Scotland Pardons Witches 300 Years Late!

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by Praxidike

A flurry of articles and commentaries appeared across the Internet this past Samhain when a Scottish federal court pardoned 81 people convicted and executed as Witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among them were 56 people who were also convicted of treason for attempting to raise storms to interfere with the rendezvous of King James I and his wife Anne of Denmark, who were sailing across the North Atlantic to meet each other in 1589. All of the accused were burned at the stake. The feudal court in Prestonpans, a town about 20 miles east of Edinburgh, granted the pardons on the charge of witchcraft before the dissolution of the court under the Abolition of Feudal Tenure (Scotland) Act 2000, according to the Scots Law News. In addition, Baron Gordon Prestoungrange also sent a letter to Queen Elizabeth II requesting that she pardon the 56 accused of treason, as his power did not extend to pardoning treason against the Crown.

The pardons were secured in part due to evidence presented to the court by local historian Roy Pugh, author of the 2001 book The Devil's Ain. "It will recognize the crimes that were perpetrated against these people. It's too late to apologize, but it's a sort of symbolic recognition that these people were put to death for hysterical ignorance and paranoia," Pugh said in an interview.

The AP wire article most reprinted online quotes the court's written findings: "Most of those persons condemned for witchcraft within the jurisdiction of the Baron Courts of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstown were convicted on the basis of spectral evidence -- that is to say, prosecuting witnesses declared that they felt the presence of evil spirits or heard spirit voices. Such spectral evidence is impossible to prove or to disprove; nor is it possible for the accused to cross-examine the spirit concerned. One is convicted upon the very making of such charges without any possibility of offering a defense."

Pugh also added that the accused were tried by "kangaroo courts" without defense attorneys and judged by local lairds with no legal training and aided by the Kirk (the Church of Scotland).

So what, if anything, does this all have to do with modern Wicca? We could think of it as a victory, but, since the entire pardon was based on the premise that the accused had nothing to do with witchcraft, that would be pointless. Besides, even if they had been Witches, a pardon 300 years after they were tortured and executed is small comfort. Another approach would be to use the story as a starting point for re-thinking our beliefs about the Great Witch Hunts.

One thing that really jumps out at me is Pugh's description of the courts. The judges were not church officials, and these weren't church courts. They were civil courts, and the church in question, the Church of Scotland, played a supporting role rather than a leading one. Also bear in mind that the Church of Scotland is Protestant. This goes against the stereotype of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition being the driving force behind the hunts.

In her great article on rethinking the Great Hunts, "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt," historian Jenny Gibbons bears this out: "When the church was at the height of its power (the eleventh to fourteenth centuries), very few witches died. Persecution did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe's indisputable moral authority. Moreover, most of the killing was done by secular courts."

But if we end up having to rethink our "whos" in the hunts, what else that we take as fact about them do we need to reconsider? I have a bold proposition, and it is twofold. First, we reconsider our sense of ownership. By this I mean that we quit focusing on the word "witch" and the idea of "witch as victim." And second, that we start focusing on what lessons we take from these terrible times and how to apply them to our modern world.

The idea that the witch hunts are related to Wicca in any way came from a few outdated historical ideas. And at their core is a now-famous book, written in 1921 by an Egyptologist named Margaret A. Murray, called The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. In this book, Murray theorized that the victims of the hunts were neither deluded nor devil-worshippers, which were the previous explanations for their bizarre trial testimony. Rather, she believed they were members of a surviving pre-Christian fertility cult that spread throughout Western Europe. This is the part that starts to sound familiar! The connection was solidified by the publication of Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today in 1954. Gardner associated his "Wicca" with Murray's witch cult.

Unfortunately, Murray's work has since been recognized to be deeply flawed. No serious academic today would consider it as valid source material. Its true value to modern Wicca is in its theory that pre-Christian beliefs in Europe were not entirely exterminated by the arrival of the modern age. It also forged the idea of a link between European paganism and Mediterranean mystery religions.

For the reader interested in a more modern interpretation of what may have been going on during the witch hunts, an excellent starting point would be Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath by Carlo Ginsburg. Like Murray, he recognizes pagan practices continuing in Europe. Unlike her, however, he sees them as vestiges of shamanism. He also identifies them as being a strictly local phenomenon rather than as a widespread cult.

Besides the works of Murray and Gardner, another reason modern Wicca is associated with the hunts is politics. At one time it was generally accepted that most of the victims were women. This is another belief challenged by Gibbons, "... There was no characteristic that the majority of witches shared, in all times and places. Not gender. Not wealth. Not religion. Nothing. The only thing that united them was the fact that they were accused of witchcraft." During the rise of feminist craft in the 1970s and 80s, the inaccurate belief that the Great Hunt was a kind of crusade against women tightened the perceived links between those "witches" and modern Wicca.

"But what about the entire villages with not a woman left?" you ask. Well, as it turns out, the single source for that statistic, Historie de l'Inquisition en France by Etienne Leon de Lamothe-Langdon, was shown by two independent researchers in 1972 to be a forgery. And while most researchers today know to avoid this "source" like the plague, it can be harder to avoid materials that are derived from it.

Even though I think I've demonstrated that any connections between the victims of the Great Hunt and modern Wiccans are ill-formed, that doesn't mean that I think we can dismiss them. For one thing, we see time and time again that when a society believes itself in danger, people begin to act irrationally and rule of law goes out the window. Just read the editorials in the paper. Today there was a letter-writer claiming that the United States is justified in torturing suspected terrorists. As if advocating torture isn't bad enough, it's also okay to torture those who have merely been accused! They don't even have to be charged or convicted. I'm reasonably sure that this was also in the Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous witch-hunting manual written in the fifteenth century. It's 500 years later, and we're still in the same place.

Also remember: The recent pardons afforded those 81 Scottish witches were based on the evidence that they weren't really witches at all. What if in fact they had been witches? Would that have been enough to convict them? As the testimony shows, there was no physical evidence that they had committed crimes. So really, being a witch was equated with committing crimes in itself. The modern world is uncomfortably crowded with examples of simple affiliation being enough to send someone away.

So finally, here are my suggestions. Don't let the fact that tens of thousands of people were executed as witches be your focus. We are not they. Instead, make your focus the fact that they were executed as a result of fear and paranoia. Educate yourself, so you can not only be an intelligent voice for our community, but also so you can speak out for all victims. Don't tolerate (or propagate) the kind of thinking that let the Great Hunt happen.

Sources

Associated Press. "Pardoned 400 Years too Late." WorldWide Religious News, October 30, 2004. http://www.wwrn.org/parse.pap?idd=9447&c=146

Associated Press. "Town Pardons Executed Witches." BBC News, October 10, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/-1/Scotland.3965965.stm.

"Baron Court of Prestoungrange Pardons Witches: Trick or Treat?" Scots Law News, December 28, 2004. http://www.prestoungrange.org/prestoungrange/index.html

Gibbons, Jenny. "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt." Covenant of the Goddess Web site: http://www.cog.org/witch_hunt.html (Editor's note: If this link doesn't work, plug Jenny's name and "witch hunt" into a search engine. The article, and iterations of it, is published all over the Web.)

Trial record of the "Wife of Smythe," http://forejustic.org/db/smythe_wife-of-.html