June 4

Scotland's Witchcraft Act and the North Berwick Trials

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

The law never defined what it was prohibiting…

On June 4, 1563, the Parliament of Scotland passed the Act Anentis Witchcraftis—Against Witchcraft—making the use of “any manner of witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy” a capital offense for all parties: the practitioner, their client, and anyone who consulted them. The penalty was death. The text of the Act didn’t trouble itself to define what witchcraft actually was, or how it was to be distinguished from healing, from prayer, from folk medicine, from the use of charms that the Catholic Church had tolerated for a thousand years—it simply prohibited it, in the broadest possible terms, and left the definition to the courts, the Kirk, the local community, and the anxieties of the moment.

The consequences were catastrophic: between 1563 and the formal repeal of the Act in 1736, an estimated four to six thousand people were tried for witchcraft in Scotland—a rate of prosecution significantly higher per capita than in England, France, or most of continental Europe. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft estimates that approximately two-thirds of those tried were executed. Most were ordinary women, and most were dead within weeks of their first accusation, having been subjected to sleep deprivation, needle-pricking, and various other tortures whose purpose was not truth-seeking but confession.

The Reformation and the End of Tolerance

Three years before the Witchcraft Act, in 1560, Scotland’s Parliament had made Protestantism the official religion of the realm, a comprehensive reorganization of the relationship between the sacred and the ordinary—and one of its most immediate consequences was the criminalization of an enormous range of folk practices that the Catholic Church had previously tolerated, absorbed, or quietly ignored. The Catholic tradition had maintained a relatively nuanced position on magic and folk healing. Certain practices, such as the blessing of fields, the use of saints’ names in charms, the wearing of protective amulets, all existed in a grey zone between official theology and popular religion, with the Church often looking the other way or incorporating these practices into approved ritual.

The cunning folk—the healers, wise women, charmers, and diviners who served their communities throughout rural Scotland—operated within this grey zone with reasonable safety, as they were not viewed as witches in the theological sense. However, the Reformed Kirk abolished the grey zone. Under Calvinist theology, there were only two sources of supernatural power: God and the Devil. Any practice that did not derive explicitly from the former derived necessarily from the latter. The blessing that a Catholic might have seen as a folk saint’s intercession was, to the Calvinist minister, a diabolical compact. The charm that healed a sick child was the same in kind as the spell that cursed a neighbor. The cunning folk were swept up in the same net as the malefic witch, because the theology could not distinguish between them.

The 1563 Act was the legal expression of this theological shift. It was also, as was almost always the case, a political instrument: the new Protestant establishment needed to demonstrate its godliness and its break with the Catholic past. Prosecuting witchcraft—which it associated with the superstitions of the old religion—was a way of doing both simultaneously. As one historian of the period observed, the Scottish Kirk could root out unreformed Catholics under the guise of eliminating witches.

The Coming Storm

For the first twenty-seven years after the Act was passed, it lay largely dormant. But then King James VI went to Denmark…

In 1589, the twenty-three-year-old king crossed the North Sea to collect his bride, Anne of Denmark, and encountered storms so severe on the return voyage that he became convinced they were supernatural in origin. He wasn’t wrong to find them unusual—the storms were exceptionally violent even by North Sea standards. But his explanation was densely theological, believing someone had sent those storms against him. And when he returned to Scotland in 1590 and the North Berwick witch trials began, the king believed he had finally found found the confirmation he was looking for.

The North Berwick trials were the first major persecution of witches under the 1563 Act. A servant girl named Geillis Duncan had been seen slipping out of her employer’s house at night and demonstrating unusual healing abilities. Under torture, she named accomplices, and the names she gave included Agnes Sampson—a respected midwife and healer who had served the community of Haddington for years—and John Fian, the schoolmaster of Prestonpans. The accused were said to have gathered at North Berwick Kirk on Halloween to dance with the Devil, who appeared in the form of a man in black and preached to them from the pulpit. They had raised storms to sink the king’s ship by christening a wax image with the name James and passing it among them as they danced.

