, anothe
r one that called itself Bill Hobbs—and said it had lived in the house—spoke through Janet. This could not be described as ‘mediumship’, in which a person goes into a trance and is ‘used’ by the ‘spirit’. Janet could ask the entity questions, which it answered promptly.

  Poltergeists are thought to be mischief-making ‘low-grade’ entities feeding on surplus energies exuded by certain people.

  Playfair is convinced that poltergeists are low grade entities’ that cause mischief by somehow ‘using’ surplus energy exuded by certain people—usually adolescents. This does not exclude the possibility that there may also be some unconscious cooperation on the part of the ‘focus’, some basic discontent that expresses itself through the antics of the poltergeist. (The Enfield family was a ‘broken home’.) If Playfair’s theory is correct, then we cannot dismiss ‘possession’ as a form of unconscious exhibitionism, as Huxley does; (although Huxley does not deny the possibility of disembodied spirits or ‘low grade entities’).

  The curious phenomenon of multiple personality—which laymen sometimes refer to incorrectly as schizophrenia—undoubtedly explains many cases of‘possession’. The French psychologist Pierre Janet described the remarkable case of a man called Achille, a French businessman, who first became ‘dumb’, then declared that he was in hell, that the Devil was inside him, and began to utter all kinds of blasphemies. Janet discovered that while Achille was speaking incoherently, he could insert a pencil petween Achille’s fingers, and obtain written answers to questions. To the question ‘Who are you?’ he received the answer: ‘The Devil’. Janet persuaded the ‘Devil’ to cause various hallucinations to his host, then asked him if he could send Achille to sleep. The Devil obligingly did so, whereupon Janet was able to ask Achille questions and receive answers—in effect, the ‘Devil’ had hypnotised him. Achille now admitted that he believed he was damned because he had, on one of his journeys away from home, committed a ‘grave misdeed’—probably some ‘perverse’ act with a prostitute. Janet was able to cure Achille through hypnotic treatment, and by staging a scene in which Achille’s wife forgave him. Here, then, is a case in which ‘possession’ can be explained purely in psychological terms.