9
Julian Goodare
The belief that witches could fly was a key component of the early modern concept of witchcraft. In Scotland, many witches told stories of flight – even if, like Barbara Parish in Livingston in 1647, they obscured this fact by using another word for it:
She raid to Burdihouse and was eight dayes their and said that she left a ould seck in her place quhill she come againe and that their was eight of them in company with her that went to Burdiehouse and the thing that she raid on was a runge.1
Witches’ flight has been little studied in Scotland. This chapter will seek to fill a gap by drawing together a wide range of evidence about popular beliefs concerning flying witches. As well as a wide variety of modes of flight, the survey will also extend to consider other magical modes of travel, such as instant transvection and sailing in sieves. It will also discuss the possible reality behind reports of flight, touching on psychological studies of out-of-body experiences.
I
Folk belief about witches’ flight was varied. Flight could be voluntary or involuntary, could employ vehicles such as straws to ride on, or could be undertaken in human or animal form. The chapter will review these and other motifs, and evaluate the varied types of evidence in which the motifs are found. Bearing in mind that flying is absent from many witchcraft trial records, the chapter will also ask how widespread the belief in witches’ flight was in Scotland. To anticipate, the answer will be that it was normal to believe that Scottish witches flew – but that it was still a remarkable belief.
One possible reason for the neglect of flight in Scottish witchcraft studies is that Christina Larner, the great pioneer of the subject, dismissed the subject in her remarkable reconstruction of the system of popular belief. She quoted two leading cases involving flight (Isobel Shirie and Isobel Gowdie) and ascribed them to ‘dreams, nightmares, and collective fantasies’.2 She then moved rapidly on without further comment, to interpret the witches’ view of their sabbath in realistic terms. Witches’ confessions, as Larner read them, showed the sabbath as a straightforward festive occasion of the kind that Scottish peasants got into trouble with the church for having. Larner made clear that none of the confessions described real events straightforwardly, and in that sense they were all ‘fantasies’; yet when they strayed from the realistic, they became aberrations. Larner was certainly right to identify peasant festivity as an important ingredient in Scottish witches’ confessions, but it was not the whole story.
Information about popular belief in witches’ flight comes from a variety of sources. The single biggest group is the confessions of suspected witches, which could have been contaminated by elite assumptions and leading questions. However, the accounts of flight contain little of the repetition of standard motifs that one finds in, for instance, accounts of the making of the demonic pact. Not only are accounts of flight less common, they are also more varied. Some of the flight material may have come from leading questions, but not much came straight out of learned demonology. Moreover, some of the confession material can be paralleled in other sources, especially neighbours’ testimonies against suspected witches. Some confessions mention flight, not by the confessing witch, but by someone else. These too might have been contaminated by leading questions, but the danger is less, and again, the material seems too varied for it to have been straightforwardly imposed by interrogators.
Many confessing witches, then, seem to have been free to tell their own stories about flight. This does not mean that they were telling the truth (if only because the literal truth, that they really flew, does not warrant extended consideration), nor does it even necessarily mean that they literally believed the stories that they were telling; but it does mean that their confessions derive from popular culture. Many of the beliefs about flight seem in fact to have been shared between the common folk and the elite, but the elite also had demonological preoccupations, especially about whether flight occurred bodily or in spirit. The rarity with which the confessions discussed this issue indicates that they largely showed witches’ flight as it was understood in popular culture. It is that culture that this chapter seeks to understand.
How did early modern folk imagine flight? They did not think of powered machines, nor of anything like today’s cartoon superheroes. They thought of rising by possessing a quality of lightness and airiness.3 They thought of birds, they thought (though more rarely) of bees and other insects, and they thought of being carried by the wind. To be sure, they also thought of magic; but even magic could not transcend the boundaries of the imagination. Witches’ flight had to be imaginatively credible.