Predictably, Agnes Sampson was quickly brought before James VI himself. Under her own torture (she had been kept without sleep, subjected to “the witches’ bridle”—a four-pronged iron device clamped into the mouth—and had her head bound with a rope twisted ever tighter) she eventually confessed. But it was what she said next that made the king believe absolutely; whispering in his ear, she repeated back to him the exact words that had passed between himself and Anne on their wedding night—words no one outside that bedchamber could have known.

James VI was shaken aghast, believing only a demonic force could have provided her with such information. He immediately threw himself obsessively into the study of witchcraft and attended multiple trials personally. In 1597, he published Daemonologie—a three-book treatise on the reality of witchcraft, the nature of demonic compact, and the obligation of Christian rulers to prosecute it. When he became James I of England in 1603, he brought those anti-witchcraft convictions with him, and the English Witchcraft Act of 1604—which would eventually form the legal basis for the Salem trials in Massachusetts—bore his direct imprint.

The storms off the Scottish coast had consequences that extended all the way to a courtroom in the New World nearly a century later.

The Voice of a Tradition

Among the thousands of voices lost to the Scottish witch trials, one stands apart: Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn, who in April and May of 1662 appeared before the local church court and, without any apparent torture or coercion, gave the most detailed, vivid, and extraordinary confession in the entire history of Scottish witchcraft: she described meetings with the Queen of Fairie and journeys underground to her kingdom, shapeshifting into hares and cats, and the Devil appearing to her in the form of a man in grey, imprinting her with his mark, and giving her a new name. She described the preparation of elf-arrows—flint arrowheads shot by fairies that could kill cattle and people—and the technique for shooting them and, worst of all, named her coven members and described their rituals in precise detail. She even recited charms and incantations in archaic Scots that scholars have spent decades analyzing.

What was strange about this instance is Gowdie’s apparent lack of motive; she hadn’t been tortured, and hadn’t confessed under any specific form of duress. Rather, she’d volunteered all of it, apparently of her own free will, to officials who hadn’t even asked or accused her. The most plausible reading, suggested by several historians, is that Gowdie was describing, with genuine conviction, a living tradition of folk practice that she had inherited and participated in—a tradition whose vocabulary included fairy encounters, shapeshifting, and magical attack, and which understood itself as real, not as fantasy. Whether the tradition was “genuinely magical” in any objective sense is a question that lies beyond historical method. What the confession tells us, beyond any doubt, is that in the Scotland of 1662, there were people who understood themselves to be practicing a form of magic with genuine cosmological foundations, and who considered the fairy world as real as the world of the Kirk.

(Gowdie was almost certainly executed, although the precise record of her fate is lost to time. In 1990, Scottish composer, James MacMillan, composed an orchestral “requiem” for the notorious “Queen of the Witches”—The Confession of Isobel Gowdie.)

The Witchcraft Act was formally repealed by the British Parliament in 1736—and the last prosecution under it had already occurred in 1727, when Janet Horne of Dornoch was burned alive (the last person to be legally executed for witchcraft in Britain) after her daughter’s deformed hands and feet were described as evidence of having been “shod like a horse” by the Devil; she was already an elderly woman with dementia, although, luckily, her daughter escaped. But the repeal of the Act did not end the living tradition it had spent 173 years trying to exterminate; the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft documents that basic magical beliefs continued throughout the Highlands and Islands long after 1736, largely unchanged in their structure from what Isobel Gowdie had described. The cunning folk—the healers, diviners, and charmers who had been the primary victims of the persecution alongside those who had consulted them—continued their practice under different names and with appropriate discretion.

The modern Scottish witchcraft revival—part of the broader contemporary pagan movement we’ve discussed in this blog in connection with figures from Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley—draws on this very survival. Practitioners working in the Scottish tradition today often engage explicitly with the material preserved in the witch trial records: the charms, the fairy lore, the shapeshifting traditions, the cosmology that Gowdie described with such unsettling confidence in 1662. The trials intended to destroy a tradition but, in many ways, preserved it instead.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist