8
Emma Wilby
The four confessions given by Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn, Nairnshire in 1662 are consistently cited as the most extraordinary on record in Scotland. In remarkable detail and with inimitable style they cover a diverse range of folkloric and demonological subject matter, from stereotypical pacts with the Devil to feasting under hills with the fairy king and queen. Arguably the most striking of all the passages in the confessions are those depicting elf-arrow shooting. In her first confession, Isobel claims that she and the other members of her coven
vold flie away q[uhe]r ve vold be ewin as strawes wold flie wpon an hie way, we will flie lyk strawes q[uhe]n we pleas wild strawes and corne strawes wilbe hors to ws q[uhe]n ve put th[e]m betwixt owr foot, and say hors and hattok in the divellis nam, and q[uhe]n any sies thes strawes in whirlewind, and doe not sanctifie them selves, they we mey shoot them dead at our pleasur. …1
Having established her power to shoot and kill people, Isobel then provides a grim roll-call of the arrow-slain. This passage, from her third confession, runs to over 200 words, beginning:
th[a]t q[uhi]ch trowbles my concience most is the killing of sewerall persones, with the arrowes q[uhi]ch I gott from the divell, the first voman th[a]t I killed wes at the plewgh landis, also I killed on in the east of murrey, at candlmas last, at that tyme bessie wilson in aulderne killed on th[e]r, and margret wilson ther killed an uth[e]r, I killed also James dick in conniecavell, bot the death th[a]t I am most of all sorrie for, is the killing of william Bower in the miltowne of moynes, margret brodie killed an vowman washing at the burne of tarres, Bessie wilsone killed an man at the bushe of strutheris Bessie hay in aulderne killed an prettie man, called dunbar at the eist end of the towne of forres as he wes coming out at an gaitt …2
I
As many commentators have noted, these passages have links with fairy lore. The fairy host was believed to roam the countryside, sometimes using plant stalks as steeds, in search of sustenance. In addition to stealing milk and taking the ‘foyson’ (nutritive quality) of the grain, they killed humans and animals with ‘elf arrows’, tiny projectiles identified with the prehistoric arrowheads found in many parts of Scotland. If the humans who crossed the fairies’ path did not ‘sain’ (bless) themselves, the fairy darts would cause them to sicken or die.3 It was also believed that humans could be called upon to function as fairy archers, with Welsh cartographer Edward Lhuyd noting in 1699 of the Highlanders that ‘their Opinion is that the Fairies (having not much Power themselves to hurt Animal Bodies) do sometimes carry away Men in the Air, and furnishing them with Bows and Arrows, employ them to shoot Men, Cattle, &c.’4 Similarly, variations on Isobel’s ‘hors and hattok’ anthem appear in a number of sources as a fairy levitation cry.5
Although Isobel’s arrow-shooting passages were clearly rooted in fairy lore, we still need to explain why she stood up in the Auldearn tolbooth before a crowd of local ministers and townsfolk and confessed to having shot elf arrows herself. While it is one thing to say that a figure of legend or gossip, such as the weaver from the Bridge of Awe, travelled in a fairy whirlwind and killed his neighbour with an elf arrow, it is another thing to claim that ‘I flew in a fairy whirlwind and killed my neighbour with an elf arrow.’6 We cannot postulate simplistic elite superimposition – as we may reasonably do with regard to Isobel’s demonic pact accounts – for the idiosyncratic and folkloric nature of the arrow-shooting passages strongly suggests that Isobel took an active role in their creation. We can speculate that her claims were the result of disorientation brought on by pressures of imprisonment and interrogation. Mid-seventeenth-century Auldearn was a hotbed of covenanting fundamentalism and social unrest. Harry Forbes, the minister who led Isobel’s questioning, was not only a religious extremist, but was also obsessed with the threat of witchcraft and believed himself to have been a victim of maleficent magic. In addition, several relatives of Isobel’s primary named victim, John Hay of Park, attended her interrogations in the belief that the deaths of three family members had been caused by maleficium.7 There would have been plenty of reason for Isobel’s prosecutors to question her coercively and suggestively, with research suggesting that she is likely to have woven fairy beliefs into false memories produced in response to close questioning about maleficium and the witches’ coven.8
But we may be jumping to conclusions if we assume that this was all there was to it. The strangeness of Isobel’s arrow-shooting claims is ameliorated by the fact that they were not wholly unique. Other witches confessed to shooting elf arrows. In a few cases their narratives hint at fairy host-related activity, with Bute witch Margaret NcLevin’s claims that she and her companions ‘went to Birgadele broch and in a window [where] Margret NcWilliam shot James Androws son and that Marie More NcCuill was appointed by them to take away the body and leave the stoke of a tree in his place’ clearly referring to the same nexus of belief.9 Over 150 years later, outside the interrogatorial arena and after all the hubbub about witches had died down, perfectly sane and ordinary Highlanders were still claiming to have shot elf arrows in the company of the fairy host. The following anecdote, recorded by nineteenth-century folklorist John Francis Campbell, is one of many from the period:
An old highlander declared to me that he was once in a boat with a man who was struck by a fairy arrow … [later] a man, whom the fairies were in the habit of carrying about from island to island, told him that he had himself thrown the dart at the man in the boat by desire of them [the fairies]: “they made him do it.” My informant evidently believed he was speaking truth.10
Of course, these examples do not obviate the possibility that Isobel’s arrow-shooting passages may have been some kind of false confession – but they do raise the possibility that there may have been more to her claims than meets the eye. And in order to explore this possibility, we must now turn to shamanism.
II
In his pioneering work, Ecstasies, Carlo Ginzburg argued that shamanistic beliefs and practices contributed to ideas surrounding the witches’ sabbath.11 He distinguished two traditions: warrior shamanism (involving aggressive rites designed to combat enemy persons and spirits) and following-the-goddess shamanism (involving processional rites, rooted in devotion to a supernatural female figure). Although in practice this distinction is often blurred, and although Ginzburg’s asserted links between following-the-goddess traditions and a pre-Christian ‘pan-Eurasian’ goddess figure have been criticised, his early modern evidence does help us to articulate a polarity that emerges from the records.12 Clear examples of warrior shamanism can be found from early modern Friuli, where the benandanti believed that on certain nights of the year, while lying in bed, they engaged in visionary rites that involved fighting enemy witches for the fertility of local fields.13 Following-the-goddess shamanism, alternatively, is epitomised in seventeenth-century Sicily where, as Gustav Henningsen has shown, women who termed themselves the donas de fuera believed that on certain nights of the week they joined a group of women, under the auspices of a female authority figure, while in some kind of dream state. In this company, they engaged in fairy-like activities, such as feasting and dancing in house-to-house processions, to generate prosperity and gain healing skills.14 Although it has generated opposition and controversy, Ginzburg’s ‘shamanistic hypothesis’ has since been supported and developed by a number of scholars who have been able to avoid many of its more controversial claims.15
Ginzburg argued that Isobel Gowdie’s claims to have feasted under local hills with the fairy king and queen, along with similar testimony from Aberdeenshire cunning-man Andro Man (1597), suggest that following-the-goddess traditions may have been extant in early modern Britain.16 Certainly, among contemporary historians and folklorists, the Scottish fairy queen is agreed to represent a version of the ‘European nocturnal goddess’.17 Like her variants on the Continent, she progressed through the countryside with her train of spirits (identified as fairies or the dead), feasting and dancing in house-to-house processions and remote countryside locations. She also attracted human followers, with the early modern Scots believing that by joining the fairy queen and her train an individual could acquire magical benefits. Several kirk session records and witch testimonies contain references to people who, like Marion Or in 1602, professed to ‘ride with the fair folk and to have skill’.18
Although Ginzburg focused on Isobel’s descriptions of feasting under sacred hills with the fairy queen, other aspects of Isobel’s confessions also suggest following-the-goddess themes. Isobel frequently mentions the fact that she and her coven ‘wold goe s[eve]rall howses in the night tym’. At Robert Donaldsone’s house they ‘went in at the kitchen chimney, and went down wpon the crowk’ in order to feast on ‘beiff and drink’; at Grangehill, they ‘got meat and drink enough’; at the earl of Moray’s house they ‘gott anewgh ther and did eat and drink of the best, and browght pairt w[i]th ws’; and at Bessie Hay’s house in Auldearn they consumed an ox that they had killed previously, presumably with elf arrows. Although Isobel does not make specific reference to these house-to-house visits conferring prosperity, they seem to have been generally benign. Not only does she fail to report the performance of any maleficium at these events, but her claim that ‘q[uhe]n ve goe to any hous we tak meat and drink, and we fill wp the barrellis w[i]th owr oven pish [i.e. piss] again’, could be interpreted as a reference to the female group leader’s powers of magical increase, reflecting the fact that in Nairnshire, as in other places that hosted the fairy cavalcade, ‘no one noticed any decrease in the food supplies’ after its visit.19 Also compatible with the following-the-goddess nexus is the fact that, although she does not overtly link her abilities to the fairy queen, Isobel seems to have acted as a healer. She provides her interrogators with three long and detailed healing charms, and describes how she and her coven performed rituals to heal bewitched children.
In addition, in keeping with similar groups throughout Europe, Isobel’s feasting companions were ontologically diverse. There were non-human spirits (the fairy monarchs, the elves, the Devil); the dead (the ‘bodies’ that ‘remain with us’ after they have been shot and killed by elf arrows); and the living (Isobel and her neighbours). Even Isobel’s use of the term ‘coven’, which has been taken up by scholars to denote a stereotypical group of malevolent witches, echoes the references to ‘companies’, ‘societies’ and ‘troupes’ found in Continental following-the-goddess traditions.20 When interpreted through the lens of the shamanistic hypothesis, these elements invite us to speculate that when Isobel provided her prosecutors with narratives about feasting and dancing with the fairies under hills and in the cellars of houses, she was not just recounting local fairy lore as some kind of coerced fiction, but drawing on memories of shamanistic dreams or trances, consciously undertaken for the benefit of her community, prior to her arrest.