II
How, then, did Scottish witches fly? There is no clear evidence that they flew on broomsticks; nor did they necessarily need a vehicle of any kind. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to begin with the vehicles that a few witches used – several of which are in fact gathered in a single case. Margaret Watson, in Carnwath in 1644, was accused of attending witches’ meetings at which there had been ‘ane great multitude’ of witches present. She confessed that ‘Mailie Paittersone read upone ane cat, Jonet Lockie read upone ane cock and thy aunt Margaret Watsone read upone ane thorne trie and thyself read upone ane bottell of strae and the said Jeane Lauchlane upone ane bourtrie.’4
The vehicles Watson gives us, therefore, are three plants – a hawthorn tree, an elder tree (bourtree) and a bundle of straw – and two animals – a cat and a cock. The hawthorn and elder were both ill-omened.5 Watson may have been the only witch to mention flying on them, but the hawthorn, at least, occurs in other witchcraft contexts.6 As for the straw, this was probably imagined as a vehicle for flight because of its lightness. Watson rode upon a bundle of straw, but the most famous witches to fly on straws were Isobel Gowdie and her companions, in Auldearn in 1662, who mainly flew on single straws. Gowdie imagined these straws as being blown along in the wind, ‘ewin as strawes wold flie wpon an hie way’.7 There were in fact several kinds of straws; Gowdie’s first confession mentioned wild-straws and corn-straws. Yet more remarkably, these witches also rode on the bodies of people whom they had shot; their souls went to Heaven, ‘bot ther bodies remains w[i]th ws, and will flie as hors to ws als small as strawes’. In Gowdie’s second confession she mentioned ‘windlestrawes or beenstakis’.8 A ‘windle’ was a bundle of straw, which brings us back to Margaret Watson; ‘beenstakis’ were beanstalks, effectively a third kind of straw. There was also a ‘bunwede’, a stalk of ragwort, on which Marion Hunter confessed to having ridden in Lanark in 1650.9
Gowdie’s confessions provide a rare example of a spell for flight: the witches would ‘say hors and hattok in the divellis nam’, enabling them to ride on straws in whirlwinds.10 ‘Hattock’, linguistically, was a diminutive of ‘hat’, and the phrase seems to have been connected with Norse legends in which a hat was thrown to a mortal to enable them to join a fairy ride. The same phrase in a later Orkney story was ‘Up hors, up hedik’, while there are also Gaelic stories involving a magic cap for flight.11 For Gowdie, the spell animated her straw so that she could fly on it; it became a symbolic ‘horse’. In the Orkney story, the straw was actually transformed into a horse. As for the hat or cap, Janet Boyman stated in 1572 that she had ‘sene twentie tymes the evill blast that is to say the wind with a thing lyke ane hatt in it quhirland about the stray and ay at sic tyme thair is ane evill spreit or ane war thing neir hand by’.12 The hat may be a significant component of this belief system.
Mention of horses brings us to flight on an animal, of which, as with flight on plants, there was only a modest amount. We have already encountered Margaret Watson’s cat and cock. The cat was a common animal in Scottish witchcraft, usually with witches being transformed into cats. A cock was a favoured animal to which to transfer diseases.13 It was a ‘creature full of lust’, and the aphrodisiac ‘cock ston’ was related to elf-shot.14 The only other animal vehicles are swallows, mentioned by the canon lawyer William Hay in the 1530s in a discussion of the famous Canon Episcopi. The women whom he described ‘profess that they ride at night on some kind of beasts or swallows’.15 These swallows, it has recently been argued, were the vehicles for a shamanistic cult involving fairy-like beings, the ‘seely wights’.16
Perhaps more common than flight on an animal was flight on a transformed human. We have already encountered this with Isobel Gowdie, and it also occurs in another famous case, the last Scottish witch to be executed. Two witches were prosecuted in Sutherland in 1727, a mother and a daughter; the mother was executed while the daughter escaped. The mother was reported to have ‘ridden upon her own daughter, transformed into a poney, and shod by the devil’, making the daughter lame in hands and feet.17 This comes from a tradition collected in the early nineteenth century, which added that the daughter’s son, still living until recently, had also been lame. Was the whole story invented to explain the son’s lameness? It seems unlikely that such a belief could have been freshly invented in the period after 1727, because, as we shall see, similar stories had already been told in the seventeenth century. It is quite likely that ‘Janet Horne’ was really believed at the time to have transformed and ridden on her daughter; at any rate, the belief should be recognised as one that was current at the time.18 The story did not explicitly mention flying, but as in other such cases, magical ‘riding’ was probably understood as involving flight.
The earlier case closely paralleling that of 1727 is that of Isobel Shirie and the other witches of Forfar in 1661. Here, too, not only did the witch transform and ride on another person, but that other person was also a witch. Shirie was herself transformed into a horse and ridden, both by other witches and by the Devil. Agnes Spark confessed that other witches ‘did speake of Isabell Shirie and say that shoe was the divills horse, and that the divill did alwayes ryde upon hir, and that she was shoad like ane mare or ane horse’. She added that Shirie ‘carried hir away’ to a meeting about midnight. Janet Howat, similarly, confessed that Shirie ‘carried’ her to two meetings. Elspeth Alexander and Janet Stout confessed that Shirie was nicknamed ‘The Horse’.19 The case of Anne Armstrong, from Corbridge, Northumberland, in 1673, was similar and may even have been influenced by Scottish beliefs.20
More typical of Continental belief was the idea of the witch transforming, and riding upon, an innocent person. As we have seen, Isobel Gowdie and her companions sometimes rode on the bodies of people whom they had shot with elf-shot, transformed into straws. This appears to be a version of the idea of witches abducting and riding on innocent people, though the idea of killing the people first was unusual. The witch who transforms and rides an innocent person would later be a common figure of Gaelic folklore.21 This may well lie behind the testimony of Robert Brown, in Balmerino in 1649, who insisted on his deathbed ‘that Elspeth Seith and other two did ryde him to deathe’.22 An intermediate idea was expressed by the accused witch Margaret Duchell, in Alloa in 1658, who confessed ‘that ane night the said Elisabeth Blak came to hir at midnight and took hir out of hir awne house to the crofts of Alloway, quhair the Devill came to them, and as shoe said, rede them both’.23 Duchell was not an innocent person when Black, or the Devil, rode her, but she seems, like the innocent people, to have been coerced into flight.
