00:00:00.160Hi, I'm Clare Mitchell QC. Welcome to the Witches of Scotland podcast.
00:00:05.220I'm a lawyer who specialises in miscarriage of justice cases and we're bringing you this podcast
00:00:10.120because we want to tell you about the women who were accused, prosecuted, convicted
00:00:15.240and ultimately executed as witches in Scotland.
00:00:18.780I'm Zoe Vendetotsi and I'm a writer who's always had an interest in the witches
00:00:22.780and I feel that this dark mark against Scotland needs a reckoning.
00:00:26.500The campaign Witches of Scotland wants three things.
00:00:29.600Firstly, a pardon for all those convicted of witchcraft.
00:00:33.240Secondly, an apology for all those who were accused as witches.
00:00:37.420And finally, a national monument in recognition of all those who were affected by this terrible miscarriage of justice.
00:00:44.460Over the forthcoming weeks, we'll be talking to a whole host of experts about the history and the modern day connections to the witches of Scotland.
00:00:51.420Good morning, good afternoon, good evening
00:00:56.620and welcome to the Witches of Scotland podcast.
00:01:00.540Somewhat unbelievably, we're now on 62 episodes
00:01:20.680But before that, Claire, dear Claire, I'm just wondering, has anything happened in the news?
00:01:30.560Well, here at Which News Desk Central, depending on when you're listening to this and not simply morning, noon or night,
00:01:37.820it may be that the consultation period is still open for a day or the consultation period has
00:01:45.720already ended for the Scottish Parliament finding out whether or not you support a pardon for those
00:01:53.540convicted of witchcraft now if the time has gone past and you haven't been able to sign it or
00:01:59.900you're just coming across this podcast now and thinking I would really like to do that what can
00:02:04.100to do the answer is you contact your local MSP and you just write to them to say I've heard there's
00:02:10.960legislation proposed about a pardon for those people that were convicted of witchcraft I support
00:02:17.300it and just let your view be known that way so that's another way post the public consultation
00:02:22.340period people can do that so I really hope we'll probably find out quite soon after how good the
00:02:29.640number of people signing up has been. Public consultations like this don't tend to have
00:02:35.620thousands upon thousands of people answering them. I've looked at some of the other public
00:02:40.220consultations and I don't know I think sometimes there's a feeling that oh well everyone else will
00:02:45.940do it so I don't need to. That sometimes is the case but anyway we will see how many people support
00:02:51.440it. There will be people that will be against it and we'll have written in and explained why
00:02:56.060they're against it as well so it'll be interesting to see what they've got to say but that's kind of
00:03:00.960the big news is that we'll be waiting soon to find out what the outcome of the public consultation
00:03:06.160will be because if we can get people on board for the public consultation if there's enough people
00:03:12.100if there's enough interest then it will show the parliament that this is something that people want
00:03:18.580and we don't want to think about the other alternative just now okay that sounds like an
00:03:24.220excellent thing to do there's also a couple of really cool things that are happening in scotland
00:03:29.480that are friends of the show that we've had on to talk to or that we know that we've met various
00:03:34.580things who are i think to an extent certainly influenced by what they've learned of the
00:03:40.060campaign and has helped to generate things locally would you like to talk about the first of these
00:03:45.180events yes shout out first of all to the people's witch trials and you can find out about them
00:03:51.140at peopleswitchtrials.com and I was going through their website and it's really really nicely done
00:03:57.660and they tell the stories of the people from that area who were accused convicted and executed as
00:04:05.320witches and in fact they get go into quite a lot of detail about that there's a website where it's
00:04:12.760connected to which is www.languageladdy.scot who goes in depth into the story of those who were
00:04:21.380accused and convicted in Peebles so it's really worth a look at that and at the moment they're
00:04:28.340working towards unveiling a new memorial in Peebles and we'll give you an update on that
00:04:33.680soon as well because we think in the very very near future we will have another memorial and
00:04:39.680And that's, we've had one in Brechen, if you remember, Zoe went to that.
00:04:44.140We're going to have one in Peebles as well.
00:04:46.160And there are other places around the country that I've got in contact with is asking us about how they would go about doing that and getting their own memorial set up.
00:04:55.280So we've been in contact with a few people and hopefully that will come off for them as well.
00:05:00.120The other thing is in Forfer. Is that right, Zoe?
00:05:04.040This is correct. So this is with podcast fave Judith Gorman.