But while this thesis is helpful, it is insufficient. As we noted earlier, Isobel’s descriptions of feasting with fairy queens and dancing on hilltops are seamlessly intertwined with equally vivid accounts of performing a wide spectrum of harmful magical acts, of which the elf-arrow shooting forms the apotheosis. For Isobel, the company that feasted under the fairy hill were the same company that travelled in whirlwinds in order to hunt down and kill their neighbours. As we have seen, these references are too divergent from demonological convention to be dismissed as elite superimposition, and too consistent with contemporary folklore to be dismissed as anomalous. Consequently, in Isobel’s case, before we can even entertain theories about following-the-goddess visionary traditions, these maleficent elements need to be explained.
We find few answers in the shamanistic hypothesis, as it currently stands. Although there have been many disputes over how the shamanistic experience should be defined, anthropologists and historians agree that one of its core features, and that which distinguishes it from a non-shamanistic visionary experience, is that it involves spirit-contacting rites undergone specifically for the benefit of the community. In other words, however dramatic the voice or the vision, however deep the dream or trance, unless there is evidence of community-benefiting rationale a rite cannot be defined as shamanistic. In their analyses of warrior shamanism in early modern Europe, scholars such as Ginzburg and Pócs have shown that – although violent – the militaristic activities of cults like the Friulian benandanti and Hungarian táltos fit into this template. Here, aggressive shamanistic rites are played out in the context of epic battles motivated by beneficent aims such as obtaining fertility of the fields or protecting towns from earthquakes.21
But these analyses do not seem immediately relevant to Isobel’s case. Unlike those of the benandanti or táltos, her aggressive acts seem hard to justify in this way. While interpersonal tensions may have underpinned her alleged assaults on the few identified victims, such as Harry Forbes and her landlord John Hay, most of her maleficium seems disturbingly random and indiscriminately vindictive. In her long lists of the arrow-slain, for example, there is no evidence of any prior grievance and many of the victims are not even named. It is difficult to link Isobel’s violent and arbitrary attacks to any kind of shamanistic ethos.
III
However, we can gain new insights into this problem from recent developments in anthropology. In 2004, Neil Whitehead and Robin Wright noted that
there has been a marked tendency in past two or three decades to emphasize the positive, therapeutic and socially integrative dimensions of shamanism … [but the] ethnographic experience of Amazonian dark shamanism pointedly contradicts this imagery and, while issues of the politics of representation cannot be ignored, it is obviously the role of anthropology to provide a more adequate interpretation and presentation of actual Amazonian practices. Although recognized, [until now] the ‘dark’ side – the shamans’ power to destroy or inflict harm through sorcery and witchcraft – has received little in-depth attention.22
Whitehead and Wright emphasise that while most shamanistic aggression can be clearly linked to the community-benefit rationale – with protecting the tribe against enemies and healing the sick being the most commonly cited aims – recent fieldwork in Amazonia has uncovered dark shamanistic traditions that are far more difficult to rationalise in this way. Here, the central envisioned rite is that of killing or, as it is often termed, ‘ritual predation’, and the predator’s victims are often targeted in a shockingly indiscriminate way. The practices of the Guyanese kanaimà are illustrative. Kanaimà shamans ritually stalk, kill and mutilate their envisioned human victims by inserting various objects into their mouth and anus. Then, sometime later, they ‘return to the dead body of the victim in order to drink the juices of putrefaction’.23 This predation is so violent, and its community-benefiting rationale so obscure, that it has traditionally been viewed as a form of revenge-motivated witchcraft, but Whitehead shows that it has a deeper shamanistic purpose. After killing their victims, the kanaimà give some of the body fluids to their mentors (kanaimà’san) and, by virtue of the latter’s special relationship with Makunaima, the creator of plants and animals, this exchange has a protective effect on the community.24 Similar conclusions have been reached about the dark shamans of the Amazonian Warao tribe.25
Kanaimà predation is not, as with the benandanti or táltos, aimed at specific enemy combatants, but is apparently indiscriminate, with Whitehead emphasising that their ‘selection of victims is ultimately a matter of indifference, in the sense that anyone will do’.26 As a result the kanaimà shaman could find themselves targeting members of their own tribe, and even their own family members, with one informant telling Whitehead that ‘If you learned to kill you must then kill – they have the urge to kill and it might even be a brother or sister.’27 Such random predation is in fact an expression of standard shamanistic compulsion. The experience of being taken over by an uncontrollable power is a worldwide feature of shaman narratives. Shamans often depict the visionary impulse as an accumulation of psychological tension that has to be released, by ‘shamanizing’, in order to restore physiological equilibrium and avoid becoming either physically or mentally sick.28 Similarly compulsive dynamics have been observed by historians working with early modern material, with Ginzburg noting that the benandanti were propelled to go out and perform their envisioned battles in response to an ‘irresistible’ urge.29 While shamanistic compulsion has generally been studied in the initiatory context, it has been clearly linked to shamanistic predation in many parts of the world, from Siberia to East Asia.30 The kanaimà who told Whitehead that, while travelling in spirit, ‘he killed [a woman] with his hands and stopped her up … he didn’t really know what he was doing’ was articulating a trans-cultural experience.31
IV
These shamanistic perspectives are relevant to Isobel because shamanistic compulsion can also be detected in Scotland’s host-related arrow-shooting narratives, as they have emerged from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. The following Victorian account, told to J. F. Campbell by a local doctor, suggests that the ‘call’ came through a build-up of psychological tension. Campbell claimed that, after pointing to a particular hill, the doctor told him:
‘Do you see that kind of shoulder on the hill? Well, a man told me that he was walking along there with another who used to ‘go with the fairies’, and he said to him – ‘I know that they are coming for me this night. If they come, I must go with them; and I shall see them come, and the first that come will make a bow to me, and pass on; and so I shall know that they are going to take me with them.’ ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘we had not gone far when the man called out, “Tha iad so air tighin. These are come. I see a number of ‘sluagh’ the people; and now they are making bows to me. And now they are gone.” And then he was quiet for a while. Then he began again; and at last he began to cry out to hold him, or that he would be off.’ ‘Well,’ said the doctor … ‘he was fairly lifted up by the “sluagh” and taken away from him, and he found him about a couple of miles further on, laid on the ground. He told him that they had carried him through the air, and dropped him there. And,’ said the doctor, ‘that is a story that was told me as a fact, a very short time ago, by the man whom I was attending.’32
The compulsive quality of host participation is even more evident in anecdotes depicting men or women reluctant to accept their call. Campbell’s contemporary Alexander Carmichael claimed that a Uist woman told him about a Benbecula man to whom the fairies were, unfortunately, ‘partial’:
His friends assured me that night became a terror to this man, and that ultimately he would on no account cross the threshold after dusk. He died, they said, from the extreme exhaustion consequent on these excursions. When the spirits [the sluagh] flew past his house, the man would wince as if undergoing a great mental struggle, and fighting against forces unseen of those around him.33
The same visionary impulses that drove the Highlanders into trance also seem to have driven them to kill. Those who believed themselves to have been swept up by the fairy host never claimed to have shot elf arrows willingly, but emphasised that they had been forced or commanded to do so by the fairies, with Carmichael noting that the host ‘commanded men to follow them, and men obeyed, having no alternative. It was these men of earth who slew and maimed at the bidding of their spirit-masters’.34 As we have already heard from another of Campbell’s informants, one Highlander claimed that he shot an elf arrow at a man in a boat ‘by desire of them: “they made him do it”’.35
That this belief was widespread in the early modern period is further supported by the fact that wherever contemporary first-hand accounts of participation in host-related arrow-shooting emerge (which is usually, as we saw earlier, in witchcraft records), the protagonists claim that they were ordered or coerced to shoot and kill their victims by the host or host leader – here generally defined as the Devil rather than a fairy. The power of these visionary impulses, and the degree to which they could subsume personal will, are painfully intimated in the trial dittays (indictments) of Margaret NcWilliam, who, as we have seen, participated in a coven that engaged in host-related arrow-shooting. She claimed that she had killed her own son:
about 18 yeires syne being dwelling in Chapeltoune the devill apeired to her at the back of the Caleyaird and she haveing sustained losse by the death of horse and kye was turneing to great poverty he said unto her be not affrayed for yow shall get ringes eneugh … he sought her sone William a child of 7 yeires old which she promised to him and he gave her ane elf arrow stone to shott him which she did ten dayes therafter that the child dyed immediately therafter which grieved her most of anything that ever she did.36
Here we can speculate that during a period of intense physical and psychological suffering NcWilliam succumbed to a visionary impulse that caused her to participate in a host-related hunt during the course of which she aimed an arrow at her own son. When she regained normal consciousness, she looked back in horror at what she had done. Although it does not specifically mention arrow-shooting, cunning-woman Janet Traill’s account, given to the Perth kirk session in 1623, strongly suggests the same visionary dynamic:
‘When I was lieing in child bed lair [stated Traill], I was drawn forth from my bed to a dub near my house door in Dunning, and was there puddled and troubled.’ Being asked by whom this was done? She answered, ‘by the fairy folks, who appeared some of them red, some of them grey, and riding upon horses. The principal of them that spake to me was like a bonny white man, riding upon a grey horse.’ She said, ‘He desired me to speak of God, and do good to poor folks’ … Being asked the cause why she was so much troubled by them? She answered, that the principal of them had bidden her do ill, by casting sickness upon people, and she refused to do it.37
V
These perspectives encourage us to re-evaluate Isobel’s arrow-shooting passages. We must of course retain our earlier view that much of her testimony is likely to have been the result of false confession elicited through interrogatorial coercion and suggestion. Similarly, we cannot rule out the possibility that mental illness may have played a role. But we can now speculate that there may have been an experiential component to Isobel’s arrow-shooting claims. It is notable that although Isobel’s confessions contain indications that she willingly participated in, or even relished, her bloodthirsty experiences, on at least five occasions she specifically states that she had been encouraged or commanded to shoot her arrows by the Devil, with comments like the following appearing in all four confessions: ‘(the Devil) giwes them [elf arrows] to ws each of vs so mony … [and] Qwhen [rest of line missing] giwes th[e]m to ws he sayes shoot thes in my name’ and ‘the divell gaw me an arrow, and cawsed me shoot an vowman in that fieldis: q[uhi]lk I did and she fell down dead’.38
As with so much of Isobel’s testimony, these comments are open to a variety of interpretations, but in the context of our discussion about dark shamanism they could be interpreted as indications that Isobel’s arrow-shooting passages may have drawn on memories of compulsive acts of visionary aggression experienced prior to arrest. Like her contemporaries in Bute, and her Victorian counterparts two centuries later, she may have been periodically seized by an irresistible impulse that propelled her into an envisioned bloodlust during which she saw herself as loosing elf arrows at the men, women and animals that became, during the course of her deep dreams or trances, identified as prey. On recovering from these experiences, Isobel may have looked back in horror at what she had done. Certainly, her claim that ‘th[a]t q[uhi]ch trowbles my conscience most is the killing of sewerall persones, with the arrowes q[uhi]ch I gott from the divell’ suggests genuine remorse.