There was, then, a variety of vehicles for Scottish witches – and this fact may have its own significance. Margaret Watson’s cat, cock, hawthorn tree, elder tree and bundle of straw have all been discussed individually, but have more to reveal as a group. One theme in stories of magical transport seems to have been the deliberate incongruity of different modes of transport.24 Watson could have confessed that the witches had all used the same kind of vehicle (cats, say), but she preferred to list a mixture of animal and plant vehicles. Isobel Gowdie mentioned various different straws, as well as humans transformed into straws. Flight had to be imaginatively credible; what we are looking at here is a story that, in order to be credible, has to be made as weird as possible. Even this weirdness was not random, however, but structured in recognisable ways.
Animal transformations were often linked with flight in a more straightforward way: witches transformed themselves into flying animals. No full study of shape-shifting has yet been carried out in Scotland, but the most common animals for it overall were probably hares and cats. The cases involving flight, however, emphasise bees and birds – usually crows. One, unusually, comes from a neighbour’s statement. Megot Laing, in Elgin in 1597, was accused by a man ‘callit Raye’ of being a witch who ‘apperit … in the lyknes of ane be[e] and yeid in with a yirning and incontinent as he tuk doun the yirning and pat it under ane tub scho returned in her awin schape agane’.25 Isobel Elliot and Marion Veitch, in Paiston and Humbie in 1678, flew in the shape of bees, carrying the poison used to kill Veitch’s grandson in their ‘cleuchis, wings and mouth’.26 They may have been connected with the witch followers of the renegade minister Gideon Penman, in East Lothian in 1678, who confessed ‘that sometymes he transformed them in bees, in ravens, in crows, and they flew to such and such remote places’.27 A witch defended by George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh in this period faced the accusation that it was ‘deponed by two penitent Witches, that she and they did flee as Doves to the meeting place of Witches’.28 The Alloa witches, in the 1650s, sank a boat ‘in the lyknes of corbies’.29 Thomas Lindsay, a young boy connected with the Bargarran case of 1697, confessed that ‘if he pleas’d he could fly in the likeness of a crow upon the mast of a ship’.30
Taking the form of a bird led naturally to flight, and in such cases flight may have been assumed even when it was not stated explicitly. In the confession of Helen Taylor, in Eyemouth in 1649, she and other witches visited a house in the likeness of various animals. ‘Margaret Dobson was in the liknes of ane blak hen, and went in at the chimley head.’31 The most likely way for a hen to enter a chimney from outside would have been to fly up to it.
Some of the vehicles for flight, especially straws, suggest the idea of being carried in the wind. The wind, especially if it was a whirlwind, could also carry witches without the aid of any vehicle. This motif could sometimes be associated with the idea of fairies carrying people away in whirlwinds.32 Thus, Christian Nauchtie, in Elgin in 1629, ‘confessit scho was three severall tymes away, ilk tyme aucht dayis away, and scho was taine away with a wind’. Others in her company included two dead people, and people with white faces and boss (hollow) backs, who seem to have been fairies.33 On the other hand, whirlwinds are found in cases with no obvious fairy element. Bessie Flinker, in Liberton in 1661, confessed to having been ‘taken up on the hills by a whirl of wind’ to a witches’ meeting.34 Her confession was brief and heavily demonic; perhaps the motif was suggested to her by her interrogators, but it probably originated in popular belief.
One case of a witch being carried in the wind, but without explicit mention of a whirlwind, was that of John Fian, one of the North Berwick witches of 1590–1591. He was convicted of allowing himself ‘to be carried to North Berwick kirk (he being lying in a closed bed in Prestonpans), as if he had been soughing athwart the earth’. He was also carried out to sea by the Devil, ‘skimming over all the sea without land, in a boat’; this does not sound like an ordinary voyage. He also chased a cat in Tranent, ‘in the which chase he was carried high above the ground with great swiftness’.35
Several cases simply state that the witch flew, without specifying a vehicle or method. A rare case where flight was witnessed (or at least asserted) by a witch’s neighbours comes from Canongate kirk session in 1628. Christian Stewart complained that John Stirling and his wife Katherine Pratt had called her a witch. Two witnesses testified that Stirling and Pratt ‘callit the said Cristeane ane witche and that they saw hir with hir slefis and mutch fleing abone thair headis cuming from Leyth’.36 The sleeves and ‘mutch’ (cap) seem to have been thought magical, perhaps even connected with the ‘Horse and Hattock’ spell. The kirk session, however, did not believe the accusation. It seems to have been possible, but not common, to expect to see a witch flying.
