00:00:00.200Hi, 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,
00:00:08.740and we're bringing you this podcast because we want to tell you about the women who were accused,
00:00:13.800prosecuted, convicted, and 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,
00:00:23.040and 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.
00:00:33.120Secondly, 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.
00:00:44.420Over 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.
00:11:37.120I remember the film absolutely terrified my children when they were wee.0.74
00:11:40.300His representation of witches was obviously that, you know, the stereotype of the evil coven of women coming together to kill all the children.
00:11:48.320But this new adaptation, they've made an alteration to that, haven't they?
00:11:51.220And they've made the witches have less fingers than five, I think.
00:11:56.020Yes, they've made the witches have three fingers.
00:11:59.940The witches are still bald, but quite rightly, some people took to Twitter and used the social media hashtag not a witch if anyone wants to look it up.
00:12:08.080british paralympic medalist amy marron said please educate yourself on limb differences
00:12:14.380and support the idea that hashtag you're not a witch because you look different you can also
00:12:19.400actively support limb difference community by using words that describe us as people as it's
00:12:24.600not the difference that defines us so it's really it's really interesting that the idea that
00:12:29.740differences separate you there's a resonance with that in people's minds and it's great that it's
00:12:36.340being called out i think it's very thought-provoking about the idea of the ways in which the women you
00:12:41.440know the witches that we are discussing the women that were accused and you know convicted of being
00:12:45.400witches the difference in them you know and this is the first one that we've had i can remember
00:12:50.380mentioned that there's been a physical disability that's been used as an otherness to sort of point0.88
00:12:54.980the finger of blame so to speak the other things about the women's that are othering has been we've
00:12:58.780talked about them being unmarried or alone or poor or whatever but it's really awful just to think
00:13:03.420whatever it is that's sort of marked you out as being not quote normal meant that you might have
00:13:09.000been in league with the devil then because you know you're not normal it's just really horrifying
00:13:13.040anything out of the ordinary she suffered a terrible death she was stripped covered with tar
00:13:19.580paraded through the town on a barrel apparently and she was burned as a witch presumably after
00:13:26.660strangulation and a short number of years after her death the witchcraft act was repealed
00:13:33.040the thought of all the people that that must have known her standing in the street watching her
00:13:39.680being paraded and degraded in that way and then killed it's just amazing dropping of civility of
00:13:45.960humanity you know it's just they must have so comprehensively thought of these women as not
00:13:51.100being human as julian said they believed that they believed that they were doing god's work
00:13:56.800when these people were accused and they believed when lies were made up about them and that's
00:14:02.320simply how they were able to do it that's absolutely horrifying. And there's the witch's
00:14:07.520stone you were saying in Little Town and Dorne is there to allegedly mark the spot of where she was
00:14:14.020executed. Yes we'll post a link to the witch's stone and again in social media so people can see
00:14:20.140where the site of her execution was said to be. Okay well again I think it's really important
00:14:26.100that we are trying to think of the women and the men who were executed as witches as individuals
00:14:31.840I just think it's really important that we keep thinking of them as separate people that were just living their lives and then this terrible thing happened.
00:14:39.540Absolutely. Bring it back to who we're actually talking about here and not the general story of witches.
00:14:45.640On a much brighter note, we have somebody joining us today.
00:14:50.480We do indeed. We are very fortunate today to be talking to Alice Tarbuck, who is a writer and academic based in Edinburgh.
