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How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern Ideas About Witchcraft

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern Ideas About Witchcraft

Last updated on: October 22, 2026 at 12:40 am by Philip Jenkins

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How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern Ideas About Witchcraft 2026-10-21T10:26:11-04:00 Philip Jenkins

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I have in recent years been working a good deal on the topic of folk horror, which focuses a great many issues concerning history and religion. The topic also tells us so much about the inextricable links between popular culture and real-world perceptions, and how fiction can shape reality.

By way of definition, folk horror is grounded in the idea that potent ancient forces and deep-rooted evils survive in the landscape, scarcely acknowledged by the modern world. In isolated communities, active witches or pagan groups mobilize those dark forces, deploying rituals dating from pre-Christian times. The booming scholarly literature on that topic has a heavy British emphasis, but what we often miss is just how specific the material is within that nation, and how much of it is neither British nor English, but Scottish. Scotland, in fact, has done a huge amount to condition modern views of the weird, the occult, and the supernatural. – and specifically of much of what we know about witchcraft and paganism, which is what I am concentrating on in my present blogs.

It Came From Outer Scotland

Among the founding texts of folk horror was the 1973 film of The Wicker Man, which concerns a lethal pagan cult on a Hebridean island, which stands off the Scottish coast. But that is only one small part of the story. Scotland gave us Robert Kirk, a major source for later interpretations of fairies and witch-cults (which I discussed at length in my last post). Scotland also supplied John Buchan, one of the most prolific and influential folk horror writers of the early twentieth century, whose 1927 title Witch Wood is the pioneering full length novel in the genre. The same small country also gave us Sir James Frazer, whose book The Golden Bough (1890-1915) laid out the full modern mythology of the supposed pagan world of fertility cults and human sacrifices. Folklorist David MacRitchie popularized the weird and wonderful idea that ancient dwarf races literally lived in the margins of modern society, where they were described by such names as elves and fairies. And there were lots more – multiple other key titles and authors, including James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson.

In a sense, Scotland actually invented the “weird.” The original Anglo-Saxon word “wyrd” implied fate or destiny, and it long retained that meaning in English, with no sense of the occult or witchy. Matters changed when Shakespeare’s Macbeth brought in the Three Witches, who are also the Fates, who control that destiny. Hence, they were the “weird sisters,” and the link between weird and supernatural or eerie was firmly established (although some early versions of the play have it as “wayward sisters”). From that usage in The Scottish Play, we find regular later uses of weird in the context of ghosts and the Gothic, and ultimately, of Weird Tales.

In this blogpost, I will discuss “weird” pieces by three key authors, namely Robert Burns, James Hogg, and William Bell Scott.

All images are in the public domain

Why Scotland?

It all starts with witches. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British and European scholars fervently investigated ancient folk beliefs and customs, in the hope that they might thereby dig up the relics of an ancient paganism. But what must strike us about the British Isles is how much of what we might expect in such matters came specifically from Scotland. It was Scotland that did a far better job of keeping old seasonal festivals, like Halloween, but above all, they cherished witchcraft lore in a way that the English certainly did not.

Although England had its shameful history of witch persecutions, these normally involved accusations against individual suspects who reputedly acted in ones and twos. Scotland however produced a far greater number of cases, which reputedly involved organized covens engaged in the ritual worship of Satan, commonly at large gatherings, at which literal demons (or fairies) were in attendance. That national difference reflected the use of systematic torture in the Scottish context, which forced suspects to confess to outlandish charges as they were presented to them. Scottish witch trials thus involved florid charges and confessions, on the lines of French and German cases, which the English emphatically did not. Scotland did not execute its last witch until 1727.

We now have an excellent Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which attempts to compile all the known cases. In recent years too, the commemoration and vindication of those accused witches has become a significant feminist cause in Scotland, and memorials are proliferating.

Those lethal persecutions generated a sizable literature, which in 1830 became easily available through the comprehensive Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft by Sir Walter Scott, who summarized a vast trove of early writing and judicial records. In terms of writing horror or weird literature, that coven idea obviously has vastly more potential than the image of one very poor and elderly village woman, which is the English model.

Inventing the Witch Cult

I have already described the truly strange case of Isobel Gowdie, who in 1662 confessed to an incredible array of witchcraft misdeeds, apparently without torture. Her case had a phenomenal influence on the later development of writing on the subject.

It is those Scottish aspects that provided so much of the evidence assembled by Margaret Murray, who made extensive use of Isobel Gowdie, and she assumed that her confessions were sincere and genuine. Murray’s 1921 book The Witch Cult in Western Europe outlined the (totally incorrect!) theory that early modern witchcraft was a survival of ancient paganism. That idea exercised its baneful influence through the 1970s, and it largely shaped modern understandings of witchcraft. (Murray, by the way, had distant Scottish ancestry, but in no sense identified thus). Those ideas also totally formed modern neo-pagan and Wicca traditions.

