[47] It is a singular circumstance, as Pitcairn remarks, that in almost all the confessions of witches, or at least of the Scottish witches, their initiation, and many of their meetings, are said to have taken place within churches, churchyards, and consecrated ground; and a certain ritual, in imitation, or mockery, of the forms of the Church, is uniformly said to have been gone through.
[48] In the Forfarshire reports, alluded to on p. [332], the witches always speak of the devil’s body and kiss as deadly cold.
[49] Pitcairn remarks, with justice, that the above details are, perhaps, in all respects the most extraordinary in the history of witchcraft of this or of any other country. Isabel Gowdie must have been a woman with a powerful and rank imagination, who, had she lived in the present day, might, perhaps, have produced a work of fiction of the school of Zola.
[50] There are mutilations in the original manuscript, and the bracketed words are conjectural.
[51] These, it is needless to say, were pure inventions, and by no means amusing ones.
CASE OF JANET WISHART.
The case of Janet Wishart, wife of John Leyis, carries us away to the North of Scotland. It presents some peculiar features, and therefore I shall put it before the reader, with no more abridgment than is absolutely needful. It is of much earlier date than the preceding.[52]
‘i. In the month of April, or thereabout, in 1591, in the “gricking” of the day, [that is, in the dawn,] Janet Wishart, on her way back from the blockhouse and Fattie, where she had been holding conference with the devil, pursued Alexander Thomson, mariner, coming forth of Aberdeen to his ship, ran between him and Alexander Fidler, under the Castle Hill, as swift, it appeared to him, as an arrow could be shot forth of a bow, going betwixt him and the sun, and cast her “cantrips” in his way. Whereupon, the said Alexander Thomson took an immediate “fear and trembling,” and was forced to hasten home, take to his bed, and lie there for the space of a month, so that none believed he would live;—one half of the day burning in his body, as if he had been roasting in an oven, with an extreme feverish thirst, “so that he could never be satisfied of drink,” the other half of the day melting away his body with an extraordinarily cold sweat. And Thomson, knowing she had cast this kind of witchcraft upon him, sent his wife to threaten her, that, unless she at once relieved him, he would see that she was burnt. And she, fearing lest he should accuse her, sent him by the two women a certain kind of beer and some other drugs to drink, after which Thomson mended daily, and recovered his former health.’
It is to be noted that Janet flatly denied the coming of Mrs. Thomson on any such errand.
‘ii. Seven years before, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, when Andrew Ardes, webster [weaver], in his play, took a linen towel, and put it about the said Janet’s neck, not fearing any evil from her, or that she would be offended, Janet, “in a devilish fury and wodnes” [madness], exclaimed, “Why teasest thou me? Thou shalt die! I shall give bread to my bairns this towmound [twelvemonth], but thou shalt not bide a month with thine to give them bread.” And immediately after the said Andrew’s departure from her, he took to his bed for the space of eight days: the one half of the day roasting in his whole body as in a furnace, and the other half with a vehement sweat melting away; so that, by her cruel murther and witchcraft, the said Andrew Ardes died within eight days. And the day after his departure, his widow, “contracting a high displeasure,” took to her bed, and within a month deceased; so that all their bairns are now begging their meat.’