00:14:59.520she has got a new book that's just come out called a spell in the wild a year and six centuries of
00:15:07.140magic which is published by two roads and she's also known for being a poet as well and has
00:15:12.980performed in lots of different places and has her work published in lots of different places
00:15:17.020so we'd really like to welcome alice to the show
00:15:20.460we're really keen to talk to you about your experiences and very much particularly about
00:15:38.780your new book which we've just mentioned a spell in the wild a year and six centuries of magic
00:15:43.760and i was wondering first if you could tell our audience why it is that we have asked you in
00:15:49.040particular to come today with your your particular experience I suppose that witchcraft for me is the
00:15:55.860kind of umbrella term that focuses a lot of my interests both personally and from a research
00:16:04.980point of view so the new book combines the kind of second part of the title a year and six centuries
00:16:11.240of magic really combines a sort of history of the occult in largely Britain and kind of folk
00:16:20.000traditions alongside obviously information about the witch trials but it also charts a year in my
00:16:28.380life month by month looking at magical practice what it might mean to me and looking at various
00:16:36.840aspects of contemporary witch practice everything from foraging to sex magic to how you might want
00:16:44.060to celebrate the solstices so hopefully it kind of combines a historical research driven academic
00:16:51.660aspect with a kind of very approachable personal reflective aspect so I suppose that hybridity
00:16:57.700is why I am with you. I think it's a really interesting thing when we're talking in fairly
00:17:03.160in abstract terms i think about people women particularly being accused of being witches in
00:17:08.580the past it's interesting to talk to somebody now who is a witch who would describe herself as a
00:17:13.820witch i think it's okay to say that it absolutely is okay to say that it feels a bit strange it's
00:17:19.080quite i'm just going to name this it's a bit weird to say to somebody you're a witch and i think it's
00:17:23.700because we are so laden with this past association with it being you know always a negative thing
00:17:29.120yeah negative connotations yes and I certainly think that I am among a kind of ground swelling
00:17:37.520movement of people who are feeling more comfortable to do that if you search the
00:17:43.340witchstagram hashtags on Instagram you will see millions and millions of of photographs of
00:17:49.980people's altars or beautiful flat lays of herbs of people describing themselves as witches it's
00:17:56.260One of the things that I am really attached to is this idea that interest in witchcraft is cyclical.
00:18:02.800There's a critic, Peg Aloy, who describes it as the seven year witch, which I think is hilarious.
00:18:09.460And certainly it seems to happen in times of kind of adversity.0.90
00:18:12.880So the last time there was a big groundswell interest in witchcraft was the 2008 recession and the financial crash.
00:18:21.680And since, as we all know, it's just all been going swimmingly since then.
00:18:25.220it sort of maintained that momentum quite unusually we've had an unusually long period of resurgence
00:18:32.560of interest in the occult and so part of that has been younger people I mean I'm 32 I'm hardly a
00:18:39.260younger person but people who use social media a lot and use the internet a lot finding that
00:18:44.820describing themselves as witches no longer feels like a negative externally imposed word it's much
00:18:52.220more about tapping into a sense of personal power and connection with the world which I think is
00:18:58.740super interesting because I think from an academic point of view which still has a lot of negative
00:19:04.780connotations and for me anyway it's a lot like the way I would describe myself as a queer person
00:19:12.400would be because I think that is the word that best fits me but also because I think it is
00:19:19.180helpful to include myself in a group that has historically been considered outwith society's0.73
00:19:25.060norms and therefore called queer in a pejorative way and in the same way I think that witch is
00:19:30.160quite an interesting word because I think it's in the process of having a sort of not a similar
00:19:34.760reclamation because witchcraft is not inherent it is a chosen practice but a sort of similar shift
00:19:40.920in adoption by a group. Can I say that to me all this is absolutely fascinating I'm particularly
00:19:47.520interested in the last part of what you said because you suggested that witchcraft isn't innate
00:19:53.500it's something you learn is that right yes so even historically the idea of witches as i found in my
00:20:02.160research are really set apart from sorcerers people who are doing kind of christian based
00:20:09.620magic in the medieval period so john d talking to angels he was advisor to elizabeth the first
00:20:15.020witches are always or are seen during the witch hysteria anyway as being vessels for satanic
00:20:22.540possession essentially after having fully and of their own will given themselves over to the devil
00:20:28.220so one of the key definitions of a witch historically has been that witches do not
00:20:32.740possess their own power they are only able to operate through being filled with satanic power
00:20:38.820they are conduits they're not people in their own right who have innate power and i think
00:20:44.180But that is very interesting, because one of the ways that witchcraft is being reclaimed, and especially by marginalized groups and by as a feminist concern, is because it is a chosen area of research and religious practice, rather than something that happens to you when you make a deal with the devil.
00:21:08.400And I think it's really interesting how much that word has shifted. And one of the reasons for that, from an etymological point of view, is that we have fewer subcategories that describe magical and occult practice than we used to.
00:21:24.300So in 809 AD, when Alfred the Great makes various statements against witchcraft and says that you cannot live with a witch among your society, he divides that.