III
Usually, flight seems to have taken some time, but there are a few cases where it may have been instantaneous. Strictly instantaneous transvection was demonologically unorthodox; demons were believed to be unable to transgress natural laws, and thus could not move objects from one place to another without traversing the intermediate space.37 However, instantaneous transvection might still occur as a folk belief. Scottish folklore about the medieval alchemist Michael Scot told that, when in Bologna, he fetched his meals magically from the royal kitchens of France and England. The instantaneousness of the operation was a central point of the story – the food was still hot.38
Thus the ‘Boy of Leith’, aged ten when he told his story in 1684, visited the fairies every Thursday night. Sometimes he and his companions were ‘carried into France or Holland for a night’.39 The North Berwick pamphlet Newes from Scotland related the story of a pedlar who discovered some witches and ‘was in a moment conveyed at midnight from Scotland to Bordeaux in France’; the pamphlet dismissed the story as ‘most false’, but presumably someone had believed it.40 Helen Guthrie, in Forfar, confessed in October 1661 that ‘she knowes that Elspet Bruice and Marie Rynd and severall other witches went to see the King’s coronatione’ which had taken place in Westminster on 23 April.41 A related idea, sometimes known as bilocation, occurs in the case of Elspeth Wood, in Kilmalcolm in 1699. She talked to the minister of Kilmalcolm one Sunday, ‘and yet that same day she or some in her shape was seen sitting in Kililan kirk the whole day’.42
A story in Lord Duffus’s family in 1695 brings together several of these ideas and also connects us with Isobel Gowdie’s spell for flight. One of Duffus’s ancestors had heard the noise of a whirlwind, and ‘voices crying horse and hattock (this is the word which the Fairies ar said to use when they remove from any place)’; he cried ‘horse and hattock’ also, and was caught up and ‘transported through the aire by the Fairies’. He feasted with them, fell asleep, and next day awoke to find himself in the French king’s cellar with a silver cup in his hand. Duffus himself thought the story ‘fabulous’.43
IV
Destinations of flying witches varied. Quite often they flew to the witches’ sabbath, though this was usually somewhere local. There are occasional indications of a remote, folkloric sabbath venue like Benevento in Italy or Blåkulla in Scandinavia.44 The remote sabbath held ‘upon a hill in Atholl’ in 1597 is one example; flight is not mentioned but is surely the most likely means by which 2,300 witches could have been thought to gather there.45 Gideon Penman’s followers, quoted above, flew to ‘remote places’. As we have seen, some witches flew to fairyland, often being ‘carried’ involuntarily. In addition to the cases discussed by Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, the case of Margaret Fulton may be mentioned; she was one of the Bargarran witches of 1697. She was a charmer, and ‘her husband had brought her back from the fairies’.46 Janet Cowie, in Elgin in 1647, said that ‘the fairie had taken hir away to Messindiu wher she slept all night’.47
Often, however, flying witches’ destinations are unspecified. When the witnesses saw Christian Stewart flying above their heads, they presumably did not know where she was going. Some witches used their powers to accomplish a variety of errands, such as Isobel Gowdie’s arrow-shooting flights or John Fian chasing his cat. Flying was occasionally associated, not with travel, but with dancing at a witches’ meeting. Christian Mitchell, in Aberdeen in 1597, confessed to attending a meeting at which Satan played music and ‘ye all dansit a devilische danse, rydand on treis’.48 These ‘treis’ (logs) also extend the range of vehicles for flight; they seem similar to the ‘runge’ ridden by Barbara Parish, quoted at the head of this chapter.
V
A study of witches’ flight can usefully be extended to consider other magical modes of transport. Witches could travel over the sea in ways that were analogous to flight; often they seem to have been hovering just above the surface. This motif occurs repeatedly in the North Berwick trials, with alleged attempts to interfere with the North Sea voyages of James VI and his bride. The very first recorded words of the first confession of the first witch, Geillis Duncan, were: ‘Gillie confesses that in the midst of the firth they met with the [blank: witches?] of Coppenhown’ (Copenhagen). The witches, both of Scotland and of Denmark, seem to have hovered under their own power to this maritime encounter. Duncan also described another sea journey in a boat like a chimney, with the Devil going before them in the form of a rick of hay; the boat ‘flew like a swallow’.49 This is reminiscent of the ‘beasts or swallows’ that we have seen mentioned by William Hay.
