"Lilias Adie: The Witch of Scotland" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Blood Sex Magic: Everyday Magic for the Modern Mystic"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 28
Lilias Adie: The Witch of Scotland
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On July 28, 1704, in the small
coastal parish of Torryburn, Fife, an elderly woman named Lilias Adie was taken
into custody accused of witchcraft. She was likely in her sixties. She would
never leave custody alive, and in dying before her trial could conclude, she
inadvertently did something no other accused witch in Scottish history managed
to do: she left behind a grave.
Everyone else convicted in Scotland’s
two centuries of witch persecution was strangled and then burned, their ashes
scattered with no ceremony and no marker. Lilias Adie’s body still exists, or
did until the nineteenth century decided otherwise, and the story of what
happened to her before and after her death is one of the strangest and most
quietly devastating in the whole of Scottish history.
The Kirk Session
Scotland tried an estimated four to
six thousand people for witchcraft between 1563 and 1736, three-quarters of
them women, under a “Witchcraft Act”
that made the crime capital. Adie was one of them, accused, as was standard, by
neighbors under pressure to name names during a local panic. What survives from
her case is the record of her interrogation by the parish “Kirk” session, and
it makes for difficult reading. Under questioning, and very likely under
duress, Adie described being approached by the Devil behind a stack of wheat
sheaves on a warm July evening three years earlier. She gave physical details
with an unsettling specificity: his skin was cold, his color black and pale, he
wore a hat, and his feet were cloven like a young bull’s. She described
repeated meetings by moonlight. Historians studying Scottish witch trials
broadly have noted that this particular obsession with the physical mechanics
of demonic sex says considerably more about the interrogators than about the
women being questioned; the Kirk sessions asked these questions constantly, of
nearly every accused woman, in a pattern that reads less like investigation
than like a script being followed.
The Cost of Silence
There is one detail in Adie’s
confession that deserves to be highlighted on its own, because it looks very
much like an act of quiet defiance inside an impossible situation.
Interrogators pressing a confession out of an accused witch nearly always
wanted one thing above all else: names. A confession that implicated other
women kept the machinery of the panic running and gave the authorities their
next targets. Adie gave up no new names. She confirmed only the individuals
already under suspicion, and no others, even as the pressure on her continued.
Whatever was done to extract her confession, she appears to have drawn a line,
and held it.
Adie never stood trial. The Kirk
session’s own minutes record that she was interrogated on August 29, 1704,
“some hours before her death,” suggesting she may have died within the very
custody in which she’d been questioned, quite possibly by her own hand. Dying
in custody, whatever the cause, spared her the sentence that would otherwise
have been all but certain: strangulation at the stake, followed by burning. It
is specifically because she escaped that fire that anything of her remains at
all.
Adie was buried in a plain wooden box
in the intertidal zone of Torryburn beach, in the mud between the high and low
water marks, and a large flat stone slab was placed over the grave. The
location and the slab were both deliberate: burial between the tides was
thought to trap a body in a kind of liminal no-man’s-land, neither fully on
consecrated land nor fully at sea, while the stone was meant to physically
prevent her from rising, or from being reanimated by the Devil to walk among
the living again. It worked, in its way, for about a century and a half. It
remains, to this day, the only known grave of an accused witch anywhere in
Scotland.
In 1852, the grave was deliberately reopened, not by vandals but by a local antiquarian and phrenologist named Joseph Neil Paton, who wanted to study the skull of a convicted witch as a specimen. Adie’s bones were removed and, over the following decades, dispersed. Fragments were sold to collectors and to St. Andrews University students as curiosities. Her skull ended up in the collection of the St. Andrews University Museum, where it was photographed at some point before it was put on public display at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park in 1938. After that exhibition, the skull was never seen again. It remains missing today, and a campaign to locate and repatriate it, launched by Fife Council in 2019, has so far turned up nothing.
What the exhumation could not erase,
it turned out, was the photographic record made just before the skull
disappeared. In 2017, working entirely from those old museum photographs,
forensic artist Dr. Christopher Rynn of the University of Dundee, working with
historian Louise Yeoman for BBC Radio Scotland, built a full digital facial
reconstruction of Lilias Adie using 3D virtual sculpture. It is the only
reconstructed face of any accused Scottish witch that exists. Rynn was candid
about the choice he made in shaping her expression: nothing in her documented
story, he said, gave him any reason to sculpt her as anything other than an
ordinary woman caught in horrific circumstances, so he didn’t. The result is
often described, a little startlingly, as kind. On the 315th anniversary of her
death in 2019, Fife Council held a memorial service at Torryburn and laid a
wreath at the site of her grave, formally naming her, in the words of one
councillor, an innocent victim of unenlightened times rather than the thing her
own parish once believed her to be.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Lilias, and all of today’s modern witches...
Blood Sex
Magic: Everyday Magic for the Modern Mystic
By
Bri Luna | HarperOne
Bri
Luna is better known as “The Hoodwitch,” and has become one of the most
recognizable voices in contemporary witchcraft culture. One reason is her
outspoken boldness when it comes to her practices and, in that instance, her
literally debut, Blood Sex Magic, doesn’t disappoint.
Luna’s
aesthetic tends to lean into the sacred darkness: lush altars, menstrual magic,
ancestral reverence, unapologetic sensuality. Blood Sex Magic extends
that aesthetic into a full instructional framework, inviting readers into
practices that a lot of occult authors might only tiptoe around. The title
itself is the central thesis: Luna argues that blood, sex, and magic are not
separate domains, but a unified current of power—one that most spiritual
traditions have suppressed, sanitized, or hidden beneath layers of shame. Her
approach is firmly rooted in the folk magic and brujeria influences she
has long drawn on, blended with a modern self-empowerment sensibility that will
resonate strongly with practitioners coming from feminist, queer, or
body-positive frameworks.
For
those looking to delve “all in” regarding Luna’s philosophies, the “blood
magic”—while easily the most provocative—are, arguably, the most valuable. Luna
rehabilitates menstrual magic as a genuine power source, a connection to
ancestral lineage, cyclical time, and the deep body, rather than something to
be stigmatized or avoided. The way she frames the treatment as practical and
grounded in genuine tradition, rather than sensation-seeking, gives the book an
additional weight of legitimacy; the sex magic material is similarly
matter-of-fact: desire and life-force, not a manual for hedonism.
But
Luna’s strength is transmission, not necessarily scholarship, and the practical
exercises occasionally move faster than the conceptual groundwork beneath them
has been fully laid. Readers looking for the rigorous historical or theoretical
underpinning of a Lisiewski or a Carroll may need to look elsewhere. That said,
Blood Sex Magic does what it sets out to do with confidence and genuine
power. Luna’s voice is serious, yet playful, and her refusal to apologize for
the material she works with is itself a kind of initiation.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" 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.)
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