00:21:38.900He's very specific about what a witch is.
00:21:41.020He says that people who sing charms, so galders, are pretty much all right.0.98
00:21:46.420People who use herbs, so leech men and women, are fine.
00:21:50.260people who who give incantations to the dead and kind of converse with the spirits who often
00:21:56.420spoken incantation are like a bit dodgy but witches who are operated by occupied by negative
00:22:04.100spirits are really not okay and i think one of the things that we have lost is those subcategories
00:22:12.540that were different but still operant right through the early modern period the occult is
00:22:18.200no longer such a vivid presence for most of us in our lives so we don't need those subcategories.
00:22:23.500That is fascinating to me for a particular reason Alice and one of them is I'm researching the
00:22:30.320historical background to the Witchcraft Act at the moment. I'm trying to work out why it was
00:22:35.480brought in to force what the need for it was and I'm actually finding out that the need for the
00:22:41.780Witchcraft Act was in fact brought about because they were trying to get rid of what was described0.76
00:22:48.500at that time as charmers. They were trying to get rid of people who were using their powers or their
00:22:56.860expertise to help people in ways which were considered ungodly. But it wasn't really to do
00:23:04.860with satanic possession. It wasn't actually until after the Witchcraft Act came in and when the
00:23:11.320country was really in the grip of the reformation and the satanic panic that really things changed
00:23:17.340to talk about demonic possession it was really a different thing so what you're talking about
00:23:22.640when you're talking about the different subcategories sounds much more like what the
00:23:27.180original witchcraft act was trying to address yes and what really fascinates me about that
00:23:33.640is that the charmers who deal in what we would call atropaic magic so magic that charms against
00:23:40.680evil would have largely considered themselves to be not ungodly people. And there is this
00:23:48.580fascinating distinction in history, which we find so difficult to understand now in our kind of
00:23:53.920increasingly non-religious society, which is that if you are doing magic against the devil or witches
00:24:01.720or people cursing you or people taking things, bringing misfortune upon you in whatever way
00:24:07.780that is practical or metaphysical you are not a witch so burying you know like including shoes
00:24:15.580in the fabric of buildings which was considered lucky or making witch marks which we still see
00:24:21.420in barns in pennsylvania as a tradition they're very beautiful were not considered to be witchcraft
00:24:27.960they were in fact often anti the devil and all these things but of course the godly state is
00:24:34.380threatened by people who act outside the edicts of Christian rule, essentially. Because of course,
00:24:42.480if you are acting in a way that protects people against superstition, and people are employing
00:24:47.860you to do that, then that is a form of idolatry. Often, it can be considered a form of heresy. But
00:24:55.140most crucially, it supposes the existence and lived reality of certain forms of negative influence
00:25:04.060demonic satanic superstitious whatever a cult and therefore cracking down on the people who work
00:25:09.740against those things is an attempt to crack down on the belief in those things so if you're working
00:25:16.000against something but the state is trying to get you to believe that those things don't exist or
00:25:21.300shouldn't exist then you're also in the wrong for trying to assist people who believed in them
00:25:26.260absolutely because you can't say that they're not real if everybody in the village pays so-and-so
00:25:32.920to come and draw something on their lintel once a year and these people these charmers were of use
00:25:39.340I mean some of the old charms that I hear talk about are love charms wellness charms to effectively
00:25:46.300a sort of I suppose a blessing for the family I'm probably using the wrong word but you know
00:25:52.000something to keep your family safe those sorts of things but they were what I'm reading about anyway
00:25:56.700appears that these were positive things to help people. Yeah absolutely and you've got to remember
00:26:03.160that at the time there are precious few things to help people. There is no welfare state, there is
00:26:11.100no medicine remains in its infancy and is inexpensive, you know there is no free health
00:26:17.380care, there is no guarantee that your children will live or survive. The world is far more tied
00:26:25.620to the idea of the wheel of fortune, that things can come and go, that fate acts upon us all,
00:26:33.000rather than being, you know, our lives are not so much in our hands historically. So those charms
00:26:38.160are essentially the non-Christian equivalent of certain types of prayer. And the difficulty,
00:26:48.600and I think you can draw parallels with the cracking down on indulgences in the medieval
00:26:53.700period issued by the pope to forgive sins and often sold fraudulently because the church would
00:27:00.120not like you to believe that there is any other way of controlling the world and your fate other
00:27:06.380than appealing to the mercies of god that there is something going on which is not just god's will
00:27:12.940in the world which are we have to remember for a lot of the time that we're talking about
00:27:17.460still in Latin and therefore not actually always understandable by the people who are attending
00:27:24.100church services we are in a position where to say oh I'd like a love spell or I'd like a love charm
00:27:30.780I'd like a wellness charm against this toothache that I have implies that there are other forces
00:27:36.300at work that these people can have the power of benediction and blessing and of course the church
00:27:42.320would like to regulate very strictly who is able to do those things the church was effectively
00:27:47.820wanting a monopoly for god you can't get well other than by paying to god you can't be protected
00:27:54.240other than by paying to god give your money to the church yeah yeah yeah yeah the money must go
00:28:01.680to them instead of people who are independent and charmers that's absolutely fascinating stuff
00:28:08.940Alice, one of the things that I found really fascinating about your book was something right at the very beginning where you tell a story about something that happened to you some years ago, which maybe led you to the way that your life is just now.
