As promised, my review of Emma Wilby's _The Visions of Isobel Gowdie_.

Best,

Sabina Magliocco
Professor
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge
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Subject: [JFRR] The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Shamanism and Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Wilby, Emma)

The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Shamanism and Witchcraft in
Seventeenth-Century Scotland. By Emma Wilby. 2010. Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press. 604 pages. ISBN: 978-1845191801 (hard cover).

Reviewed by Sabina Magliocco, California State University, Northridge
([log in to unmask]).

[Word count: 1012 words]

The seventeenth-century witchcraft confessions of Isobel Gowdie, a
crofter's wife from Auldern in eastern Scotland, are extraordinary on
a number of levels. They are first and foremost among the most
fantastic, lengthy, and detailed of any European witchcraft
confessions, combining vivid personal narratives of fairy encounters
and spell-work with darker, diabolical material. They have long
puzzled historians, leading some to conclude that Isobel must have
suffered from mental illness. Despite, or perhaps because of, their
atypical nature, they were among those most cited by Margaret Murray,
the Egyptologist-turned-historian whose 1921 book The Witch Cult in
Western Europe argued that witchcraft was an ancient pre-Christian
fertility religion persecuted as devil-worship by early modern church
and state authorities. In turn, Murray's thesis inspired the
emergence of modern Pagan Witchcraft, or Wicca, one of today's
fastest-growing religious movements. Many Wiccan elements in fact
derive, through Murray, from Isobel's confessions, including the word
"coven" for a group of witches, the idea that covens ideally consist
of thirteen individuals, and even specific formulas that have become
part of modern Wiccan rituals. In many ways, therefore, Isobel Gowdie
has had a tremendous influence on modern history and folklore --
arguably more than any other victim of the European witch hunts.

In this bold and imaginative book, Emma Wilby attempts to understand
Isobel by taking us deeply into her culture and spiritual worldview.
Using primary historical documents, she begins by contextualizing the
four confessions, given over a period of six weeks in 1662, during
which Isobel was imprisoned and repeatedly questioned by a number of
local ministers and landholders in the kirk assizes. With meticulous
attention to detail, she reconstructs Isobel's life as a poor,
illiterate farmwife: her cultural horizons within the fermtoun, or
small agro-pastoral community where she lived; her spiritual
worldview, which combined Christianity with many aspects of folklore
rooted in earlier cosmologies; and the likely sequence of events that
led to her arrest and imprisonment. Wilby gives equally careful
attention to the personalities and agendas of the men who questioned
her, showing how a unique combination of personal, religious, and
political ideologies came together in the small interrogation room,
culminating in her remarkable performance.

Of great interest to folklorists is Wilby's assertion that Isobel was
probably a gifted performer of legends whose wide repertoire,
complete with plots, rhymes, and verbal formulas reminiscent of those
of the ballad corpus, is reflected in her unusually dramatic and
detailed narrative style. The first part of the book is essentially a
performative analysis of the confessions in the micro- and
macro-contexts in which they took place. Wilby makes good use of
recent scholarship on false memory and forced confession to show how
under extreme anxiety and pressure, elements of folk narrative may
come to be experienced as memories by the victim. Here Wilby deftly
shows readers how notions from folklore and vernacular religion
syncretized with emerging ideas about diabolical witchcraft to create
new kinds of narrative themes.

But Wilby's most controversial claim is that Isobel may have been
part of a shamanistic dream cult, akin to the Friulian benandanti
documented by Carlo Ginzburg (1983) and the Sicilian donne di fuori
(Gustav Henningsen 1990), who also fell afoul of the witch
persecutions. These groups reported journeying in spirit to
gatherings where they battled evil sorcerers for the fertility of the
fields, or to the homes of their neighbors, where they feasted,
danced, made merry, and healed the sick accompanied by fairies and
spirits of the dead. Wilby defines shamanism broadly as the practice
of magic that includes entering into alternate states of
consciousness to experience visionary phenomena (252). She argues
that Isobel's visions of visiting the fairies and entering the homes
of her neighbors unbeknownst to them belong to a similar body of
European folklore. Isobel, however, also reported decidedly harmful
doings, such as killing neighbors by shooting them with elf-arrows at
the devil's behest. Using comparative data from non-Western
societies, Wilby argues that shamanism can also involve darker
practices, such as harmful counter-magic, illness-transfer, and a
kind of fatalistic culling of the human population, whereby those who
are to die are randomly selected and spiritually killed by the
shaman. Wilby asserts that this kind of belief complex may have
existed in Scotland well into the seventeenth century, where it
intermingled with demonology introduced by Christianity to produce
the kinds of narratives that emerged in Isobel's confession and those
of other accused witches.

While Wilby's interpretation is elegant, thought-provoking, and
satisfying, in that it explains many facets of Isobel's confessions
that have otherwise remained opaque to modern readers, there are
aspects of it that raise significant doubt. While cultural
comparisons have their uses, they tend to work best when the cultures
being compared have a certain number of similarities. Wilby draws
from cultures as divergent as Corsican shepherds, South American
kanaimà, and New Guinea's Sambia, which differ significantly from
that of seventeenth-century Scotland. Furthermore, the hypothesis
that Isobel may have experienced her visions as part of a dream cult
seems highly speculative. Legends of fairies and devils such as those
that emerged in witchcraft confessions can best be compared to modern
ones about space aliens and satanic cults. While there are
significant numbers of people today who report having had direct
contact with space aliens, or having suffered from satanic ritual
abuse, there is no evidence that they belong to any sort of dream
cult. It is not necessary for a dream cult to exist in order to have
legend material emerge in the spiritual visions of individuals; that
is simply how legends behave.

Nonetheless, no other author to date has come up with such a cohesive
interpretation of Isobel's confessions. In the end, this book does
what good research should: provide us with provocative, original
interpretations and raise questions for further exploration. Wilby's
book will be of great interest to folklorists, anthropologists,
historians of witchcraft, and of course modern Pagan Witches.

WORKS CITED

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1983. The Night Battles. London: Routledge.

Henningsen, Gustav. 1990. The Ladies from the Outside. In Bengt
Ankarloo & Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern Witchcraft. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

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