00:05:08.840so we have an episode coming up soon with Judith where she's going to fill us in on what she's
00:05:13.600been doing in Forfer she's got somebody that she's working with now as well which is great so there's
00:05:19.020two people beavering away on that and one of the things that they've worked on is it's going to be
00:05:23.400a series of events about the witch trials that occurred in Forfer and there's going to be a
00:05:29.000launch for that at 2pm at the Methven Museum in Forfer on the 22nd of October which we'll be
00:05:36.460delighted to go along to as well so I'm really looking forward to seeing Judith in real life
00:05:41.360I don't think I've actually I've not seen Judith in real life during the witches situation so it'll
00:05:46.780be nice to actually see her rather than just on the screen so anyway everybody can come to that
00:05:51.280it's not just me and Judith and it's at 2 p.m on the 22nd of October and I think there's going to
00:05:55.860be a whole bunch of different events so that'll be really worth checking out and if you can't make
00:06:00.520it on the 22nd you know they will they haven't released yet exactly what's happening and the
00:06:06.180dates for that but i think there'll be various things over a period of time that you can go to
00:06:10.160so that'll be good cool it's really really fantastic to see so many people getting involved
00:06:15.580in that really practical way in their local areas it's brilliant and if i can just mention at this
00:06:20.840point as well there seems to be like a real increase in cases that leo igway is getting
00:06:26.340involved with just now with the advocacy for alleged witches if you don't already follow him
00:06:32.100and the work that he does on either Facebook or Twitter,
00:17:56.120They're not, as you know, particularly famous for writing about witches.
00:17:59.480No, it's something that would jump to my mind, I don't think.
00:18:01.840And that's actually why I ended up working on this.
00:18:04.780A few years ago, I was working on a study of Agatha Christie that never quite saw the light of day.
00:18:09.480Two chapters of it are now an article. Another chapter is now the basis of this study.
00:18:12.820But one of the things that I kept coming back to was, why all the witches?
00:18:16.580You know, why the paganism? It kept popping up, not in every book,
00:18:21.260but regularly enough that this seemed to be one of her things,
00:18:25.160you know, like her biblical quotations or her Shakespeare quotations.
00:18:28.060And I kept wondering, because it seems so incongruous,
00:18:30.720Why a novelist who is famous for mousetrap-like plots, you know, rationalistic things that explain everything, everything goes in its place?
00:18:40.220I mean, I'm stereotyping here, of course, and those who love Agatha Christie will know that her work is much more complex than he wants than that.
00:18:46.520But for a genre as well, that is frequently discussed as extremely rationalistic, extremely into explaining away all the mysterious and all the dubious.
00:18:57.740why did these novels keep coming back to witchcraft and paganism so that was a sort of
00:19:02.560impetus for working on this you talked about your work first of all with the bible and with
00:19:07.720shakespeare and of course the most famous shakespeare play involving witches is macbeth
00:19:15.440now we understand she said very vaguely because my understanding is very vague we understand that
00:19:21.960Shakespeare may have been trying to curry favour with the king by inserting the witches into
00:19:28.680Macbeth. Is that something you've come across? It's certainly a theory I've come across. And
00:19:33.320again, I will tread fairly carefully here because I'm no longer an early modernist, really.
00:19:39.360I mostly work these days on later work. But yeah, I mean, James had written about witches. He then
00:19:46.580sort of slightly recants that and writes as a sceptic. But it's certainly true that this is a
00:19:51.520subject that he's deeply engaged with you know he calls a witch who was charged at the time to court
00:19:57.940and there's an extraordinary anecdote about him telling her to perform the dance that she
00:20:02.620allegedly performed during her spell making in front of the court he sort of restages this in
00:20:07.620in front of the king's presence and I believe there's a there was a concern that when he had
00:20:13.300come back from Scandinavia there had been witches who attempted to sink the boat it's certainly a
00:20:17.880A very live question at the time. So I suppose you're right that there is this very obvious, when you look at it, there's a very strong conduit that taps into ideas of witchcraft, witchcraft belief. I'm pretty sure Lisa Hopkins has explored extensively the way in which Macbeth is one of the most frequently cited plays by Shakespeare in detective fiction.
00:20:38.900So perhaps that's one of the conduits where the imagery arrives. And of course, Christy writes a novel called By the Pricking of My Thumbs. So yeah, that stuff's around. And yeah, perhaps that provides a tap or a conduit via which these images can make their way into modern fiction.
00:20:54.760And why do you think it is in modern fiction that the idea of witches is so compelling and why people like Christy went back to it?
00:21:01.620Very good question. And again, one that people write entire books and careers around. In these cases, I think it's a couple of things. One, this is a major topic of sort of cultural discussion at the time.
00:21:15.960In the mid-century, you have the repealing of the laws against witchcraft, almost accidentally during the passing of the Fraudulent Mediums Act.
00:21:23.140You have the appearance in public of people like Gerald Gardner, who claim to be the last initiates of centuries of hidden covens that have been suppressed and having to live in secret.