Americans are used to the idea that all their cultural ideas of witchcraft ultimately track back to Salem. All British ideas of witchcraft, as they have existed over the past century or so, track back to Scotland. That includes all English ideas: most modern ideas of witchcraft represent Scottish cultural imperialism at its most egregious!

Tam O’Shanter

Scotland made other vital contributions, producing abundant materials on which fictional authors could draw so freely. As fears of real-life witchcraft subsided, Scotland’s romantic and antiquarian writers explored early sources for their literary potential, which represented local color rather than any element of horror. Those tales even offered opportunities to explore subversive challenges to respectable society and its gender roles, and especially to challenge the staid and hypocritical state church, the powerful Kirk.

I will here mention a poem that in its day was one of the best-loved pieces of verse in English, which is Robert Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter” (1791). Now, this is emphatically not folk horror – it is far too funny to be considered horror in any sense – but it perfectly demonstrates the difference between English and Scottish perceptions, as they existed at that point. You can find the poem full text in many places.

Burns himself had a lifelong interest in the otherworldly, an interest he attributed to a maid employed by his mother, who “had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions … and other trumpery.” She obviously told many stories, and he listened attentively.

“Tam O’Shanter” describes a drunken traveler going home from the pub, where he encounters a classic Sabbat, with all the macabre features accumulated in witchcraft lore over the previous three centuries. And the Devil is there in person:

Warlocks and witches in a dance;

Nae cotillion brent-new frae France,

But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels

Put life and mettle in their heels.

A winnock bunker in the east,

There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast:

A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,

To gie them music was his charge;

He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,

Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl.—

Coffins stood round like open presses,

That shaw’d the dead in their last dresses;

And by some devilish cantraip sleight

Each in its cauld hand held a light,

By which heroic Tam was able

To note upon the haly table

A murderer’s banes in gibbet airns;

Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen’d bairns;

A thief, new-cutted frae the rape—

Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape;

Five tomahawks, wi’ blude red-rusted;

Five scimitars, wi’ murder crusted;

A garter, which a babe had strangled;

A knife, a father’s throat had mangled,

Whom his ain son o’ life bereft—

The grey hairs yet stack to the heft;

Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awfu’,

Which ev’n to name wad be unlawfu’.

Although Tam is terrified, he shouts his praise of one witch dancer, a “winsom wench” who wears a short shift or underskirt, a cutty-sark. Hence his yell, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” The witches chase him home, but he does escape. We are left to debate how much of what had happened was reality, and how much stemmed from a wildly drunken imagination.

The point here is that Burns is thoroughly enjoying all the classic images of Scottish witchcraft – the organized groups, the covens, the ritual gatherings, and connected to Satan. However totally standard that is in modern ideas of witchcraft, the. At the time it would have meant nothing in English folklore or traditional That is just not what witches did. After Margaret Murray had done her work, that is what English writers came to imagine about their own history, and that Scottish importation has left its mark to the present day.

The Witches of Traquair

As I say, that is one example I could choose out of a great many. Burns’s poem “Halloween” was likewise immensely popular, with its detailed description of country people’s celebrations with their folk magic and divination rituals. As I will discuss in a later post, this work had a huge impact on the American founders of popular folklore studies, notably John Greenleaf Whittier.

Very prominently, there was also James Hogg, about whose poem “The Witch of Fife” I have already posted at this site. But Hogg published widely, and one of his greatest achievements was the collection of stories and sketches that appeared in the two volumes of The Shepherd’s Calendar (1829). These stories are a goldmine for vernacular belief and folk tales, and for the supernatural worlds which ordinary rural Scots lived in Hogg’s youth. A couple of stories in particular are supernatural/horror classics, and they have strong themes of possession, of fairies and changelings, and of strange otherworldly beings, variously kelpies or brownies. Being Hogg, he usually leaves it open to the reader to figure out exactly what might or might not be supernatural, and what exactly is happening.

The best known stories in this vein are “Mary Burnet” and “The Brownie of the Black Haggs.” You can find these or others full text at the links I supply here. But for witchcraft, the great story is “The Witches of Traquair,” which is set in the Scottish borders of the mid sixteenth century. Briefly, it tells the story of young Colin Hyslop, who falls into despair and is determined to join the witch cult, complete with a pact with the Devil. Throughout, Hogg puts himself into Colin’s mind, and reproduces what would plausibly have been the belief system of a man of that time. Colin lives in a society obsessed with the threat of witchcraft:

Traquair was a terrible place then! There was a witch almost in every hamlet, and a warlock here and there besides. There were no fewer than twelve witches in one straggling hamlet, called Taniel Burn, and five in Kirk Row. What a desperate place Traquair had been in those days!