VI
While these perspectives may give us an insight into the psychological mechanisms that may have propelled Isobel into envisioned arrow-shooting, for her experiences to be defined as ‘shamanistic’ as opposed to just ‘visionary’ the question of rationale remains. What community benefit could possibly have emerged from these strange bouts of ecstatic violence?
We can gain some insights into this question from Corsica, where a dark shamanistic cult of allegedly archaic origin – the mazzeri – existed until the mid-twentieth century. The mazzeri believed that their spirits periodically left their bodies and roamed the countryside hunting animals, ‘tear[ing] their prey to death with their teeth, like hounds’. After their quarry had been wounded or killed, the mazzeri identified them as a human relative or neighbour in spirit form, and the animal’s death almost always presaged the death of its human counterpart. Compulsion is clearly evident in the mazzeri sources, with the folklorist Dorothy Carrington emphasising that they were ‘called’ to kill, ‘could not even choose their victims’ and bore ‘no animosity towards the animal they have to kill, nor towards the human being it represents’. As in other dark shamanistic traditions, this urge to engage in ecstatic violence was so powerful and indiscriminate that, on occasion, the mazzeri could be ‘ordered to kill those they loved the most’.39 One mazzera, Carrington claimed, informed ‘a female member of the family [in the morning] that she had killed her child, that night, in a dream. She regretted what she had done, but it was not she who had committed the act, but something that had entered into her. She would make amends.’ The fact that the visionaries did not keep their violent acts to themselves, but informed those they had killed, or seen killed, of their impending death, leads Carrington to conclude that their rites lifted, for a brief moment, ‘a fragment of the veil that covers the mystery of dying’ and functioned as a form of death-divination.40
Can we suppose that the envisioned arrow-shooting experiences of Isobel and her contemporaries – should they have existed – mirrored the same rationale? That their violent envisioned rites were valued because they offered their communities the opportunity to gain valuable knowledge of those who were about to die? Such a possibility is supported from a variety of quarters. Firstly, it is important to remember that – as in any society where life is precarious – the prediction of future death was a major concern in pre-industrial Scotland. Signs and portents of death were warily watched for: visions of winding sheets, funeral processions or coffins being made; eerie sounds of glasses rattling at wakes; apparitions of the wraiths or physical doubles of the about-to-die; encounters with crows or ravens. Death-divination was a core preoccupation of popular visionaries, from the early modern period through to the nineteenth century, with folklorist Isabel Grant claiming that ‘The visions of people who had the Second Sight were largely concerned with a future death.’41 Similarly, the immediate desire of many clients of magical practitioners was for a prognosis – to be told whether or not they would survive their illness.42
Secondly, we have the fact that, with regard to arrow-shooting experiences, there would have been ample opportunity for divinatory discourse. Despite the grisly and sensational nature of their dreams and visions, those who participated in fairy hunts do not seem to have been shy about publicising them. The anecdotes and eyewitness accounts found in the collections of nineteenth-century folklorists make it clear that in this period the men and women who engaged in these activities broadcast their experiences both to their victims and to the community at large.43 With regard to the early modern centuries, where arrow-shooting accounts generally appear in witchcraft records and could therefore have been alleged, as opposed to confessed, our assessment must be more speculative, but Lhuyd’s observation in 1699 that it was widely believed that the fairies abducted humans as archers enables us to assume that something comparable occurred. Certainly, Isobel’s claim, in her third confession, that ‘Janet breadheid spows to Jon taylor told me a litl befor she wes apprehendit th[a]t margret wilsoen in aulderne shot allexr hutcheon in aulderne’ suggests just this.44
Thirdly, working with Carrington’s theories on the social function of the mazzeri, we have the fact that early modern Scottish society nurtured the deeper belief matrices necessary to sustain dark visionary traditions of this kind. Carrington emphasises that the Corsicans tolerated the brutal murders of the mazzeri not only because they functioned as a form of divination but also because they believed the visionaries to be innocent of the crimes they committed. For the Corsicans, the shamanistic compulsion was of divine origin. The victims of the mazzeri did not die because they had chosen to kill them, but because God himself had decided that it was their time to die. ‘God ordained all she did’, claims Carrington of one mazzera; ‘It was He, she believed, who determined the day of the death of each one. She had been chosen to convey this news; she could only submit to His will.’ This perspective reflected the ‘fatalistic Christianity’ adhered to by many Corsicans. As servants or messengers of God, the mazzeri functioned as ‘instruments of fate’.45 We find similar attitudes towards dark shamans in indigenous cultures from the Americas and Siberia.46
