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The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland
The witchcraft confessions given by Isobel Gowdie in Auldearn, 1662, are widely celebrated as the most extraordinary on record in Britain. Their descriptive power, vivid imagery and contentious subject-matter have attracted considerable interest on both academic and popular levels. This book provides the first full-length examination of the confessions and the life and character of the woman behind them.
The author's discovery of the original trial records, deemed lost for nearly 200 years, provides a starting point for an interdisciplinary endeavour to separate Isobel's voice from that of her interrogators, identify the beliefs and experiences that informed her testimony and analyze why her confessions differ so markedly from those of other witchcraft suspects from the period. In the course of these enquiries, the author develops wider hypotheses relevant to the study of early modern witchcraft as a whole, with recent research into Amazonian 'dark' shamanism, false-memory generation and mutual-dream experience, along with literature on marriage-covenant mysticism and protection-charm traditions, all being brought to the investigation of early modern witch-records for the first time.
Emma Wilby concludes that close analysis of Isobel's confessions supports the still-controversial hypothesis that in seventeenth-century Scotland, as in other parts of Europe in this period, popular spirituality was shaped through a deep interaction between church teachings and shamanistic traditions of pre-Christian origin. She also extends this thesis beyond its normal association with beneficent magic and overtly folkloric themes to speculate that some of Europe's more malevolent and demonological witch-narratives may also have emerged out of visionary rites underpinned by cogent shamanistic rationales.
538 pages, Paperback
First published April 24, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 9, 2011
I read this over 6 months and I still don't feel that I'm done with it yet. If you liked Emma Wilby's previous book, 'Cunning Folk & Familiar Spirits', this expands upon the ideas about shamanism that she proposed there in relation to one of the most interesting witchcraft cases in early modern history. Fascinating, thought-provoking study that isn't an easy read, but is absolutely essential if you are seriously interested in this subject.
September 19, 2019
Easily one of the best books on the subject of the still-murky roots of witchcraft in Europe, maybe even surpassing Ginzburg's "Night Battles" of which it is the rightful heir.
This is a dense, complex work that it would be shameful to reduce to a petty review, but I'll do my best.
Wilby explores the social and cultural context of the titular "witch"'s interrogation and confessions, trying to tease out just where all her "visions" came from. From northeastern Scotland's religious milieu to a detailed look at fairy/elf belief in medieval/early modern Britain, Wilby coaxes together some tantalizing strands to come up with a tenuous, but convincing hypothesis: that Isobel Gowdie was a dark shaman visionary, likely trained as a storyteller, who moved among the people as a fate-declaring remnant of a long-extinct class of pre-Christian mutual dreaming spirit cult.
Now, that's not to say there was any kind of organization to this, a la Margaret Murray, but the evidence seems to suggest that Gowdie was the latter-day heir of an older belief system that can be found scattered across Europe, from the Corsican mazzeri, to the "good ladies of the night" in Sicily, to the Hungarian taltos...all peripheral parts of Europe where Christianity's grip was tenuous.
That's a lot to digest and it sounds ridiculous, but you can't ignore what Wilby has done here, which is challenge the dominant paradigm of witchcraft as elite/interrogator influenced, simply because by parsing out Gowdie's confession, one notices all kinds of weird details that probably meant much to her, but little to the churchmen torturing her.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, this is a crucial work.
This is a dense, complex work that it would be shameful to reduce to a petty review, but I'll do my best.
Wilby explores the social and cultural context of the titular "witch"'s interrogation and confessions, trying to tease out just where all her "visions" came from. From northeastern Scotland's religious milieu to a detailed look at fairy/elf belief in medieval/early modern Britain, Wilby coaxes together some tantalizing strands to come up with a tenuous, but convincing hypothesis: that Isobel Gowdie was a dark shaman visionary, likely trained as a storyteller, who moved among the people as a fate-declaring remnant of a long-extinct class of pre-Christian mutual dreaming spirit cult.
Now, that's not to say there was any kind of organization to this, a la Margaret Murray, but the evidence seems to suggest that Gowdie was the latter-day heir of an older belief system that can be found scattered across Europe, from the Corsican mazzeri, to the "good ladies of the night" in Sicily, to the Hungarian taltos...all peripheral parts of Europe where Christianity's grip was tenuous.
That's a lot to digest and it sounds ridiculous, but you can't ignore what Wilby has done here, which is challenge the dominant paradigm of witchcraft as elite/interrogator influenced, simply because by parsing out Gowdie's confession, one notices all kinds of weird details that probably meant much to her, but little to the churchmen torturing her.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, this is a crucial work.