00:21:36.040For the first time in hundreds of years, you have a significant number of people in Britain saying,
00:21:39.960witches? Yep, that's me. Hello. I'm a witch. We are witches. There are lots of competing theories
00:21:44.700about what witchcraft is. It's not only something that people are talking about, it's something
00:21:48.960that people are making wildly different counterclaims. And then I'd point to the work
00:21:53.220by Rondall Tutton, his Triumph of the Moon and his work on paganism in Britain, which is absolutely
00:21:58.100fascinating. And he points out the way in which the various laws over the previous centuries had
00:22:03.080taken drastically different visions of why you shouldn't be a witch. To simplify, and again,
00:22:08.760I'm not a legal historian, as I understand it. The Jacobean laws basically said you shouldn't
00:22:13.380be a witch because that's a way of causing harm to others. It's like using a weapon or it's like
00:22:18.660stealing something. It is a way of harming others, but you happen to be using magic. So don't do
00:22:23.600that. Then you have in the 18th century, a more skeptical enlightenment view where witchcraft is
00:22:28.880illegal because it's a way of duping people. It's a form of fraud. You shouldn't pretend to cause
00:22:34.560sorceries and enchantments and you know pretend i think it's in the statute itself then in the
00:22:38.46019th century witchcraft gets gathered into i believe it's the vagrancy act so you shouldn't
00:22:44.660pretend to be doing sorcery and witchcraft you also shouldn't show wounds whilst begging you
00:22:50.520shouldn't sleep in outhouses you shouldn't carry housebreaking implements but you shouldn't bet
00:22:54.380in the street so it seems to be gathered around this sort of low-level anti-social down with this
00:23:00.920sort of thing, move on into the next parish attitude. In the 1950s, you get the Fraudulent
00:23:05.900Mediums Act, where by making sort of fraudulent spiritualism illegal, the law seems to open up a
00:23:14.100space for respectable spiritualism, where it can be a sort of spiritual practice, almost a form of
00:23:20.240religion. And witchcraft then itself gets, as I say, almost accidentally made legal. It's no longer
00:23:25.840identified as something that's specifically identified by the law. It's the time in which
00:23:30.680people are reassessing what they think witchcraft is and was. And it's a radically different view.
00:23:37.220So you've got people like Montague Summers who are saying witchcraft is basically what the early
00:23:41.300modern inquisitors thought it was. It's an anti-Christian, anti-social, secret system of
00:23:46.340cabals that's looking to bring down whatever it is that we hold dear. And you have Margaret Murray0.87
00:23:50.940saying, no, witchcraft as persecuted in the early modern period was a secret religion.
00:23:56.340It was an ancient pagan religion rooted in prehistory as far back as humanity went, and it was peaceful, earth-loving, full of healers, and it was oppressed by the Christian church and went underground.
00:24:08.980you have people like uh charles williams um charles williams always taking a slightly eccentric view
00:24:14.540of things saying that witchcraft is almost a sort of it's a it's an accident that witchcraft which
00:24:21.540identifies with goisha sorcery is what happens when the noble dreams of learning and power fall
00:24:28.960away and become corrupted so if you know if you're an early modern magician you either end up in
00:24:34.860experimental science and become an alchemist and you know eventually a scientist or whatever or
00:24:38.860you go into the kind of high-minded ritual magic that people like charles williams were very
00:24:44.040attached to or sort of your moral corruption gets the better of you and you end up as a witch
00:24:48.000those are only a few examples of of what people thought witchcraft was they couldn't even agree
00:24:52.820on what it was let alone whether you should do it or not so it seems that this is a thing that's
00:24:59.000that's being hashed out in the culture of the time people are not only disagreeing about what
00:25:03.180witchcraft is now, but what in the past it connected to. And that dilemma of what witchcraft
00:25:09.200was then, and what our, I think, Professor Julian Goodyear says, you know, the 1930s,
00:25:15.640essentially a previous history of witchcraft was imagined, but it wasn't the history of witchcraft
00:25:21.140in Scotland. These weren't Margaret Miller's idea of these covens and things like that.
00:25:26.600And he's very, very clear that that has muddied the historical story of what it was to witchcraft in Scotland.
00:25:35.100However, it's a view which has lingered on.
00:25:38.960We're almost coming up to a century of that idea and that view.
00:25:43.420And it hasn't gone away. If anything, those ideas have gathered steam, I would think, over the last hundred years.
00:25:49.460And people are more willing or more interested in trying to create a history of witchcraft, which far predates the Witchcraft Act and the people that we are talking about as people who definitely weren't witches.
00:26:05.060Do the modern writers, as a generality, talk about the Miller witches or the real witches, real witches, i.e. the real people that were accused of witchcraft?
00:26:18.420What kind of ideas do the modern writers take?0.73
00:26:22.000Talking about the ones that I write about here, the Four Queens, I would say definitely the former.
00:26:27.840They're playing with exploring ideas of enchantment, of witchcraft that are definitely post-Margaret Murray.
00:26:34.360And I totally agree with you that that theory, though it was really, as I understand it, sort of debunked by the 30s and 40s and certainly by the 70s in history, continues on.
00:26:45.920As anyone who, as I do on a colleague's 17th century module, anyone who lectures occasional witchcraft will discover, because you have undergraduates who know about witchcraft.0.94
00:26:55.960Witchcraft was his secret religion, very good, very feminist, very earth-centered, healing, all this shit, and bad stuff was done to it.
