Tag: Incantations/Charms

In the spring of 1662, in the small parish of Auldearn on the Moray coast of Scotland, a woman named Isobel Gowdie began to speak. Over six weeks, between April 13th and May 27th, she gave four separate confessions to a panel of ministers, landowners, and a public notary named John Innes, who wrote everything down. She was not, as far as the records indicate, subjected to the spectacular physical tortures that characterised some witch trials. She simply spoke. At length, in detail, with a richness and internal consistency that scholars have been returning to ever since. What she described was a world saturated with magic. A coven of thirteen, each with a named spirit attendant. Meetings at Earlseat Hills and the Kirk of Nairn and Darnaway Palace. The Devil as a large, dark, cold man. The Queen of Faerie in white linens. A puddock-plough drawn by frogs, with traces of dog grass and a half-gelded ram’s horn for a coulter. Clay images made to destroy the heirs of local landowners. Elf-arrows, shaped by the Devil’s hands and trimmed by hunchbacked elf-boys with packing needles, shot from the thumb. And charms. Twenty-seven of them in total – more than in any other recorded British witchcraft case. Three appear twice in the confessions, with significant variations, as if Isobel was either refining her recollection or the written record captured two slightly different versions of living oral material. The charms are remarkable. They are not the formal Latin incantations of learned ceremonial magic. They are working folk charms. Rhythmic, practical, spoken in the first person, built on the kind of internal rhyme and repetition that makes things memorable, that makes them stick. Some of them invoke the Devil explicitly. Others carry the unmistakable flavor of pre-Christian magic overlaid with Catholic forms. The saints’ names, the Holy Trinity, the Lady and her Son. Which is exactly what you would expect from the older healing tradition of the Scottish Highlands, where Christian and pre-Christian elements merged seamlessly in popular practice for centuries. Reading them now, what strikes most is their directness. This is not abstract theology. This is someone who knew exactly what they wanted and had words they trusted to get it. What follows is every charm from Isobel Gowdie’s confessions, organised by purpose, with the context in which she described them. The language has been lightly modernised where Scots spellings make comprehension difficult, but the substance and structure of each charm is preserved exactly as recorded. A Note on Reading These Charms Isobel Gowdie was almost certainly executed, though no record of the execution survives. She named dozens of her neighbours in her confessions. The world she described – the coven, the devil, the murders by magic – was understood by her interrogators as literal truth, and the consequences for the people she named were real and serious. The charms here are historical documents: windows into a specific time, place, and tradition of folk magical practice in seventeenth-century Scotland. They are also extraordinary poetry. The shape-shifting charms in particular have a rhythmic drive that suggests they were made to be spoken aloud, repeatedly, until the saying of them changed something in the speaker. Emma Wilby, the scholar who has studied Gowdie most thoroughly, has suggested that Isobel may have been a genuine magical practitioner, a cunning woman or wise woman, whose real practices were translated, under the pressure of interrogation, into the framework of demonic witchcraft that her Calvinist questioners were looking for. The healing charms lend weight to this. They are not devil-worship dressed up as medicine. They are medicine, with… …