On a cold, shadowy night—nine days before Hallowe’en—prominent QC and goth Claire Mitchell was in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh’s Old Town, talking to a small audience about one of the greatest wrongs in Scottish legal history: the persecution of 4,000 people, most of them women, for supposed sorcery.
The event was part of the church’s Festival of Science, Wisdom and Faith, and the setting was apposite. Outside the kirk’s stone walls lies Greyfriars cemetery, the final resting place of two leading protagonists in the country's infamous witch trials.
One of them is Christian Shaw. By the time of her death in 1737, she had become better known as a founder of Paisley’s thriving thread industry. But early in life she played a decisive role in western Europe’s last mass execution of witches. As an 11-year-old, she claimed a family servant had “bespelled” her, a charge that led to eight people being accused of witchcraft. One killed himself in his cell; the others were hanged and then burned on the town’s Gallow Green.
The other figure buried here is George “Bluidy” Mackenzie—the lord advocate on whose watch some of the “witches” were executed. Yet Mackenzie also showed the first stirrings of doubt as to the extreme nature of witchcraft trials. While he believed witchcraft was possible, he also thought most of those accused were innocent.
As an appeal court lawyer, contemporary miscarriages of justice are Mitchell’s stock-in-trade. But for the past 18 months, she and teacher/writer Zoe Venditozzi have been campaigning on behalf of those falsely accused of witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries. They want the Scottish government to issue a pardon and a national monument to be built to mark the state-sanctioned atrocities.
Such a move is not without precedent. In 2019, the Scottish government granted a pardon to every gay and bisexual man convicted under discriminatory laws prohibiting same-sex intercourse. It has also pledged to pardon miners convicted of certain offences, such as breach of the peace, during the strikes of 1984-1985.
The persecution of the witches was heavily gendered. Eighty-five per cent of those executed in Scotland were women. Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch, believes the trials were rooted in a patriarchal desire to keep women in their place. Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon has already accepted the convictions were discriminatory, and Mitchell is hopeful she will issue an official apology—as a first step towards pardoning legislation—on International Women’s Day in March 2022.
At a time of renewed angst over women’s safety, the campaign seems to have tapped into the zeitgeist. In September 2020, Mitchell and Venditozzi began recording a podcast, talking to experts and telling the individual stories of the women convicted of witchcraft in Scotland; they intended to run it for just a few weeks. Almost 50 episodes later, it is still going strong, with a growing audience and many more episodes planned.
Venditozzi believes their campaign is helping to make a human connection with the victims of witchcraft accusations. “I think our listeners understand we are not talking about women in pointy hats. These were real people and a terrible thing happened to them,” she says. “Also [the persecution] was spread across Scotland, so wherever you live it was probably going on near you. People can look at the map and say: ‘My god, that happened right here.’”
There are other reasons why women today might identify with these “witches.” The murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan police officer, not to mention the harassment of the protesters at a subsequent vigil for her on Clapham Common, revealed that institutionalised misogyny remains alive and well in the modern world.
Even today the depiction of women as terrifying sorcerers is used to fuel that misogyny. In a conversation with Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Vanity Fair, Margaret Atwood linked her fears over a backlash against #MeToo with the reappearance of the witch motif used to criticise Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign.
Since then, “witch” has once again become the go-to insult for those seeking to silence women. It was used against the complainers and female journalists during the Alex Salmond case, who were said to be part of a “coven.” Googling “witch” and “Sturgeon” returns millions of hits. Earlier this year, Ireland’s Sunday Independent was heavily criticised for carrying a cartoon of Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald stirring a cauldron.
In response, some feminists have tried to reclaim the word, re-interpreting the witch as a figure of power and defiance. At anti-Trump protests, it became common to see placards reading: “We are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn.” Some women have formed new witch communities and adopted alternative lifestyles inspired by the term, practising pagan religions like Wicca and learning about ancient herbal remedies.
Mitchell and Venditozzi understand this impulse to reclaim. But they also worry it could be counterproductive, because most of those accused in the 16th and 18th centuries were neither pagan nor particularly fierce; they were ordinary citizens picked on arbitrarily. They were women like Lilias Adie, who was imprisoned and tortured until she confessed to having consorted with Satan. She died before she could be tried. She is the only Scottish “witch” to have a known grave, lying on the foreshore at Torry Bay in Fife.
“It’s great that people are trying to make the word more positive and that some women feel empowered as witches,” says Venditozzi. “But it does obscure the fact that those who were burned as witches weren’t witches. They were Christians, and there was no single reason for them being targeted: maybe they had a learning difficulty or land their relatives wanted. It was all very complex.”
The resurgence of interest in their fate means there is now a Fife Witches Trail with plaques, including one at Adie’s grave. But Mitchell and Venditozzi believe true acknowledgement of the wrongs committed remains sorely missing. Having the names of all supposed witches cleared would go some way to achieving that. A new national monument, meanwhile—like Norway’s Steilneset Memorial, unveiled in 2011 to commemorate 91 women executed for witchcraft in 1621—might stand as a testament not only to the great wrongs of the past, but to the great wrongs still perpetrated today. It could remind us that, across the world, many women still live in fear.