Hovering over water continued in the seventeenth century. Marie Lamont, in Inverkip in 1662, confessed that she and several other witches ‘went out to the sea betwixt [Inverkip] and the land of Arran’, where they met a ship and tore off its sails.50 In Forfar, Helen Guthrie and her companions decided to sink a ship ‘lying not farr off from Barrie’; she held the cable by which the ship was fastened, while ‘the rest with the divill went into the sea upon the said cable as she thought’.51 Both of these sound like the North Berwick witches. Margaret NicLevin, in Bute in 1662, confessed that the Devil carried her ‘under his auxter’ (armpit) to a boat that she wanted to sink; a storm arose, but God prevented the boat from sinking. The Devil later dropped NicLevin on a rock near the coast, from which she was rescued by another woman. John Macpherson, one of those in the boat, testified that she had told him at the time that she had saved the boat from the storm.52
The motif of crossing water also applied to inland waters. Isobel Young, in East Barns in 1629, was accused of having crossed a millpond in a stormy night, ‘throw the watter … be extraordiner transportatioun without hors or uther help bot be the devill to haif sua convoyit hir-selff’.53 Robert Wilson, in Crook of Devon in 1662, crossed the river Devon in a similarly uncanny way, being accused that ‘ye said that ye came home over Devon, the water being very great’.54 Janet Kerr, in Duddingston in 1661, was helped by the Devil to cross the water at Tweedside.55 Even when flying over land, witches may essentially have been hovering, rather than reaching any great altitude. This was common in reports of Hungarian witches’ flight.56
The North Berwick witches’ most famous maritime adventures, though, involved a vehicle: the sieve, or riddle as it was called. Agnes Sampson confessed that they had often been ‘out of Scotland on the sea in their riddles’, which ‘made no stay but slid speedily away’. Euphemia MacCalzean was associated with a convention of witches who ‘passed over the sea in riddles’ to a ship which they raided and then sank. The contemporary pamphlet about the affair, Newes from Scotland, related that two hundred witches had set sail, each in their own riddle, to participate in the notorious witches’ gathering in the church of North Berwick at Hallowe’en 1590.57
The motif of the riddle predated North Berwick. The poet Alexander Montgomerie, in the 1580s, claimed that his antagonist, Polwarth, would ‘saill the see in a sive’.58 Not all Montgomerie’s material was folkloric, but it is plausible to believe that this was. Further riddles occurred in seventeenth-century popular belief. According to a slander case in 1622, Marjorie Bonnyman called Grissel Urral a witch and said that ‘hir mother was a witche and rowit in a riddell’.59 Margaret Philp told a neighbour that a spirit had said to her, ‘Remember thow not that thow and I did sail in the ridle togither in the fleuck pot with severall others.’60 A ‘fleuck’ was a flounder, so a ‘fleuck pot’ was presumably a fish kettle, perhaps an alternative means of magical transport.
VI
References to flight are quite common in records of Scottish witchcraft cases. Probably only a minority of the detailed records say explicitly that a given witch ‘flew’; but we should add to these a large number of records in which flight appears in casual and allusive ways. A witness in the case of Isobel Cumming said that she ‘redd over the new wall upone her owne belt’. The verb is ‘redd’ (rode), but the impression seems to be that she was airborne. A second witness had been surprised that Cumming arrived at a distant market before him, despite being ‘old and weak’; he did not believe her explanation that she had travelled by boat, and he clearly thought that she had remarkable powers of transvection.61 Isobel Haldane, in Perth in 1623, was ‘taikin furth quhidder be God or the devill scho knawis not’ and ‘caryit to ane hill syde’ where she met the fairies; there is no explicit statement that she was airborne, but it seems unlikely that her unidentified captor carried her on foot.62 John Stewart, in the Maxwell of Pollok case of 1677, confessed that when three of his fellow-witches visited his house they ‘went out at the window, thorow which they entered’, although he had opened the door.63 Elizabeth Maxwell, in Dumfries in 1650, was seen ‘ryding upoun a cat’.64 Cats do not usually fly, but then, people do not usually ride on them either. Reports of unusual and magical ‘riding’ are likely to imply flight.
There is also the issue of incomplete sources. The commissioners’ report to the privy council on the Bargarran case of 1697 gives a seemingly full account of the witches, summarising their confessions. It mentions that James Lindsay ‘was carried’ to a meeting in Bargarran orchard. But a further source, a note of the crown advocate’s speech to the assize, tells us additionally that Lindsay ‘appeared to William Semple suddenly, and flew about like a fowl, for an opportunity to strike him’.65 If we had further sources for some other witches, we might find more such material.
VII
In an influential work employing psychological studies, Edward Bever has recently argued that out-of-body experiences lie behind some reports of witches’ flight.66 This is a developing topic, and firm conclusions would be premature, but my own impression is that Bever’s work, and the psychological studies underpinning it, are probably applicable in some way to the Scottish evidence. The questions are, how can they be applied, and to which cases?
Bever and I are historians. Perhaps we should begin by taking stock of what the psychologists are telling us. Bever stresses the autonomy of the out-of-body experience and its distinctness from another much-studied phenomenon, sleep paralysis. However, this is questionable.67 He relies heavily on the work of Allan Cheyne and Todd Girard, but they see out-of-body experiences as part of a nexus of related phenomena which very much includes sleep paralysis. They also distinguish between ‘illusory motor experiences’ (IME) and ‘out-of-body experiences’ (OBE), with the latter, as they see it, involving a sense of separation from one’s body or looking down on one’s body from outside (‘autoscopy’). Flight, as such, could be experienced in either IME or OBE mode. However, Cheyne and Girard see the IME and OBE experiences as linked, and further argue that OBEs themselves should be understood as two linked phenomena – ‘out-of-body feelings’ and ‘out-of-body autoscopy’, the former of which can lead to the latter.68 Meanwhile, Michael Marsh has linked the out-of-body experience with the near-death experience.69 The categorical and causal relationships between all these phenomena remain matters of debate, but the out-of-body experience is clearly part of a larger picture.