Fatalistic beliefs were strong and widespread in early modern Scotland. They helped people to cultivate the profound acceptance necessary to endure frequent privations and bereavements. Although Protestant theologians would not have wanted to interpret their Christian beliefs in such terms, as defined in their broadest sense fatalistic beliefs – in the form of the doctrines of predestination and providence – were fundamental to the reformed world-view and could have merged relatively harmoniously with the more inchoate Christian fatalism of the fireside. A little over a century after Isobel’s trial an observer noted, with regard to the inhabitants of Auldearn: ‘the general gloominess of their faith, which teaches them, that all diseases which afflict the human frame are instances of Divine interposition, for the punishment of sin; any interference, therefore, on their part, they deem an usurpation of the prerogative of the Almighty’.47 Dark Gaelic proverbs like ‘No man can avoid the spot, where birth or death is his lot’ and ‘His hour was pursuing him’ are testament to these sentiments.48 The possibility that fatalistic convictions such as these were powerful enough to enable death-divinatory arrow-shooting traditions to function in early modern Scotland gains support from various quarters. It is notable that even in the seventeenth century seers involved in death-divinations of any kind often seem – outside the Church at least – to have escaped moral censure. Although, like the mazzeri, they were often feared, they were not considered to be personally responsible for their grisly visions, or blamed for the grave messages they brought to their fellow men. Indeed, their inability to resist their dark calling seems to have elicited some sympathy, with contemporary minister James Kirkwood claiming of the second sight that ‘It’s so very troublsome to many, that theyd be gladly free from it.’49
Barring accounts appearing in witchcraft records, the same explanatory dynamic appears in sources describing arrow-shooting experiences. From Lhuyd’s comments of 1699 through to those of nineteenth-century folklorists like Campbell, it is clear that all the farmers, lairds and weavers who claimed to have been forced to participate in the fairy hunt were considered to be innocent participants who were in no way responsible for the murders they were required to commit: the fairies ‘made them do it’. Although the early modern Scots would not necessarily have articulated host-related arrow-shootings specifically as acts of ‘fate’, taken as a whole the evidence suggests that their tolerance of these traditions was rooted in a profound cultural fatalism. As I have explored elsewhere, the etymological and mythological links between fairies, witches and personifications of fate, like the martial valkyrja, support this thesis, and illustrate how, from an early period, following-the-goddess and warrior shamanism themes may have combined.50 In this context, Isobel’s role as fairy-empowered killer need not have been incompatible with her role, delineated earlier, as fairy-empowered healer in a regional following-the-goddess tradition. The intimacy with the fairies necessary to gain healing skills could have demanded an incorporation of their death-bringing aspect.
This tolerance, however, would not have precluded accusations of witchcraft. Even if fatalistic world-views enabled both the fairy hunters and their communities to justify such traditions, the hunters would have been highly vulnerable. Anthropologists have shown that dark shamanistic practices usually occupy an ambiguous position in their host culture. While they may be justified by mythology and by the self-protective or healing skills that they bring to the tribe, the aggressiveness of the practices means that those shamans who, whether deliberately or inadvertently, cause undue offence can be rejected by their communities. If a dark shaman oversteps the mark – perhaps through allowing personal vendetta to be seen to influence his choice of victim – the delicate balance between what the tribe gains and what the tribe loses through his envisioned activities becomes disrupted and the shaman can be ostracised or killed.51 Whitehead has also noted that under the influence of Christian missionaries the nuances underpinning dark shamanistic practices, like those of the kanaimà, can become obscured, with local people who might have previously endured them being encouraged to denounce them in simplistic dualist terms.52
Something similar may have occurred in early modern Scotland. Like the early missionaries who travelled to the Amazon, the Scottish reformers strove tirelessly to revise and re-shape the popular world-view; a world-view that was often so alien to them that, as Stuart Clark has pointed out, ‘The cultural distance that separated the aims of the religious reformers (and their secular backers among the European states) from the ideas and behaviour of the mass of the laity seemed to be great enough to invite comparison with the colonial confrontations overseas.’53 Under the acculturating influence of the reformed church, with its stringent ‘black and white’ and ‘of God and not of God’ mentality, the moral subtleties that underpinned host-related arrow-shooting divinations (and many other popular beliefs and practices) would have become obscured, while the church’s eagerness to prosecute magical activities may have encouraged those less tolerant of these practices to seek redress in the courts. Consequently, however much a woman such as Isobel maintained that she was coerced into performing these violent acts, the fact that she participated in them at all put her in a perilous position. Once she was hauled before the church authorities, the uneasy truce that may have existed in her mind between the folkloric fatalism of the fireside and the godly fatalism of the church would have dissolved under the glare of the interrogatorial spotlight. And there, in an instant, the fairy archer would have been transformed into the witch.
