By Zoe Venditozzi, Claire Mitchell
Scotland's brutal witch trials exposed
Subject
Themes
In early modern Scotland, magic was as real as the weather. Everyone from kings to fishermen believed in a supernatural world woven through daily life. Charmers sold spoken spells; cunning folk summoned spirits for practical help. These practitioners were tolerated because their powers did not come from the Devil. Witches, however, were defined differently: their power derived from a satanic pact, and this distinction proved lethal.
In early modern Scotland, magic was as real as the weather. Everyone from kings to fishermen believed in a supernatural world woven through daily life. Charmers sold spoken spells; cunning folk summoned spirits for practical help. These practitioners were tolerated because their powers did not come…
The publication of How to Kill a Witch in 2025 arrives at a moment when the politics of gender, memory, and institutional accountability are being contested with particular intensity across the Western world. The Witches of Scotland campaign, founded by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, has…
The Scottish witch trials were not a spontaneous eruption of superstitious mob violence but a deliberate, state-sanctioned campaign enabled by the fusion of religious and political power. The Reformation of 1560 did not merely replace one branch of Christianity with another; it created an entirely…
Of the approximately four thousand people accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, 85 percent were women. This staggering disproportion was not accidental. It was the logical outcome of a belief system that cast women as inherently weaker, more susceptible to temptation, and more…
The Salem Witch Museum distils the mechanics of witch persecution into a simple formula: fear plus a trigger equals a scapegoat. This equation applies with striking consistency across every witch panic documented in the text, from sixteenth-century Scotland to twenty-first-century Nigeria. Fear is…
One of the most disturbing revelations is that the Scottish witch trials were not the work of hysterical mobs wielding pitchforks. They were conducted through formal legal processes, with evidence, charges, commissions, and judicial reasoning. The system had all the trappings of justice while…
Scotland's accused witches were not simply killed; they were erased. Bodies were burned to prevent the Devil from reanimating them, but the burning also destroyed every physical trace of the victims' existence. Parish records noted the cost of firewood and executioners' fees but rarely preserved the…
In early modern Scotland, magic was as real as the weather. Everyone, from kings and philosophers to farmers and fishermen, believed in a supernatural world interwoven with the material one. Celtic mythology described an Otherworld inhabited by human-sized fairies, spirits, and demons. People…
The 1591 pamphlet Newes from Scotland provides the first detailed account of the North Berwick witch trials, though it is also a masterpiece of royal propaganda. David Seaton, a bailiff in the town of Tranent, grows suspicious of his maidservant Geillis Duncan's extraordinary healing abilities. He…
Life in sixteenth-century Scottish fishing villages was brutal and precarious. Men died frequently at sea, crops failed without warning, and disease routinely killed children. The kirk minister was seen as a direct connection to God, and anyone deviating from social norms risked suspicion. In these…
Among the most feared figures in early modern Scotland was the witch pricker, a self-appointed specialist who arrived in towns and sent communities into panic. The practice centred on finding the Devil's mark, a blemish believed to prove a satanic pact. According to Daemonologie, the mark would not…
Robert Pitcairn, a nineteenth-century Scottish lawyer, preserves in his 1833 work Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland the legal machinery that sent thousands to their deaths. A commission from the Privy Council was required to proceed to trial. On a single sitting on 7 November 1661, fourteen such…
Grissell Jaffray, accused of being a spaewife who could foretell the future, was strangled and burned in Dundee in 1669 after three local ministers brought charges against her. According to legend, her son, returning from sea, saw the flames of his mother's pyre and fled the city forever. No records…
Even in death, the accused found no peace. In 1852, Joseph Neil Paton, a wealthy Dunfermline weaver and phrenology enthusiast, hires grave robber Robert Baxter Brimer to exhume the remains of Lilias Adie from her underwater burial site in Torryburn Bay. Brimer and his crew work at low tide, heaving…
In 2021, the United Nations passes a resolution urging states to eliminate harmful practices related to witchcraft accusations and ritual attacks. The resolution is not a symbolic gesture; it reflects the scale of a problem that persists across at least twenty-seven countries. Between 2010 and 2019,…
By Zoe Venditozzi, Claire Mitchell
Subject
Themes
In early modern Scotland, magic was as real as the weather. Everyone from kings to fishermen believed in a supernatural world woven through daily life. Charmers sold spoken spells; cunning folk summoned spirits for practical help. These practitioners were tolerated because their powers did not come from the Devil. Witches, however, were defined differently: their power derived from a satanic pact, and this distinction proved lethal.