In analysing flying witches, a psychologist would probably want answers to a number of questions. Were the experients asleep or awake when their experience occurred, and if asleep, were they in the rapid eye movement (REM) or non-REM phase of sleep? How long did the experience last? Did the experients float to the top of the room (as is common in modern OBE reports), or did they travel long distances? Did they experience spinning or falling, or autoscopy? Was the experience blissful, or frightening? Had the experients taken any narcotics or intoxicants? Unfortunately, the Scottish witchcraft material can shine only a few flickering beams of light onto such dark and difficult issues. Interrogators of Scottish witches were uninterested in some of these questions, while in others, their interests are likely to have influenced the interrogation process in unhelpful ways. Let us see, nevertheless, what the confessions they obtained can tell us.
The interrogators had little interest in dreams, in the duration of flight, in flight to the top of the room, or in motor factors such as floating, spinning or falling. They may have assumed that demonic flight would be unpleasant, but there is no evidence of questioning about this. They were sometimes interested in whether flight occurred bodily or in spirit, which might have elicited statements about autoscopy; I have not found any, however. They might well have been interested in the demonological topic of ointments causing flight, which would have uncovered information about narcotics or intoxicants; the apparent absence of such material indicates that Scottish witches’ flight was rarely, if ever, drug-induced.
Overall, it seems likely that OBEs, as they are currently (but imperfectly) understood by psychologists, lie behind at least a few of the reports by Scottish witches that they themselves flew. However, more work will have to be done before we can say much about individual cases. Moreover, much of the Scottish evidence comes from other sources – reports by neighbours that a witch flew, as with Megot Laing, or reports by a witch that another witch flew, as with Isobel Shirie. Such reports could not credibly be underlain by an OBE.
Flying witches in Scotland thus need to be understood in cultural as well as psychological terms. Margaret Watson may or may not have had an OBE, but it was certainly culture and not psychology that led her to describe flight on a hawthorn tree, an elder tree, a bundle of straw, a cat and a cock. The age-old nature–nurture debate is not going to be resolved in these pages, but the evidence presented in this chapter surely shows that the belief in flying witches was a significant cultural force in early modern Scotland. In the conclusions that follow, some of the reasons for this will be reviewed.
VIII
Flight is an escapist fantasy. Here it should be recognised that Larner, in her stress on peasant festivity as an ingredient of popular witch beliefs, had hit on an important principle. Peasant festivity, being rare, was itself usually an escapist fantasy. Witchcraft, to the ordinary folk of early modern Scotland, scratching a precarious existence in the face of falling living standards and the looming fear of starvation, was linked to magic, and magic offered the power to carry them away to a land of Cockaigne. There was feasting there, of course, and music and dancing. As Larner showed so well, there was freedom from ‘want’.70 Folk could readily imagine all this, so long as they could imagine having magical power. But what better way to imagine escapist magical power than by imagining the power to fly?
This is why flight was generally such a positive motif in Scottish witchcraft. Early modern Scots often feared witchcraft, but they did not imagine that flying witches would swoop down on them out of the skies like helicopter gunships, bringing death and destruction. Fear, and even disapproval, are rarely mentioned in accounts of flight, and flight is rarely associated with malefice. Nor does the Devil play much of a role except as a rare and obvious interrogatorial imposition. The proliferating vehicles for flight convey instead a sense of wonder and exhilaration. Flying witches were doing something extraordinary.
There were also darker aspects to witches’ flight. One was the fear of being ‘ridden’ by a witch – not an ordinary form of malefice, but one that some people feared, especially if they had experienced sleep paralysis. Another aspect, perhaps related, was the way in which some witches believed themselves to have been ‘carried’, often by the fairies; not all of them welcomed this, especially those for whom sleep paralysis was the likely cause. Finally, there was Isobel Gowdie and her death-dealing flights, which open a window into a cultural tradition that was positive only to the extent that it was fatalistic. Gowdie’s flights appear to be unique in themselves, but Emma Wilby has persuasively argued that her case is no aberration. All its components can be paralleled elsewhere; it is only in combination that they appear so remarkable.71
Witches’ flight, because it was extraordinary, may have contributed to a sense that there were gradations of witchcraft, with some witches having a more impressive range of powers than others. At the upper end of the range there was Gowdie herself, a kind of über-witch – confessing not only to flying, but also to shooting arrows, visiting fairyland, having wild sex with the Devil, shape-shifting in various guises, and carrying out elaborate magical rituals both for good and for ill, to all of which her interrogators listened with horrified fascination. At the lower end of the range were witches whose powers were obviously limited. One was Elizabeth Anderson, a girl aged 17 who was drawn into the Bargarran case of 1697. She met three other witches in Bargarran orchard; at the end they ‘disappeared in a flight’, but she herself ‘went home on foot’.72 Anderson may have been trying to limit her guilt, but it is still significant that she did so in this way.
Elizabeth Anderson, the witch who could not fly, was clearly untypical. The casual way in which flight is alluded to in many Scottish witchcraft cases is an indication that it was considered to be normal. There are numerous briefly-recorded cases that mention only malefice, and even more that mention only the demonic pact, but they do not seem qualitatively different from comparable cases that also mention flight. This suggests that even if there were numerous witches of whom it was not said that they could fly, there were very few of whom it was believed that they could not fly. The belief in witches’ flight was an autonomous motif, but it was linked with many other important matters that were closely tied in with witchcraft – notably beliefs in the witches’ sabbath and in shape-shifting. These too were extraordinary beliefs. The common folk of early modern Scotland believed, not just that some witches flew, but that flying witches were normal witches. Flying witches were extraordinary, but then, witchcraft itself was extraordinary.