The Devil took full advantage of the fluid religious situation, on the eve of the Reformation:

The making witches and warlocks, and holding nocturnal revels with them, where every sort of devilry was exercised, was at that time with him a favourite plan. It was also favourably received by the meaner sort of the populace. Witches gloried in their power, and warlocks in their foreknowledge of events, and the energies of their master. Women, beyond a certain age, when the pleasures and hopes of youth delighted no more, flew to an intercourse with the unseen powers, as affording an excitement of a higher and more terrible nature; and men, whose tempers had been soured by disappointment and ill usage, betook themselves to the Prince of the Power of the Air, enlisting under his banner, in hopes of obtaining revenge on their oppressors, or those against whom they had conceived displeasure.

Colin is rescued by two creatures who are themselves pure folklore creations, vestiges of the old pagan belief system, namely a couple of blessed ladies who are “clothed in white, with garlands on their heads,” and who manifest in the form of deer. They converse with him at “a fairy knowe, on the top of the Feathen Hill,” so presumably these are themselves blessed fairies or sidhe, about whom I also posted recently. Hogg, through his obtuse narrator, affects to believe that actually they must have been Catholic saints. Um, sure, the kind of saints who hang out on fairy rings and hills, and who appear in the form of sacred deer … right!

Furious at the rescue, the Devil arranges for him to be seized and tried as a warlock, and a burning is imminent. He is saved only when his beloved convinces the court that the holy woman who intervened was actually the Virgin Mary, which causes him to be valued as something like a saint.

Like I say, the whole collection demands to be read.

The Witches Go To Market

In a somewhat later era, the fine Scottish artist and poet William Bell Scott did a rollicking poem called “The Witch’s Ballad” (1875), which you can find easily online. It recalls Hogg’s “The Witch of Fife” in portraying witches as hedonists who raise hell in the figurative sense as much as the literal. The story tells how a group of four young witches assault a staid Scottish town, initially by posing as well-dressed regular women. Soon, however, they lead the locals into a wild dance:

Without a choice, against their will,

Doited, dazed, against their will,
The market lassie and her mither,
The farmer and his husbandman,
Hand in hand dance a’ thegither.

Slow at first, but faster soon,
Still increasing, wild and fast,
Hoods and mantles, hats and hose,
Blindly doff’d and cast away,
Left them naked, heads and toes.

They would have torn us limb from limb,
Dainty limb from dainty limb;
But never one of them could win
Across the line that I had drawn
With bleeding thumb a-widdershin.

I love this contemporary illustration of the story by Scott’s lover, Alice Boyd, who was in her own right a Scottish laird. (Scott and Boyd were part of a ménage à trois with his wife, but that is another story). Is that not a startling contrast to the customary depictions of witches in earlier eras? We have come a very long way from Macbeth.

The four witches then turn their attention to seducing the town’s most respectable men, the lawyer, the innkeeper, the priest, and the provost’s son.

Although the weird women are at first thwarted, they will soon be back to conquer the whole town through marriage:

And we’ll gang once more to yon town,
Wi’ better luck to yon town;
We’ll walk in silk and cramoisie,
And I shall wed the provost’s son
My lady of the town I’ll be!

For I was born a crown’d king’s child,
Born and nursed a king’s child,
King o’ a land ayont the sea,
Where the Blackamoor kiss’d me first,
And taught me art and glamourie.

Each one in her wame shall hide
Her hairy mouse, her wary mouse,
Fed on madwort and agramie,—
Wear amber beads between her breasts,
And blind-worm’s skin about her knee.

The Lombard shall be Elspie’s man,
Elspie’s gowden husband-man;
Nort shall take the lawyer’s hand;
The priest shall swear another vow:
We’ll dance again the saraband.

Cutty Sark

Remember I said that “Tam O’Shanter” was very well known, and cherished? How can I prove that? Well, in the 1860s, the British devised an amazing new sailing ship, a tea clipper, intended for very rapid trips to Asia. In its day, it was a technological marvel, and it was speedy, elegant and, well, witchy, and it is still a popular tourist attraction in Greenwich. So what else could you call it but the Cutty Sark?

Even seventy years after the poem appeared, you didn’t need to explain the reference, or the witch it was named for. Everybody knew “Tam O’Shanter,” sabbats and all.

In terms of background, the serious literature on Scottish witchcraft is enormous, but here I will just highlight a special issue of the magazine The Bottle Imp, which includes an enjoyable piece by the leading scholar Julian Goodare on fantasy and humor in Scottish witchcraft. As he concludes, “Before 1590, and again from 1720 onwards, witchcraft could be entertaining. Between those two dates, though, the anger, fear and hatred generated by witch-hunting took precedence. About two and a half thousand people died at the stake, and it wasn’t funny.”

From a great many possible titles to cite here, see for example Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, eds., Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press 2017).

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