00:27:02.980It is astonishing that you find yourself saying, oh, wow, people are absolutely certain that that was the case.0.92
00:27:07.900So yeah, the witch, as appears in Christie and Allingham and Mitchell and Marsh, is often a sympathetic character, though not always, sometimes as in something like the Pale Horse, they're harmful characters.
00:27:19.180But insofar as they are attractive or indulged or sympathetic, they tend to be this kind of post-Mariate witch.
00:27:26.820yeah it's interesting it's something we have to counter quite a lot with our campaign is that
00:27:32.920there you know we are very supportive of anybody expressing themselves in any way they wish to do
00:27:38.240and if if people are witches that's cool go for it we are not witches and our campaign isn't about
00:27:44.000sort of rehabilitating the idea of witches it's more about addressing the fact that these people
00:27:49.160were not witches and that's what the legal argument rests on and it's it's very alluring
00:27:54.740this idea it was women just using nettles to cure things that were trampled on while they were
00:28:01.140standing up against patriarchy but it just makes me demented that people don't just stick to the
00:28:07.620historical facts where there's totally enough to work with I mean there's enough awfulness there
00:28:11.580nothing extra needs to be added to it so it's quite a difficult thing to tread and we do have
00:28:16.700the support of lots and lots of people that are modern day witches who completely get that that
00:28:21.440these were people that were accused of something that they weren't doing that didn't exist and they
00:28:25.860can hold that in mind at the same time as their modern day practices but it is interesting in
00:28:30.860fiction I'm a writer of fiction myself but you can see in fiction that it's a really alluring
00:28:35.120idea to look at you know and a really interesting thing to hang a story on because you can move
00:28:41.360between the two worlds of like the real and the unreal then you mentioning the pale horse there
00:28:45.780I'd forgotten about that because I've not read tons of Christie but I do remember a few years
00:28:50.180ago there was a BBC adaptation with was it Rufus Sewell and there was the witches in the in the kind
00:28:57.420of the lovely English village that he visited and I actually had completely forgotten about that
00:29:03.140but it's really compelling in fiction like this really interesting that you can reach out of a
00:29:08.320normal realistic explicable plot to an otherworldly scary potentially quite attractive
00:29:16.020female who can wreak havoc or at least tell you that things are going to go wrong in some way0.99
00:29:21.780so I can see why it's so alluring for fiction writers. Yeah there's a line I think it's1.00
00:29:27.660Robin Briggs who says that witchcraft is a crime with a hole in the centre because any historian
00:29:32.300has to simply from a historiographical point of view advance on the assumption that the records
00:29:38.520are talking about something that didn't happen even if people confess to it and I actually
00:29:42.620borrow that idea at one point in the study, because it seems to be that what they're writing
00:29:46.620about is a subject with a hole in it. It's not simply that people are, as you say, putting in
00:29:51.160fiction, what is definitely there in the real world. The fiction is itself debating, dramatizing,
00:29:57.520proposing ideas of witchcraft. And that can, I wouldn't say stand for, but it could involve
00:30:04.180other subjects with sort of blurry edges or socially unacceptable edges. Gladys Mitchell's
00:30:12.260fiction about a detective who is often described as witchy and young women who experience sort of
00:30:17.880enchantments. Marion Gibson has used the term bilocation in fiction of this period. The way
00:30:24.880in which a witch can represent multiple states, and that can include certainly Gladys Mitchell's
00:30:30.940fiction, strong solidarity with other women, affection, sexual attraction. There's an
00:30:35.940extraordinary scene in Death and the Maiden where Mrs. Bradley, her detective, and a friend of hers
00:30:41.680are walking along a river by Winchester Cathedral,
00:31:32.320There is this extraordinary sort of rhapsody
00:31:34.740and density of poetic textures of the novel
00:31:37.220that is saying something about these young women
00:31:40.560and the older woman looking at them and some sort of enchantment is going on.
00:31:45.000It can be a very powerful, I won't call it a metaphor,
00:31:47.020because I think that might imply that it might sound as if one thing is standing in for another.
00:31:51.580It is rather that the metaphorical systems, the symbols are sort of enmeshing
00:31:54.900and witchcraft is being used to say things about women's relationships to each other
00:31:59.320that may connect with what we hoped about the past,
00:32:02.620but may also be a sort of a looking forward to the future.
00:32:06.200That sounds very vague, but you know what I mean.
00:32:07.760the witches in the fiction aren't always you know this is this is a like a bad character
00:32:14.420that's that an agent of destruction and can explain away so sometimes it can be a positive
00:32:20.060reading of being a witch as well absolutely yep so in christie's murder is easy there's a character
00:32:26.260who has heard that there has been murderousness and nefariousness in a country village called
00:32:31.480witchwood under ash big wink there's someone who's read john buckens witchwood if ever i heard one
00:32:36.880He wants to go down and investigate. And a friend of his says, he says, I need a cover story. I need an explanation. What am I doing in this village where no one's ever heard of me? And the bloke, his friend goes, oh, that's easy. You're collecting folk customs. You're looking for witchcraft. Everyone knows English countryside, absolutely cram packed full of all this witchery and paganism and stuff.