Notes
1. Angus Macdonald (ed.), ‘A witchcraft case of 1647’, Scots Law Times (News) (10 April 1937), 77–8. ‘Quhill’ = until; ‘runge’ = plank.
2. Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London, 1981), 152. The inadequacy of this is also commented on by Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2005), 185–6. The Shirie and Gowdie cases will be discussed below. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database also neglected to include a field for witches’ flight, though numerous relevant cases can be gathered from the fields Dreams/Visions, Elphane/Fairyland, Ridingdead and Shape-Changing, all in the WDB_Case table.
3. Clive Hart, The Dream of Flight: Aeronautics from Classical Times to the Renaissance (London, 1972), 24–5.
4. RPC, 2nd ser., viii, 150.
5. Jacqueline Simpson, ‘ “The weird sisters wandering”: burlesque witchery in Montgomerie’s Flyting’, Folklore, 106 (1995), 9–20, at p. 16.
6. E.g. Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, ii, I, 543.
7. Quoted in Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Brighton, 2010), 39. For an older transcript see Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, iii, II, 604. For more on this case see also Emma Wilby, ‘ “We mey shoot them dead at our pleasur”: Isobel Gowdie, elf arrows and dark shamanism’, Chapter 8 in this volume.
8. Wilby, Visions, 40, 44; cf. Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, iii, II, 604, 608.
9. Selections from the Registers of the Presbytery of Lanark, 1623–1707, ed. John Robertson (Abbotsford Club, 1839), 77.
10. Wilby, Visions, 39–40 (and pp. 91–4 for discussion); cf. Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, iii, II, 604. If spells for flight were rare in Scotland, flying ointments (much discussed in some places on the Continent) seem to have been non-existent in popular belief. In 1685, George Sinclair mentioned them only in relating an English case: Satans Invisible World Discovered, ed. Thomas G. Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1871), 188.
11. Alan Bruford, ‘Trolls, hillfolk, finns, and Picts: the identity of the good neighbours in Orkney and Shetland’, in Peter Narváez (ed.), The Good People: New Fairylore Essays (Lexington, Ken., 1991), 116–41, at p. 127; Alan Bruford, ‘Scottish Gaelic witch stories: a provisional type list’, Scottish Studies, 11 (1967), 13–47, at pp. 27–30 (also giving further instances of the phrase ‘Horse and Hattock’).
12. NRS, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.
13. J. M. McPherson, Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland (London, 1929), 230–1.
14. Hunter (ed.), Occult Laboratory, 215.
15. William Hay, Lectures on Marriage, ed. John C. Barry (Stair Society, 1967), 120–1.
16. Julian Goodare, ‘The cult of the seely wights in Scotland’, Folklore, 123 (2012), 198–219.
17. Charles K. Sharpe, A Historical Account of the Belief in Witchcraft in Scotland (London, 1884), 199.
18. Edward J. Cowan and Lizanne Henderson, ‘The last of the witches? The survival of Scottish witchcraft belief’, in Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002), 198–217, at pp. 205–9.
19. Joseph Anderson (ed.), ‘The confessions of the Forfar witches (1661)’, PSAS, 22 (1887–1888), 241–62, at pp. 247, 249–50, 252.
20. C. L’Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (London, 1933), 119, 358–61.
21. Bruford, ‘Scottish Gaelic witch stories’, 19–21. In these stories the ridden victim usually outwits the witch.
22. Alexander Laing, Lindores Abbey and its Burgh of Newburgh (Edinburgh, 1876), 218–19. This looks like a case of sleep paralysis, for which see Margaret Dudley and Julian Goodare, ‘Outside in or inside out: sleep paralysis and Scottish witchcraft’, Chapter 7 in this volume.
23. BL, Egerton MS 2879, fo. 8v.
24. Similarly, Swedish witches were thought to ride on broomsticks, goats or people (often people in authority such as sheriffs): Bengt Ankarloo, ‘Sweden: the mass burnings (1668–76)’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1993), 285–318, at p. 314.
25. Records of Elgin, 1234–1800, 2 vols., ed. William Cramond (New Spalding Club, 1903–1908), ii, 55. ‘Yeid’ = went; ‘yirning’ = whining; ‘incontinent’ = immediately.
26. SSW. Presumably ‘cleuchis’ = claws, although the spelling is unusual.
27. Sir John Lauder of Fountainhall, Historical Notices of Scotish Affairs, 2 vols., ed. David Laing (Bannatyne Club, 1848), i, 198–9.
28. [Sir George Mackenzie,] Pleadings in some Remarkable Cases before the Supreme Courts of Scotland, since the year 1661 (Edinburgh, 1673), 185.
29. BL, Egerton MS 2879, fo. 4r. ‘Corbies’ = crows.
30. A True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girle (Edinburgh, 1698; Wing catalogue no. C7475B), p. xxv.
31. David Webster (ed.), Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts on Witchcraft and the Second Sight (Edinburgh, 1820), 108.
32. Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief: A History (East Linton, 2001), 37.
33. Cramond (ed.), Records of Elgin, ii, 211.
34. Quoted in Christina Larner, Christopher H. Lee and Hugh V. McLachlan, A Source-Book of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977), 258.
35. Normand and Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft, 226, 228, 230. For more on North Berwick see Victoria Carr, ‘The countess of Angus’s escape from the North Berwick witch-hunt’, Chapter 2 in this volume.
36. NRS, Canongate kirk session minutes, 1619–29, CH2/122/2, p. 467. Stirling and Pratt confessed their fault: ibid., p. 469.
37. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 165.
38. J. Wood Brown, An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot (Edinburgh, 1897), 210–11.
39. Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 64.
40. Normand and Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft, 310.
41. Anderson (ed.), ‘Confessions of the Forfar witches’, 254.
42. Hugh V. McLachlan (ed.), The Kirk, Satan and Salem: A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire (Glasgow, 2006), 342.
43. Hunter (ed.), Occult Laboratory, 153.
44. See articles on these in Richard M. Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2006).
45. Julian Goodare, ‘The Scottish witchcraft panic of 1597’, in Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context, 51–72, at p. 59.
46. Account of Two Letters (appended to the True Narrative), 7. See also Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 36–9.
47. Records of Elgin, ii, 357.
48. Spalding Misc., i, 165; cf. 167.
49. Normand and Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft, 136, 138, 140.
50. Sharpe, Historical Account, 133.
51. Anderson (ed.), ‘Confessions of the Forfar witches’, 254.
52. HP, iii, 5, 7. For more on this case see Liv Helene Willumsen, ‘Witches in Scotland and northern Norway: two case studies’, in Peter Graves and Arne Kruse (eds.), Images and Imaginations: Perspectives on Britain and Scandinavia (Edinburgh, 2007), 35–67, at pp. 40–50.
53. SJC, i, 97. For more on this case see Lauren Martin, ‘The witch, the household and the community: Isobel Young in East Barns, 1590–1629’, Chapter 4 in this volume.
54. R. Burns Begg (ed.), ‘Notice of trials for witchcraft at Crook of Devon, Kinross-shire, in 1662’, PSAS, 22 (1887–1888), 211–41, at p. 227.
55. SSW.
56. 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), 77.
57. Normand and Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft, 148, 267–8, 314. Sampson also confessed to having been in an invisible ‘boat like a chimney’ in which the witches raided, and then sank, a ship: ibid., 138, 149. It has been argued that the riddles could have been real coracles: P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy: Magic and Witchcraft in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (East Linton, 2001), 151. However, no reason is given for describing coracles as riddles. Similarly, Maxwell-Stuart argues that an account of women rowing with oars ‘clearly indicates a normal ferrying craft’ (ibid.); however, this was the ‘boat like a chimney’. The riddles were clearly intended as magical parts of an essentially magical story.
58. Alexander Montgomerie, Poems, 2 vols., ed. David J. Parkinson (STS, 2000), i, 152, l. 214.
59. Cramond (ed.), Records of Elgin, ii, 172. Another witness had the phrase as ‘saillit in a riddell’.
60. William Cramond, The Church and Churchyard of Rathven (Banff, 1930), 26–9.
61. Cramond (ed.), Records of Elgin, ii, 298–9.
62. RPC, 2nd ser., viii, 353.
63. Sinclair, Satans Invisible World Discovered, 14 (relation 1).
64. A. E. Truckell (ed.), ‘Unpublished witchcraft trials’, Transactions of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, 3rd ser., 51 (1975), 48–58, at p. 50.
65. True Narrative, p. xli; Account of Two Letters, 7.
66. Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2008), 118–29.
67. Bever says that ‘Cheyne’s research suggests that the two are only coincidentally related’ (Realities, 465, n. 207), citing J. A. Cheyne and T. A. Girard, ‘Spatial characteristics of hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis’, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 9 (2004), 281–300. On the contrary, this article treats OBEs as a ‘factor’ of sleep paralysis and its findings ‘provide additional evidence for the internal integrity of, and distinctions between, Intruder and V-M hallucinations’ (‘vestibular-motor’ hallucinations, including OBEs) (p. 294).
68. J. Allan Cheyne and Todd A. Girard, ‘The body unbound: vestibular-motor hallucinations and out-of-body experiences’, Cortex, 45 (2009), 201–15. For a statement that OBEs ‘frequently occur’ during sleep paralysis, see Devin B. Terhune, ‘The incidence and determinants of visual phenomenology during out-of-body experiences’, Cortex, 45 (2009), 236–42, at p. 240. These articles are part of a ‘Special Section on Out-of-Body Experiences’ in this journal, pp. 201–58. For more on sleep paralysis and witchcraft see Dudley and Goodare, ‘Outside in or inside out’.
69. Michael N. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality? (Oxford, 2010).
70. Larner, Enemies of God, 148.
71. Wilby, Visions, ch. 4.
72. True Narrative, p. xl. On another occasion her father ‘carried her over the river in a flight’, but they continued their journey to Dumbarton on foot.