‘And if a child be forespoken [bewitched], we take the cradle ... through it thrice, and then a dog through it; and then shake the belt above the fire [... and then cast it] down on the ground, till a dog or cat go over it, that the sickness may come [... upon the dog or cat].’
With these extended quotations the reader will probably be satisfied, and in concluding my account of Isabel Gowdie, I must now adopt a process of condensation.
Among other freaks and fancies of a disordered imagination, Isabel declared that she merited to be stretched upon a rack of iron, and that if torn to pieces by wild horses, the punishment would not exceed the measure of her iniquities. These iniquities comprehended every act attributed by the superstition of the time to the servants of the devil, which had been carefully gathered up by this monomaniac from contemporary witch-tradition. The cruellest thing was, that she involved so large a number of innocent persons in the peril into which she herself had recklessly plunged, naming nearly fifty women, and I forget how many men, as her associates or accomplices. She affirmed that they dug up from their graves the bodies of unbaptized infants, and having dismembered them, made use of the limbs in their incantations. That when they wished to destroy an enemy’s crops, they yoked toads to his plough; and on the following night the devil, with this strange team, drove furrows into the land, and blasted it effectually. The devil, it would seem, was so long and so incessantly occupied with high affairs in Scotland, that surely the rest of the world must have escaped meanwhile the evils of his interference! Witches, added Isabel, were able to assume almost any shape, but their usual choice was that of a hare, or perhaps a cat. There was some risk in either assumption. Once it happened that Isabel, in her disguise of a hare, was hotly pursued by a pack of hounds, and narrowly escaped with her life. When she reached her cottage-door she could feel the hot breath of her pursuers on her haunches; but, contriving to slip behind a chest, she found time to speak the magic words which alone could restore her to her natural shape, namely:
‘Hare! hare! God send thee care!
I am in a hare’s likeness now;
But I shall be a woman e’en now.
Hare! hare! God send thee care!’
If witches, while wearing the shape of hare or cat, were bitten by the dogs, they always retained the marks on their human bodies. When the devil called a convention of his servants, each proceeded through the air—like the witches of Lapland and other countries—astride on a broomstick [or it might be on a corn or bean straw], repeating as they went the rhyme:
‘Horse and paddock, horse and go,
Horse and pellatris, ho! ho!’
They usually left behind them a broom, or three-legged stool, which, properly charmed and placed in bed, assumed a likeness to themselves until they returned, and prevented suspicion. This seems to have been the practice of witches everywhere. Witches specially favoured by their master were provided with a couple of imps as attendants, who boasted such very mundane names as ‘The Roaring Lion,’ ‘Thief of Hell,’ ‘Ranting Roarer,’ and ‘Care for Nought’—a great improvement on the vulgar monosyllables worn by the English imps—and were dressed, as already described, in distinguishing liveries: sea-green, pea-green, grass-green, sad-dun, and yellow. The witches were never allowed—at least, not in the infernal presence—to call themselves, or one another, by their baptismal names, but were required to use the appellations bestowed on the devil when he rebaptized them, such as ‘Blue Kail,’ ‘Raise the Wind,’ ‘Batter-them-down Maggie,’ and ‘Able and Stout.’ The reader will find in the reports of the trial much more of this grotesque nonsense—the vapourings of a distempered brain. The judges, however, took it seriously, and Isabel Gowdie, or Gilbert, and many of her presumed accomplices, were duly strangled and burned (in April, 1662).
FOOTNOTES
[46] So the witch in ‘Macbeth’ (Act I., sc. 3) says:
‘In a sieve I’ll thither sail.’