00:28:22.420I was wondering if you could retell that story for our listeners.
00:28:24.600Absolutely. So I used to live in London and work for a publishing company. And one day when I was walking home, a fox essentially met me at the entrance to the tube and then walked along very quietly behind me.
00:28:39.160I didn't notice him for a while, as if keeping me company. I thought he was a dog and then waited for me to go in and shut my door and sort of stayed outside my house.
00:28:50.060and I was quite new to living in London and I knew that urban foxes were braver even than the ones
00:28:57.380in Edinburgh so I just thought maybe this happened to everybody but I was a bit sort of perturbed
00:29:02.840so I spoke about it the next day at work I sort of wanted everybody you know I said has anyone
00:29:08.100else had this happen and one of my colleagues who was this really deadpan guy looked at me and said
00:29:14.560well no it's because you're a witch Alice that's why these things happen to you
00:29:19.000and how did you take that from him I went essentially oh I that'll be right and then0.70
00:29:27.340got on with my day but it sort of made me think I think it's one of those things that to sort of
00:29:33.820butcher the Robert Burns idea that we don't have the gift of seeing ourselves as others
00:29:39.320see us an awful lot of the time so when somebody says well this is how I see you
00:29:45.240it can stick in your head and it sort of united for me a lot of the things that I had been doing
00:29:52.640ever since I was little things that I've been interested in my whole life so it sort of made
00:29:58.800a lot of sense to me that I was one of those people who told everybody to light candles in
00:30:03.220their windows during the the solstices and I I was one of those people who very much enjoyed
00:30:08.380learning about what could be foraged for and eaten and preserved and what the symbolic
00:30:14.620qualities of plants and kind of natural matter was and he was very interested in creating
00:30:21.560essentially symbolic registers through which my life was lived in a very sort of practical way
00:30:29.140and I grew up with Buffy you know I mean I was a kid in the 90s which was one of the last times
00:30:35.080we had a kind of witchcraft interest in the media and I've always been fascinated by you know
00:30:41.400Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the craft, you know, had a teenage witch
00:30:46.460phase, I think, as a lot of people did. And then sort of kept bits of it that had felt really
00:30:51.700effective and important to me, but never thought of it as witchcraft. And it wasn't until my
00:30:58.200colleague said that, that I thought, oh, maybe that's what I am doing. And maybe that's okay.
00:31:04.520And I think it was the convergence of those two thoughts that really
00:31:07.640let me start thinking about contemporary witchcraft from a kind of serious research led
00:31:14.800what impact did that have on you on in a sort of a daily living your life sort of well I think
00:31:22.180it's had a sort of a gradual but considerable impact because it sort of gave me permission
00:31:30.060in a funny old way not that you need permission from other people but it gave me permission in
00:31:35.900a funny old way, to be curious and to investigate and to find things that felt good for me to
00:31:43.680And I certainly don't have a daily practice.
00:31:47.360I don't know anyone who is organized in almost any religion well enough to have a daily practice.
00:31:52.940But I do try to live with a kind of general interest.
00:31:58.860And I do do things like observe the moon phases.