VII
Although our assessments of Isobel’s arrow-shooting passages have been brief and highly speculative, we cannot leave them without noting their wider relevance. While there have been various controversies surrounding the shamanistic hypothesis, the core dilemma for many historians has been how far to extend the thesis. While the evidence is strong enough for most to accept that in certain well-defined cases, such as those of the benandanti or donas de fuera, visionary rites took place, it is harder to assess whether this experiential component existed in relation to the more conventional and demonologically stereotypical accounts of sabbath-like activities found in witchcraft records. While it is generally agreed that these ‘sabbath narratives’, as we can term the latter here, contain shamanistic themes and motifs of folkloric origin, scholars remain uncertain as to how far these narratives represented experience as opposed to belief.
This problem presents itself most keenly in relation to narratives from western Europe, for two reasons. Firstly, the latter are often heavily demonised, with their high levels of stereotypical content suggesting that interrogatorial influence was strong and that therefore efforts to isolate the voice of the accused are largely fruitless. Secondly, the shamanistic status of these narratives is challenged by the fact that they are usually characterised by arbitrary malevolence. Although, as in Isobel’s case, western European sabbath-narratives often contain reference to beneficent activities (such as healing) or neutral ones (such as feasting), they usually feature one or more maleficent – and often inexplicably brutal – magical acts, ranging from the raising of storms to the killing and eating of children. These acts frequently gain a disturbing intensity from seeming to be performed, and the victims targeted, in a chillingly indiscriminate way. Because it is difficult to link these narratives to any kind of community-benefit rationale, and because, as we have seen, they generally carry signs of interrogatorial contamination, few scholars give serious consideration to the possibility that they may have possessed an experiential dimension.
Our analyses of the shamanistic context of Isobel’s maleficium may shed some light on this issue. Although we have been focusing on shamanistic aggression in relation to host-related arrow-shooting, our Corsican and Amazonian material illustrates that dark shamanistic attacks could incorporate various forms of violence, from blood-sucking to beating with cudgels to tearing apart with bare hands. Could we therefore entertain the possibility that other sabbath-narratives containing seemingly arbitrary and savage killings could – like Isobel’s arrow-shooting passages – reflect dark shamanistic practices characterised by ecstatic compulsion and underpinned by fatalistic beliefs concerning death? The occasional narrative overtly welcomes such an explanation. The following, taken from a trial that took place in Hungary in 1756, is redolent of the accounts of the mazzeri and kanaimà in its depiction of compulsion, killing and retrospective remorse. It is also notable for its direct reference to ‘the will of destiny’. Pócs writes
In 1756, Katalin Szabó from Nagyvázsony talked about her bewitching nocturnal round trips and ‘being totally deprived of my senses, I became an exile … during the night, to the will of destiny. I should have set fire to the houses of four inhabitants: István Már, Cseke, Széderi, and Baranyai.’ Squeezing through the smoke hole, she set fire to two of them, but then she felt bitterly sorry. Why had God allowed her to ‘carry out such evil deeds?’54
Few accounts are as explicitly relevant as Szabó’s, but with regard to Scotland at least, it is notable that although most sabbath-narratives do not feature host-related arrow-shooting, a significant minority conform to Isobel’s confessions in the sense that they depict groups of individuals who roam around the countryside, sometimes in the form of animals, entering houses and seemingly randomly killing a succession of humans and animals in a chillingly clinical way. The testimony of Margaret Duchill, given at Alloa in 1658, is typical:
Sche confest ane meiting in the Cuningar of all the sevine with the divell in the likeness of catts, who went to the […] and destroyed ane kow to Edward Burnes. Ane other meitting one night and they went to Tullibodie and killed ane bairne. Another meitting and went to bow house and killed ane horse and ane kow to William Monteath. Ane other meitting and they went to Clakmannan and killed ane child to Thomas Bruce. Ane other meitting and they went to Caldone’s and was the death of two bairnes of his.55
Using the interpretative lens constructed here, can we speculate that the arbitrary, death-bringing perambulations of the Alloa witches involved compulsive, dark shamanistic practices? And that just as Isobel may have been compelled, on certain nights of the year, to participate in death-bringing arrow-shooting hunts, so Duchill and her companions may have been swept up and compelled to participate in death-bringing house-to-house processions; fulfilling, in these unwelcome visions and dreams, their dark shamanistic role as messengers and agents of fate? The hypothesis sketched out in this chapter needs further research before we can attempt to answer such questions. Nevertheless, rudimentary as it is, it clearly invites us to pay more attention to the role of dark shamanism in the history of Europe’s witches.
Notes
1. Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Brighton, 2010), 39–40. For the original trial document, see NRS, GD125/16/5/1/1.
2. Ibid., 47–8.
3. Robert Kirk, The Secret Common-Wealth (Cambridge, 1976), 59–60.
4. Ronald Black (ed.), The Gaelic Otherworld: John Gregorson Campbell’s ‘Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’ and ‘Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands’ (Edinburgh, 2005), 304–5.
5. Wilby, Visions, 92–3.
6. Black (ed.), Gaelic Otherworld, 47.
7. Wilby, Visions, 165–6, 171–3, 71.
8. Ibid., 215–36.
9. HP, iii, 10.
10. John Francis Campbell (ed.), Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1860), ii, 71–2.
11. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Harmondsworth, 1991).
12. In Visions I circumvented this problem by replacing the term ‘following the goddess’ with (more clumsy, but less contentious) ‘female-led spirit-groups’, 301–3. For a critique of Ginzburg, see Willem de Blécourt, ‘The return of the sabbat: mental archaeologies, conjectural histories or political mythologies?’, in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke, 2007), 125–45.
13. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London, 1983).
14. Gustav Henningsen, ‘ “The Ladies from Outside”: an archaic pattern of the witches’ sabbath’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1990), 191–215.
15. Notable works in this field, in addition to the above, have been Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age, trans. Szilvia Rédey and Michael Webb (Budapest, 1999), and Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, VA, 1998). For more recent discussions of the shamanistic paradigm, see Gábor Klaniczay ‘Shamanism and witchcraft’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 1 (2006), 214–21, and Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (eds.), ‘Witchcraft mythologies and persecutions’, Demons, Spirits, Witches, vol. iii (Budapest and New York, 2008), 35–49.
16. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 96–7.
17. Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, 2001), 136.
18. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 219.
19. The quotation refers to the visits of the Swiss Säligen Lütt, in Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 69.
20. See Henningsen, ‘Ladies’, 196. Many examples can also be found in Éva Pócs, Fairies and Witches at the Boundary of South-Eastern and Central Europe (Helsinki, 1989).
21. For the benandanti, see Ginzburg, Night Battles, 1–32. For the táltos, see Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 134–9.
22. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (eds.), In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia (Durham, NC, 2004), 10.
23. Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (Durham, NC, 2002), 14–15. The Guyanese believe that, while in spirit form, the kanaimà directly attacks, and consumes, the physical body of the victim.
24. Ibid., 97.
25. Johannes Wilbert, ‘The order of dark shamans among the Warao’, in Whitehead and Wright (eds.), In Darkness and Secrecy, 21–50.
26. Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 14, 104, 66, 90–1.
27. Ibid., 115, 117.
28. For an example, see Kira Van Deusen, Singing Story, Healing Drum: Shamans and Storytellers of Turkic Siberia (Montreal, 2004), 76.
29. Ginzburg, Night Battles, 61. See also Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 23.
30. Wilby, Visions, 332–3. Compulsion is evident in Whitehead and Wright (eds.), In Darkness and Secrecy, 40, 39. For an African example, see Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (2nd edn., London, 1993), 178.
31. Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 114.
32. Black (ed.), Gaelic Otherworld, 303–4.
33. Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1928), ii, 358.
34. Ibid., 357.
35. Campbell (ed.), Popular Tales, ii, 71–2.
36. HP, iii, 18–19.
37. Extracts from the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie, 1631–1654, ed. John Stuart (Spalding Club, 1843), p. xii.
38. Wilby, Visions, 43, 44.
39. Dorothy Carrington, The Dream-Hunters of Corsica (London, 1995), 58, 88, 110.
40. Ibid., 107.
41. I. F. Grant, Highland Folk Ways (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1995), 366.
42. For Agnes Sampson’s divinatory prayer, see Normand and Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft, 236–7.
43. Wilby, Visions, 337–8.
44. Ibid., 48.
45. Carrington, Dream-Hunters, 106, 99. This thesis is supported by wider anthropological comparisons. Though not necessarily articulated as such, dark shamanistic practices are fundamentally fatalistic: see Wilby, Visions, 342–3.
46. For examples, see Charles Stépanoff, ‘Devouring perspectives: on cannibal shamans in Siberia’, Inner Asia, 11 (2009), 283–307, and Whitehead and Wright (eds.), In Darkness and Secrecy, 7.
47. Donald J. Withrington and Ian R. Grant (eds.), The Statistical Account of Scotland: Banffshire, Moray and Nairnshire, 1791–1799 (2nd edn., Wakefield, 1982), 718.
48. Alexander Nicholson (ed.), A Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases (Edinburgh, 1881), p. xxii.
49. John Lorne Campbell (ed.), A Collection of Highland Rites and Customes: Copied by Edward Lhuyd from the Manuscript of James Kirkwood (Cambridge, 1975), 103.
50. Wilby, Visions, 346–61.
51. Whitehead and Wright (eds.), In Darkness and Secrecy, 47; Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 124.
52. Whitehead, Dark Shamans, 50, 53–76.
53. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 509.
54. Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead, 96.
55. John E. Simpkins (ed.), ‘Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning Fife with some notes on Clackmannan & Kinross-shires’, County Folk-Lore, 7 vols. (London, 1914), vii, 325.