Folkloric motifs relating to Isobel Gowdie and Scottish witchcraft.
First presented at the Museum of Witchcraft and magic conference – May 18th -19th 2019
Many of us here will be familiar with the haunting “I sal gow intill a haire …” incantation which once drifted around the museum from the old “wise woman’s” tableaux soundtrack… and indeed in the course of my background researches for this paper I was continually surprised by my familiarity with much of the material in the confessions of Isabel Gowdie. So much of her story seems to have seeped in to both popular culture and Neo-Pagan practice alike. There may however be another reason for this apparent familiarity.
The story as we know it has no prequel or record of what happened following the event, but only a set of four unusually explicit confessions from a woman called Isobel Gowdie, taken apparently without any form of coercion before a group of local dignitaries in the Spring of 1662 in the far north east of Scotland.
In 1833 Robert Pitcairn published them as a kind of legal oddity but it didn’t really emerge again until about a hundred years later when substantial references to the confessions appeared in Dr Margaret Murrays “The God of the Witches”. Here she used them as evidence for her theory that witchcraft was neither fabricated or imagined but was an actual physical survival of a prehistoric fertility cult. This is where I first came across Isobel Gowdie.
To try and navigate a path through these confessions I am following the lead taken by Joyce Froome in her 2010 “Wicked enchantments”, in which she turns to not only contemporary magical beliefs as a means by which to unpick the Pendle witch trials, which took place fifty years prior to the Isabel Gowdie case… but also to contemporary folkloric beliefs.
In examining the folklore of the Isabel Gowdie confessions, the first port of call seems naturally to lead us to the world of ‘fairy’. In the first confession she tells of going to the “Downie hillis” to feast with the king and queen of “fearie”, and it is there that she also encounters the fearsome “elf bullis”. This account appears again in her third confession but without any specific references to fairy.
In the second confession - in the section where she famously states that the witches gather in a coven of thirteen at the end of each quarter (of the year) she lists the covens spirit familiars; one of which was called “Thomas a fearie”. In the second confession she also gives an intriguing account of her encounter with what amounts to a fairy “elf arrow” making factory in which the “divell” makes the said arrows before passing them on to his team of “Elf boyes, who whyttes and dightis them with a sharp thing” before handing them on to the witches. These last two references are again reiterated in her fourth and final confession.
But before we continue, let us examine briefly what we mean by “fairy”. The world of fairy is known by many names and appears in one form or another in the myths, religions and the folklore all over the world. The etymology of the word ‘Fairy’ is uncertain, but it is generally used to denote the near- universally held folk belief that there is some kind of unseen world, co-existent with our own and inhabited by a race of beings of which under certain conditions we may encounter. The word “Fairy” (in its many forms and spellings) is generally used to denote both the fairy “beings” and the fairy “world”. The fairy and the human world seem to exist in an uneasy symbiotic state regulated by a complex and sometimes surreal system of taboo and ritual.
The story as we know it has no prequel or record of what happened following the event, but only a set of four unusually explicit confessions from a woman called Isobel Gowdie, taken apparently without any form of coercion before a group of local dignitaries in the Spring of 1662 in the far north east of Scotland.
In 1833 Robert Pitcairn published them as a kind of legal oddity but it didn’t really emerge again until about a hundred years later when substantial references to the confessions appeared in Dr Margaret Murrays “The God of the Witches”. Here she used them as evidence for her theory that witchcraft was neither fabricated or imagined but was an actual physical survival of a prehistoric fertility cult. This is where I first came across Isobel Gowdie.
To try and navigate a path through these confessions I am following the lead taken by Joyce Froome in her 2010 “Wicked enchantments”, in which she turns to not only contemporary magical beliefs as a means by which to unpick the Pendle witch trials, which took place fifty years prior to the Isabel Gowdie case… but also to contemporary folkloric beliefs.
In examining the folklore of the Isabel Gowdie confessions, the first port of call seems naturally to lead us to the world of ‘fairy’. In the first confession she tells of going to the “Downie hillis” to feast with the king and queen of “fearie”, and it is there that she also encounters the fearsome “elf bullis”. This account appears again in her third confession but without any specific references to fairy.
In the second confession - in the section where she famously states that the witches gather in a coven of thirteen at the end of each quarter (of the year) she lists the covens spirit familiars; one of which was called “Thomas a fearie”. In the second confession she also gives an intriguing account of her encounter with what amounts to a fairy “elf arrow” making factory in which the “divell” makes the said arrows before passing them on to his team of “Elf boyes, who whyttes and dightis them with a sharp thing” before handing them on to the witches. These last two references are again reiterated in her fourth and final confession.
But before we continue, let us examine briefly what we mean by “fairy”. The world of fairy is known by many names and appears in one form or another in the myths, religions and the folklore all over the world. The etymology of the word ‘Fairy’ is uncertain, but it is generally used to denote the near- universally held folk belief that there is some kind of unseen world, co-existent with our own and inhabited by a race of beings of which under certain conditions we may encounter. The word “Fairy” (in its many forms and spellings) is generally used to denote both the fairy “beings” and the fairy “world”. The fairy and the human world seem to exist in an uneasy symbiotic state regulated by a complex and sometimes surreal system of taboo and ritual.