00:32:55.640So your cover story is that you're interested in paganism, but really you're going to be trying to search out murders.0.83
00:33:01.680He goes down there, meets this young woman called Brigid.
00:33:04.840Again, big wink for those of you who know her, Margaret Murray.
00:33:08.120Is she a Celtic goddess? Is she a Christian saint? And he becomes bewitched by her.
00:33:12.240He keeps using the word witch or bewitchment.
00:33:15.320And also in this village, there is this, again, very unpleasant character who owns an antique shop,
00:33:20.720who appears to dabble in black magic, a character called Ellsworthy, who, yeah, seems to be this sort
00:33:26.280of hangover from the 1890s. He spouts all this very tired, sort of vaguely satanic stuff about
00:33:31.960the artificial being superior to the natural, the sort of, you know, warmed over Walter Pater and
00:33:36.260Oscar Wilde stuff. And it seems to me that the novel, in order to present Brigid as this
00:33:41.240enchanting, mysterious character, has to hive off like ritual magic and diabolism and that kind of
00:33:47.960thing and potential Satanism and say oh no that's over there that's something different that's done
00:33:51.400by creepy men who go on about baroque furniture the enchantment of the witch is beautiful women
00:33:57.520and the mysteriousness of the countryside and sort of finding this this map of symbols that0.92
00:34:02.520will make sense of the world and this happens again and again where Naya Marsh does it when her
00:34:07.780detective has a sort of out-of-body experience and it's made clear that this is definitely not
00:34:11.680the same as the like mad satanic cult that's being run in the same novel so that they repeatedly
00:34:18.280come up against the the way in which yeah not only can witchcraft sometimes be a positive image
00:34:22.780but it's often run in tandem if you like with something that that that they cast all the bad
00:34:28.140associations of of witchcraft in that period onto it really encapsulates the absolute duality of
00:34:34.380the way people view witchcraft the idea of the all-powerful woman doing good in society
00:34:41.460slightly ethereal I'd probably call it a wood witch a sort of nymph that kind of idea or the
00:34:48.980the creepy satanic cults that are plotting against you and you have to be on the lookout for them
00:34:54.940because wherever they are they're going to be doing evil probably in a small English village
00:34:58.960absolutely I'm not a cultural detective with this sort of thing but it's interesting the
00:35:03.440difference between England and Scotland so in Scotland many many many more people were accused
00:35:09.260and killed and England was far far fewer for obviously for the crime of being a witch but
00:35:14.820England seems to have a much more witchy vibe generally and I don't know what if it's because
00:35:21.260of the way it's been presented in films or if it's because you know it's something that's that
00:35:26.220I suppose maybe more literature and and film has come out of England and so it's got a stronger
00:35:30.660kind of visual reinforcement that doesn't really bear any relation to history but it's interesting
00:35:36.060to me that in Scotland there doesn't seem to sort of be as much that kind of benign witch
00:35:42.220sort of line going through fiction whether it's film or books or whatever but there does seem to
00:35:46.940be much more in England you know like it's maybe just says a lot about me and what I've read and
00:35:51.140what I've seen but this sort of idea about you know sort of white dresses and flowers in your
00:35:56.080a bit mid-summery which I know is not England but like that seems to be more of a thing in England
00:36:01.000like the green green men and that sort of thing whereas in Scotland it's just really dark and
00:36:06.700horrible like there's not a kind of like a nice reading and again that could just be me and there
00:36:11.780might be listeners that'll say to me oh no you've just not read x y and z but it does seem to be
00:36:16.100much much harsher in Scotland which I think speaks to us as a nation our history of witchcraft I mean
00:36:22.300it's not the best it's not the best history I mean I know a lot of people don't know about it
00:36:27.220apart from academics although a lot more thankfully are getting to know about it now
00:36:30.780I suppose that there isn't that same history to draw on from the 1930s onwards of people
00:36:37.060identifying these covens that went through history because I don't think maybe I'm very wrong please
00:36:44.540listeners uh Gem please tell me if I am but I don't think that affected Scotland so much I think
00:36:50.060it was mostly an English thing. I'm not aware of Scotland becoming involved in the sort of
00:36:56.320reimagining of witchcraft. Maybe I'm wrong. I certainly get the impression that you're right
00:37:01.240in terms of sort of the emergence of witchcraft spirituality, we might say. There's a cracking
00:37:05.460book on the subject, which you've probably read, Marian Gibson's Rediscovering Renaissance Witchcraft.
00:37:09.620Do you know, I've not read it, but I have heard it. So that's a link for me to go and look at that.
00:37:13.740She just talks about the ways in which it's not always Scottish writers, but it's very frequently
00:37:17.520writers taking traces from sort of Scottish images of witchcraft and then reworking them
00:37:22.680in a different cultural context. And yes, having said, I'm not a legal historian. I'm certainly not
00:37:27.240a historian of Scottish literature. And I am one wall away from a senior officer of the Scottish
00:37:33.420Tech Society. So I will make clear that I do not have expertise here. My reading in Scottish
00:37:37.940literature is mostly confined to people like William Dunbar and Robert Henderson. But yeah,
00:37:41.740there does seem to be a split, doesn't there? There is a temptation, again, not a historian,
00:37:46.220to wonder whether this reflects religious anxieties, where you have a much more consciously
00:37:53.220sectarian nation and a nation where, not without religious conflict, let us say, but there's
00:38:02.480I do wonder whether, because a lot of the stuff that comes up about images of witchcraft
00:38:07.240frequently seems to be drawing on memories, nostalgia, ideas of repressed Catholicism.
00:38:14.100So obviously, on a very crude way, the excitement, I think, that a lot of English 20th century and 19th century writers feel about seeing some candles and a chalice and, you know, and a virgin and some blood.
00:38:27.540This is just Gothic Catholicism, isn't it?
00:38:30.260This is just the language of repressed Catholicism.0.72
00:38:32.780And even, I think it's Kipling, isn't it, who has one of his stories in Puck of Pook's Hill is all about how the Fae folk and all the good people could only dance in Elizabeth's reign.0.91
00:38:43.280When it all got more Puritan, they had to leave.0.95
00:38:45.860England has never been fairyful ever since the Protestants came in.1.00
00:38:50.580And I think you can afford to probably indulge that a bit more1.00
00:39:11.720I've looked a bit, because it seemed to be quite different. Some examples I mentioned in the conclusion, the standing stones in P.G. James's Private Patient. There's a Rebecca Tote novel, I think it's Fear and the Cotswolds, where one of the narrating characters is a Wiccan.
00:39:28.200And I was very struck by the way in which the detective novel genre seems to have moved into witches definitely exist and they are a religious group within a pluralist society.
00:39:39.040Part of the energy and part of the excitement, I think, in the mid-century novel is this uncertainty.
00:39:43.940Are witches the descendants of hundreds of years of secret religion?
00:39:47.560Are they a conspiracy against society?
00:39:50.720Are they eccentrics just living in the countryside?
00:39:53.940do they know something about time and space and telekinesis and magic that the rest of us don't
00:40:00.160know i mean the detective novel does have this sort of mid-century wobble where relativity
00:40:05.460becomes you know sort of popularly discussed jw dunn's theories about precognitive dreaming
00:40:11.960whether you can accidentally leave the space-time sort of set that you're in by dreams is that why
00:40:18.240we sort of seem to remember things that that we had we saw in dreams you know jb priestly writes
00:40:23.220Time and the Conways and Inspector Calls, these plays that draw on the idea that time can move
00:40:29.380around in ways you don't expect. And Dorothy Sayers writes the documents in the case, a novel
00:40:34.180that's all about, hang on, if relativity is true, the detective novel is absolutely up a creek.
00:40:39.700Actually, the same thing happens in various detective novels refer to J.W. Dunn. If we can,
00:40:45.340in fact, see things outside space-time accidentally in dreams, this needs some explanation. So there
00:40:49.960seems to be a ferment in the in the mid-century about in in what what i would call non-pejoratively
00:40:55.920middlebrow culture you know the public discussion of of cultural and scientific ideas that i think
00:41:01.700then gets established and and more or less closed off at the point at which wicca and other forms
00:41:08.220of witchcraft spirituality take their place as a as a recognized group who haven't revolutionized
00:41:14.560our view of history haven't totally turned upside down the entire sort of establishment and the
00:41:19.240entire understanding of the last 400 years, but are a group largely happy to take their place
00:41:24.480amongst other religious groups protected in a broadly more secular society. I say at one point,
00:41:29.080in the mid-century novel, it's exciting to wonder if there are witches. It's less exciting in a
00:41:33.500society where they'll email you and tell you about their international conference next month.
00:41:39.100There's a level of metaphysical stability that takes away from the enchantment.
00:41:43.040It would be much, much better if a raven delivered you a letter telling you when you've been.
00:41:49.240it would yeah but i mean i've just been reading just in the last few days on twitter people
00:41:54.560asking sort of tongue-in-cheek but asking witches if they can hex the supreme court in america you
00:42:01.240know and saying you know i read one tweet saying where's the harm either it'll work or it won't
00:42:06.420but you should give it a try anyway witches so which i thought was quite interesting but i think
00:42:10.840i read a detective novel recently a modern um scottish one that definitely used the witches
00:42:17.600as a kind of a plot device but it wasn't so much that there was current day witches it was
00:42:22.520it was to sort of to set a kind of a spooky tone where somebody came across the body of somebody
00:42:28.760who'd been killed more recently but they'd been put somewhere where they had killed witches
00:42:33.320so using sort of locations of which you know which adjacent happenings as a way of of moving
00:42:40.800things along and kind of giving that sort of an extra angle but then it was explained away in a
00:42:45.160kind of a rational way it wasn't there wasn't like a witch to explain anything like the witch
00:42:50.020hadn't done the murder or anything like that but it was just that it helped set the tone and it was
00:42:54.380scottish so again i think that was that kind of scottish spooky setting where bad things have0.74
00:42:59.760happened so it's it's easier for more bad things to happen because you know women were down that
00:43:06.360cellar or whatever that's intriguing the stability of the explanation is terribly interesting one of
00:43:11.080things I've been positing about these novels is that detective fiction offered an unusual,
00:43:16.640unexpected way of dealing with paganism and witchcraft, I would say, because it seems terribly
00:43:20.000rational, it seems terribly explanatory. But first of all, it foregrounds questions of sort of
00:43:24.560evidence and proof and solution. So it's with lots of novels, you know, brilliant novels like
00:43:29.960Lolly Willows or Living Alone, you know, your classic mid-century witchcraft novels, there is
00:43:34.380sort of a level of ambiguity or blending of ideas that doesn't need to be solved at the end,
00:43:40.420doesn't need to be stabilised. But that the detective novel, and I'm half inching this from
00:43:46.140Tsetan Todorov, the literary theorist, already has two stories within it. It is a form that
00:43:51.680sets up a dialectic between two different stories in which the same objects appear. So there is
00:43:58.660the story, if you like, that's presented by the crime or by the murder, which is always,
00:44:03.740of course, the wrong story, because the detective comes in and says, oh, no, that clock doesn't say
00:44:07.340that in fact that candlestick is from somewhere else actually that there's bloodstains under the
00:44:11.980rug not over them and the act of reading a detective novel and the act of the detective
00:44:16.900working is to actually take all the items that were in the first story and reassemble them into
00:44:22.080the true story so it's something that these novels were using a sort of basic function of the
00:44:27.500detective novel to play off these parallel stories against them in fact there was probably no genre
00:44:32.500aside from possibly the gothic that was better suited to holding two stories in tension and
00:44:37.780saying oh you could read it like this or you could read it like this you know that's sort
00:44:41.500of thrown into and it was a specific historical moment i think although that some people have
00:44:46.340questioned that if you look at the the earlier era if you like look at you know the adventures
00:44:51.080of sherlock holmes there's quite a lot of mentions of of witchcraft or sorcery but they happen very
00:44:56.640early on they're readily squashed so watson says oh holmes you rogue you would have been burnt as
00:45:01.840a witch 300 years ago, because you seem to know things that other men do not know. And Yeman0.77
00:45:06.500Holmes says, no, that's nonsense. Look, it's all scientific. Or someone says, how do you know this?
00:45:10.900This is sheer witchcraft. And Holmes says, don't be stupid. It's inductive reasoning.1.00
00:45:14.560So they appear very early on. There's a little bit of mysteriousness, and then it's closed
00:45:19.200deliberately by Holmes. At the other end of the scale, in the 21st century, you have a whole
00:45:25.560burgeoning of paranormal witchy cozy detective novels a sub-genre of a sub-genre that i have
00:45:31.980a particular taste for apart from it the only thing they have like the best titles ever so
00:45:36.200back to spell one better than hex is a particular favorite of mine
00:45:40.080it's genius isn't it um the starry hollow witches are quite like them heavily drawing on a certain
00:45:47.180tv show that some people may recognize and in that witchcraft exists but it exists as sort of
00:45:53.040metaphysically stable as science or physics so some people simply are witches and there's also
00:45:59.380werewolves and vampires that kind of thing and vampire blood has a certain chemical composition
00:46:04.300that does have certain effects and you know there are werewolves and they run the werewolf bar down
00:46:08.920the street are these generally american writers yeah okay right because it's there's much more
00:46:14.380room for that because i'm thinking of something like say practical magic you know which is you
00:46:18.240know a really kind of classic thing about witches that are descended from early witches that were
00:46:23.280treated very badly and it's it's somewhere in Massachusetts I can't remember exactly where it's
00:46:28.320set and there's of course a tremendous film with that one and that fits in with the whole sort of
00:46:32.740idea about the woman that was kind of you know trapped and then there's a bad man and she beats
00:46:37.500the bad man with witchcraft then a good man comes along and so it's a really romantic witch thing
00:46:42.660but quite harsh i mean there's a domestic abuse line in in practical magic so really if you've
00:46:48.380not it's very good i really like alice hoffman but she often has like these magical things
00:46:53.200but i'm wondering how often it's used in detective fiction as a kind of um a convenient
00:46:59.580sort of fix sort of like oh it was it was the witch you know rather than having to explain it
00:47:05.080in a straightforward way but in detective fiction does it tend to follow as you said before kind of
00:47:09.760scientific logical rules it's not a kind of a ghost in the machine sort of thing yes so you're
00:47:16.880absolutely right that the as i say that at sort of both ends of the the period i'm looking at it's
00:47:21.560either there there is no mystery it is science or in this particular sub-genre um of the cozy
00:47:27.480paranormal witchcraft it's ontologically stable witchcraft operates as as part of yeah a part of
00:47:33.660predictable system and although fascinatingly uh given that you mentioned that novel those novels
00:47:38.620often start or series of novels often start with someone discovering that in fact they are descended
00:47:43.320from nth generations of witches and it's a genetic thing yeah it's about their family history um it
00:47:49.980intersects brilliantly with the we inherited a bnb on the east coast genre also a favorite genre of
00:47:55.380mine where you go back to a small town again and you know and just rediscover your roots and you
00:48:01.700have to you know have to work out what's different living in a small town than a big city and then
00:48:05.920some chap wearing a lumberjack shirt and you know you end up getting mad to him by the end of the
00:48:09.600novel it's all cracking stuff and then in the middle of those two genres you have this form
00:48:16.840where yeah witchcraft is mysterious and it may or may not exist but as you say it's not used as a
00:48:21.880get-out it's not used to solve the case I think that's one of the reasons ditto actually the
00:48:27.260citation of of the bible in these novels so one of the reasons why I think a lot of scholarship
00:48:32.400on crime fiction hasn't gone into it because it's not obviously part of the mechanism of the plot
00:48:36.720it's not obviously if you were looking at literally who done it how they done it who
00:48:41.220didn't do it it's something that appears quite tangential. My mind's going off in so many
00:48:45.600different directions about books that I want to read and Jem we could keep you here for hours
00:48:52.300talking to you about this because it absolutely intersects with what Zoe and I are interested in
00:48:57.660which is stories of witchcraft and crime fiction I mean you know even true crime indeed our interest
00:49:04.840but I had an idea while you were talking to us and I thought oh well I've got Jem here Jem
00:49:10.140could you recommend to Zoe and I three cracking books which intersect detective fiction and
00:49:19.580witches and zoe we could do a book review oh yeah that's a great idea yeah yeah why not just do it
00:49:28.520just do our own true crime of witches of scotland books now jen i know we're putting you a hugely
00:49:34.520putting you on the spot but can you think of three good books that you would like to recommend that
00:49:40.460you think our listeners would like to read i certainly can having done various references0.98
00:49:45.760of the book, I'm in fact surrounded by piles of the damn things.0.88
00:49:50.020We should explain to the listeners that when we're talking to Jim, we're seeing him on0.97
00:49:53.620Zoom with a very extensive bookcase behind him of thousands of books as well.
00:49:59.560So as well as books being beside him, they're around him and all about him.
00:50:03.100So asking him to narrow it down to threes, perhaps a wee bit cheeky, but if you can...
00:50:07.760No, that's, um, number one has to, and this is fiction you're thinking of, yeah.
00:50:12.240number one I would recommend Look to the Lady by Marjorie Allingham it is from one point of view
00:50:19.820so it's a mash she talked about it with one of her plum pudding novels where she said I
00:50:23.820I wrote these sort of carefully plotted books and I also wrote plum puddings where you just
00:50:29.800chuck all the stuff in and stick a finger in and see what comes out and that is definitely one of
00:50:33.780these it's a story about a lost heir to a fortune who has to go back home because the chalice that
00:50:42.100It has always been kept by his family, is threatened with being stolen by an international gang of crooks.
00:50:48.340And if that happens, it's always a legend that if that chalice is stolen, the monarchy falls and there's a witch in the woods.
00:50:58.440It's also, I must admit, strikes me as a novel that slightly rewrites chunks of Dracula, but writes as what if you had a lovely castle in the woods?
00:51:07.140and just people kept bothering you and trying to climb up it and get in and get to your ancestral
00:51:11.420like blood secrets and would they just leave you alone there's terribly nice gypsies that
00:51:15.300would stop them if you could only help you know that's worth a look that's that's intersecting0.98
00:51:21.560so many different things that i'm interested in i can't tell you so that sounds brilliant as number
00:51:25.740one number two death and the maiden the one that i i just mentioned there death and the maiden by
00:51:32.100gladys mitchell now it doesn't technically have anyone in it called a witch or actually mrs bradley
00:51:38.020maybe referred to as a witch a couple of times but that is that is tapped into all the other
00:51:42.860currents that we've been talking about that that's you know paganism and a sort of mysterious and
00:51:48.340enchanted solidarity between women and the sort of the poetic scope uh of the witchcraft novel that
00:51:53.500that's definitely number two number three had better be a christy i think um yeah i think i'm
00:52:01.020I'm tempted to go for Pale Horse, but that's more a debunking novel.
00:52:04.320That's more about how witchcraft is definitely not witchcraft.
00:52:06.920So why not go for Murder is Easy, which is the one I mentioned earlier?