00:32:01.780and I observe sabbats and I have an altar in my house that I use as a quiet space to talk to the
00:32:09.700world much like people who have maybe a meditation corner or a really kind of quiet nice place in
00:32:17.020their house to go and be so I think it has started it started impacting my life in those ways and it
00:32:22.500also gave me permission to talk about it with people and find like-minded people which I think
00:32:28.180is a huge thing even if you're not someone who wants to practice magic or witchcraft or whatever
00:32:33.200it is communally it can be nice just to have people to talk to about these things the internet
00:32:38.900has been fantastic from that perspective the amount of people which is women and men perhaps
00:32:44.260that are on instagram and we very recently took a step into the unknown and joined
00:32:49.380tiktok as witches of scotland on tiktok you did you did claire
00:32:53.580because i with my teenage children i very much did not join tiktok i'm still to see but i am
00:33:04.520looking to see the huge witchcraft community on there as well it's absolutely huge i think it
00:33:11.000would be really great as well if we could get your take on what you think of the campaign i mean do
00:33:15.060you agree that the witches of scotland should be pardoned and apologised and that there should be
00:33:19.700a memorial to them absolutely i think that the victims of any essentially genocide whatever the
00:33:28.280scale and should be pardoned officially and have a proper memorial i think that the memorial on the
00:33:34.960castle esplanade is an absolute disgrace isn't it it's absolutely outrageous the quote some use
00:33:43.840their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes i mean that's just pages that's a real kind of like
00:33:49.080i'm sorry but i'm sorry you feel that way about my action it's not nice at all it's very unpleasant
00:33:54.740it implies the existence of actual occult action on the behalf of any of those accused of it
00:34:03.400during that period for which there is literally zero evidence absolutely the accused witches
00:34:10.880during the witch hysteria were not witches there is no evidence that these people ever acted to
00:34:18.980effect a cult change on anybody else other than confessions gathered under torture which as we
00:34:26.200all know are not a reliable source of anything no indeed and would not be accepted as fact
00:34:32.900if they were to emerge today and so these people who we are memorializing and writing back to
00:34:40.360and celebrating are not our forebears in the occult they are victimized groups of people
00:34:49.860and I think that a memorial needs to reflect back that there is a difference between what people
00:34:58.220call you and what you are if you are an early modern victim of the witch trials. That's just
00:35:05.700It's a beautiful exposition of what the Witches of Scotland campaign is about, is just trying to show that there were people going about their lives, perfectly ordinary lives who were plucked from those lives in the middle of an absolute hysteria and thrown into one of the most horrific nightmares that anyone can possibly imagine.
00:35:26.720So we're really, really grateful and we hope, we very much hope that other people who practice witchcraft as well will support the campaign.
00:35:35.060That's something that we really hope that people will do, because I have talked to someone who practices witchcraft down in England, and she got in contact with me to check whether or not we were saying that witchcraft was something which was illegitimate or didn't exist.0.51
00:35:51.420and I said no my only focus in setting up the campaign was to ensure that the miscarriage of
00:35:58.220justice which was carried out to these people where witchcraft was used as a tool of persecution
00:36:04.280against people was made right it wasn't it wasn't the issue of witchcraft itself it was whether or
00:36:11.420not the idea of witchcraft should be used as a tool of persecution and she was relieved to find that0.88
00:36:17.500out. Alice I believe you have one of your poems that you're going to read to us that's pertinent
00:36:23.300to this. Yes so I was commissioned to write this poem by there is an anthology which is having a
00:36:30.040reprint at the moment called Umbrellas of Scotland where poets and readers have been asked to write
00:36:37.120poems about the places that they live places that are important to them and I was really delighted
00:36:42.260to be asked by Russell Jones to write about the witch's memorial. So this poem will be in that
00:36:48.520upcoming anthology and is the result of that commission. So I will read it for you now.
00:36:53.400Exceptional knowledge. Exceptional knowledge is the moment you sit in the kitchen with your own
00:36:59.980two hands, understand that nobody else is coming, understand it's use them or get nothing.
00:37:07.880exceptional knowledge is the form of your unwanted noticing which blood-backed coughs will stick
00:37:15.680which cows are falling ill and when they will get worse a curse is cast by speaking out
00:37:24.020a curse is cast by keeping your mouth still do you know how grubby and small it is this life0.99