December 6, 2016
Emma Wilby's analysis of the recorded confessions made by accused witch Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn, Scotland in 1662 is essentially an attempt to recover, from beneath the obscuring sedimentations of time and interrogatorial intervention, the subjective experiences that led Isobel to make the fantastic and frequently incriminating statements that she did. By locating the richly detailed but often unbelievable claims of the confessions within the cultural and historical context of war-ravaged and religiously-fraught 17th-century Scotland, and drawing upon comparative evidence from not only European folklore and witch-trial records, but also materials pertaining to the psychology of memory-formation and visionary trance, dream studies, and ethnographic accounts of extant shamanic practices from around the globe, Wilby reconstructs – however speculatively – the outlines of a social and mental life that could have formed the basis for Isobel's self-identification as, among other things, a compactee of the Devil and a practitioner of maleficent magic.
Wilby's thesis, that the supernatural elements of Isobel's narratives were “...likely sculpted by coerced-compliant responses and false-memory generations... built around genuine recollections of prior visionary experience” (p. 426), is certainly comprehensive, addressing not only the confessions' seamless weaving of banal and surreal elements, but many apparent internal contradictions of logic as well. However, while the false-memory and visionary hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, Wilby's strategy of hedging between the two by conjoining them tends to vitiate the convictive force of either. Still, this is more a complaint about the limitations of the evidence than about what the author has done with it, and Wilby is to be commended for not only explaining the irrational without explaining away Isobel's testimony, but also positing a truly novel theory of early-modern European witchcraft.
Wilby's thesis, that the supernatural elements of Isobel's narratives were “...likely sculpted by coerced-compliant responses and false-memory generations... built around genuine recollections of prior visionary experience” (p. 426), is certainly comprehensive, addressing not only the confessions' seamless weaving of banal and surreal elements, but many apparent internal contradictions of logic as well. However, while the false-memory and visionary hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, Wilby's strategy of hedging between the two by conjoining them tends to vitiate the convictive force of either. Still, this is more a complaint about the limitations of the evidence than about what the author has done with it, and Wilby is to be commended for not only explaining the irrational without explaining away Isobel's testimony, but also positing a truly novel theory of early-modern European witchcraft.
July 12, 2012
Following the author’s rediscovery of the original confession transcripts, Wilby reappraises documents so strange and perplexing that authors such as Katharine Briggs labelled them as 'strange, mad outpourings'.
Wilby conducts an in-depth analysis of the content of Isobel’s testimony, taking an interdisciplinary approach. She separates Isobel’s voice and beliefs from those of her interrogators and fuses together a hypothesis based on ‘dark’ shamanism, false-memory generation and mutual-dream experience, along with literature on marriage-covenant mysticism and protection-charm traditions in order to show how Isobel’s confessions might have reflected an actual self-identification as a practitioner of harmful magic.
Wilby conducts an in-depth analysis of the content of Isobel’s testimony, taking an interdisciplinary approach. She separates Isobel’s voice and beliefs from those of her interrogators and fuses together a hypothesis based on ‘dark’ shamanism, false-memory generation and mutual-dream experience, along with literature on marriage-covenant mysticism and protection-charm traditions in order to show how Isobel’s confessions might have reflected an actual self-identification as a practitioner of harmful magic.
April 3, 2016
A thoroughly well-researched and well-argued text, Wilby's analysis of the confessions of Isobel Gowdie provides a compelling argument for the survival of some kind of visionary dream cult in the Nairnshire region of Scotland. Would highly recommend this book, although I think Wilby places too much emphasis on the fact that Isobel Gowdie recounted none of her confessions as the sole evidence she didn't make anything up, but instead thoroughly believed everything she said (whether through false memory construction under the stress of close interrogation or half-remembered dreams and visionary experiences).
August 24, 2022
I chose to read this for very personal reasons and it completely satisfied all of them. It's not an easy read at all, very dense and very speculative, but it's informative and unbelievably fascinating.
September 28, 2024
Honestly I read this for an 8 week class so this all kind of feels like a fever dream to me. Now to bullshit my paper (the first draft is due sunday and I haven't started it yet lmao. I am a professional). Even though taking an 8 week class was stressful this book was pretty interesting though
January 21, 2022
Very dense great material. Reads like a college textbook. Not a fun lively read but so much info!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews