The seventeenth century was an era of regression for Europe. While the mainstreaming of the printing press brought about enlightenment and knowledge, it also brought about a slew of conspiracy theories. After the Bible, books such as the ‘Daemonologie’ by King James VI were very popular.
Mainland Europe was also going through a bloody religious schism as exemplified by the Thirty Year War in Germany. The old rules no longer applied and new ideologies were competing for space in people’s minds.
Strangely enough, we are experiencing the same with the advent of the internet. While access to knowledge has never been easier, there’s also so much nonsense out there that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is real or not. The Woke mindset, for instance, is not dissimilar to that of the Puritans in sixteenth-century England. The Puritans were so abhorrent they moved to Amsterdam where even the Dutch couldn’t tolerate them, and eventually emigrated to North America where they had the freedom to practice their religion anyway they wanted. Now that Protestantism has taken a backseat to mainstream American culture, perhaps what we are seeing is a secular resurgence of this puritanical mindset in our campuses and mainstream media in the form of Woke doctrine.
A century ago Baltimore-born journalist and critic H.L. Mencken expended prodigious streams of ink complaining about “neo-Puritanism” in the United States. There were many dimensions to his complaints, but, ultimately, he was complaining about the the kinds of busybodies we see anywhere, Left or Right, who want to dictate how the rest of us organize our lives. They were the kind of people who brought us Prohibition (1919?), one edition of a war on vice, then their War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, etc. See a pattern?
Yes, funny enough, Prohibition was the first thing women lobbied for as soon as they were allowed to vote. Modern-day feminism is still lecturing men on their behavior.
I’m not so sure the witch hunts were “another Christian attempt to purge the last vestiges of Gaelic paganism from rural Aberdeenshire”. It is no coincidence that the European “witch craze” was most prevalent in more remote rural areas where the Catholic religious structure had been weakened through the reformation and a protestant replacement was still only solid around the seats of power such as Edinburgh or London. Therefore it wasnt so much a purge as a reaction borne out of real fear of things that were creeping in to fill the vacuum – some of which certainly may have had their roots in paganism.
As for Christianity appropriating ” Sol Invictus”, the opposite is more likely to be true with the cult of Sol Invictus being used by Roman authorities as an attempt to undermine the growing influence of Christianity.
I seem to recall that James VI and I acquired his witchcraft obsession from his marriage to Anne of Denmark. Witch hunts were all the rage in Denmark at the time.
Yes, he was deeply affected by a stormy crossing from Denmark during which the ship was almost wrecked and which was attributed to witchcraft. His obsession has meant that the UK has some meticulously detailed accounts of witchcraft trials (he always took an interest) and this is why we know that it wasn’t a deliberate “purge” of paganism as such. In the infamous Pendle witch trials it seems to have been much more associated with paranoia, bad luck, the settling of old grudges and secret Catholic activities raising suspicions.
Mark Corby
3 years ago
As Dr Samuel Johnson so amusingly put it, “Knowledge was divided among the Scots like bread in a besieged town, to every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful”.
Which was poppycock when he wrote it. He was an elitist who saw the near universal education in Scotland & turned his nose up at it. Scottish education turned out the administrators of the Empire. The Scots were better educated than most ordinary public school English. Our soldiers fought for it while our clever boys administered it & our merchants profited from it. While the Cleared emigrated, sometimes forced, to it.
Your are perhaps confusing literacy with education. Scotland’s literacy rate in say 1700 was about 90% whilst Bedfordshire’s was about 18%. However the Scotch had nothing to do with foundation of the Empire because they had no sea power beyond a few fishing smacks, and no cash whatsoever. Thus they had nothing to do with the foundation of the East India Company or the settlement of Virginia and New England, or for that matter the West Indies.
When they did make their own pathetic attempt to found an ’empire’ in Darien in the 1690’s, it was, as I am sure you are aware, a complete fiasco. This off course, allowed England to literally’ ‘buy’ Scotland for a ‘bargain basement’ price in 1707.”Bought and sold English gold”, as Mr Burns so appositely put it a century later.
However in that wonderful spirit of generosity that England is so famous for, the Scotch were allowed to pillage the Empire to the best of their abilities, and it must be said, made a good job of it. Who can forget the sterling work of Hector Munro at Buxar for example?
What now astonishes most Englishman, is the grossly ungrateful nature of most of the Scotch, and their continuous whinging litany of self pity. Without the generosity of England and the Empire, they would have continued to be a poverty stricken medieval hell hole of dubious repute, do you not agree?
chrisjwmartin
3 years ago
We use the words witch hunt now quite lightly, to mean job losses at the very worst. But in 1597 it meant the loss of everything. Liberty, and life.
The less sensational truth is that very few witches were executed in medieval times. Like most pop culture knowledge of the middle ages, this was exaggerated by propaganda from the Enlightenment onwards in order to make themselves look better by comparison. (See also the supposed medieval torture devices, which were almost all either anachronisms or outright inventions.)
In the case of witchcraft this has been compounded by identity politics. Modern feminists’ insatiable desire for victimhood led them similarly to exaggerate the proportion of witches who were female”in reality, the gender split in accurate histories is far more even than is portrayed. And nationalist groups have long identified themselves with their locations’ pagan religions and attempted to find a victimhood story there. This holds be they German Nazis idolising Wagner (Himmler was especially obsessed with Germanic paganism), Italian Fascists aping Roman culture, or Scottish Nationalists obsessing over Celtic paganism.
Not in Medieval times no, but after the Renaissance. The Medieval mind could perfectly happily cope with witches and saints; it was the rationalist mind which could not, and felt it necessary to exterminate the former. Hence the rise in witch burning late 16th century onwards…
Gaelic paganism? In Aberdeenshire? Gaelic was not spoken in the east of Scotland until Christianity was well established (and then not for long). And this Queen of the Fairies stuff sounds distinctly English (or Scots English, but not Gaelic).
Shhhh the Scots Gaelic extermination of the indigenous Brittonic culture of Pictland doesn’t fit with the approved Scottish Nationalist version of history in which Scots are saints and all their problems stem from English interference.
Given that the original kingdom of alba was an alliance between Picts and Gaelic speakers it wasn’t really a cultural extermination but a dying out of a language. One of those languages eventually dominated, and then came french and English. French also died out and then mostly Gaelic was replaced by English.
Alba was not the “original kingdom” except in Scottish revisionism. There were Brittonic-speaking Celts in the far north of Britain long before the Gaelic invaders arrived from Ireland with their alien Scottish language, and progressively eradicated nearly all trace of the indigenous Brittonic culture that we call Pictish.
Sigh, the excavations at Dalriada show a continuous occupation displaying a cultural continuity with a wider maritime culture along the Western European seaboard. The Scotti would have had kin in parts of Ireland but that doesn’t make them Irish or invaders. The Kingdom of Alba was formed after the battle of Dun Nechtan in 685 when the Picts killed the king of the invading Norhumbrians who owned up to the Lothians at the time. The Strathclyde Britons and the Scotti had also had to fight the Northumbrians off. It was thus a case of my enemy’e enemies are my friends. They combined to better defend themselves. They chose Gaelic as the lingua franca which is why we have so little Pictish come down to us. The Scotti were Gaelic speaking Scots with trading & marriage links with the Hebrides to Iberia. Much like later east coasters trading with the Low countries, the Hanseatic league in the Baltic & Scandinavia. Why the Scandis see us as another Scandinavian country.
Yes, the author doesn’t seem to know too much about actual Aberdeenshire.
Nick Whitehouse
3 years ago
I am not too sure that there was a strong pagan influence in Aberdeenshire by the late 1400s. After all did not the Irish come to Iona in the late 500s as Christians (St Columbus). They then Christianised most of Pictland in the 600s. Of course there are always people around with different faiths, but to suggest that there was a Gaelic pagan influence nearly 900 years after St Columbus is strange.
Michael Whittock
3 years ago
It was unfortunate for Andrew Man and his co-believers that they were living in a very aggressively anti-occult country, Calvinist/ Presbyterian Scotland. John Knox and his fellow ministers would have done all they could to wipe out pagan and occult activity, and for very good reason. Firstly these activities are forbidden in the Bible which they and most Christians take to be the authoritative Word of God. Secondly they were aware that these these things could open the door of a person’s life to evil forces which could do grave spiritual and mental damage. Jesus spent time with people suffering from evil possession/oppression and set them wonderfully free. Its very important not to exaggerate nor dramatise this phenomenon. The abuse of the ministry of deliverance or exorcism in the past has been well documented, and there are now good safeguards in place. In my 42 years of parish ministry I was involved in 6 cases of evil oppression of people or places, 2 of which were more to do with spiritual and emotional need than with anything sinister. It’s easy to treat these matters lightly, scornfully or out of rather bemused intellectual interest. But these forces are real and the teaching and experience of the Church should be respected.
With respect, Michael, the bible contains 2 diametrically opposed views – the old testament full of Zionist propaganda and the new testament describing the teachings of the great Palestinian scholar/thinker, Jesus. Followers of the old testament do not believe in Jesus while, in Islam, Jesus is the second prophet. We might respect the church if it had anything rational or useful to say to us. Darwin Bless You.
John, I don’t, as they say, recognise your description of the Old Testament. Christians see it as a looking forward to the coming of the Messiah fulfilled perfectly in Jesus recorded in the New Testament. We believe that one of the events prior to the glorious return of Christ will be the acceptance of Jesus by the People of Israel as Messiah. Many Christians are praying that Islam will come to see in Jesus someone far,far greater than a prophet.
Simon Newman
3 years ago
What fascinates me is that burning ‘witches’ is itself a pagan rite among the Norse/Germanic, long predating Christianity. You have to first believe in witches to think they need burning!
Olaf Felts
3 years ago
There’s a pun here that I have just about resisted.
The seventeenth century was an era of regression for Europe. While the mainstreaming of the printing press brought about enlightenment and knowledge, it also brought about a slew of conspiracy theories. After the Bible, books such as the ‘Daemonologie’ by King James VI were very popular.
Mainland Europe was also going through a bloody religious schism as exemplified by the Thirty Year War in Germany. The old rules no longer applied and new ideologies were competing for space in people’s minds.
Strangely enough, we are experiencing the same with the advent of the internet. While access to knowledge has never been easier, there’s also so much nonsense out there that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is real or not. The Woke mindset, for instance, is not dissimilar to that of the Puritans in sixteenth-century England. The Puritans were so abhorrent they moved to Amsterdam where even the Dutch couldn’t tolerate them, and eventually emigrated to North America where they had the freedom to practice their religion anyway they wanted. Now that Protestantism has taken a backseat to mainstream American culture, perhaps what we are seeing is a secular resurgence of this puritanical mindset in our campuses and mainstream media in the form of Woke doctrine.
Definitely. Wokeness is a North American and Northern European phenomenon – Protestant Europe. The statues in Southern Europe are safe.
Specifically the Anglophone parts of the former British Empire, the very places to which Puritanism was exported.
Interesting.
A century ago Baltimore-born journalist and critic H.L. Mencken expended prodigious streams of ink complaining about “neo-Puritanism” in the United States. There were many dimensions to his complaints, but, ultimately, he was complaining about the the kinds of busybodies we see anywhere, Left or Right, who want to dictate how the rest of us organize our lives. They were the kind of people who brought us Prohibition (1919?), one edition of a war on vice, then their War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror, etc. See a pattern?
Yes, funny enough, Prohibition was the first thing women lobbied for as soon as they were allowed to vote. Modern-day feminism is still lecturing men on their behavior.
Be fair -women were probably recipients of domestic abuse from drunk husbands and “girls” nights out would still have been half a century away.
And in America, we’ve been having to put up with them, ever since.
‘…a dark world beneath, from which people might frequently emerge ” an underworld dominated by a highly sexual queen…’
I might have known Glasgow and Sturgeon were at the heart of all this.
Careful! They’ll be using their hate speech laws against you…
Is this why all those people in Aberdeen got Coven-19?
Witch people?
I’m not so sure the witch hunts were “another Christian attempt to purge the last vestiges of Gaelic paganism from rural Aberdeenshire”. It is no coincidence that the European “witch craze” was most prevalent in more remote rural areas where the Catholic religious structure had been weakened through the reformation and a protestant replacement was still only solid around the seats of power such as Edinburgh or London. Therefore it wasnt so much a purge as a reaction borne out of real fear of things that were creeping in to fill the vacuum – some of which certainly may have had their roots in paganism.
As for Christianity appropriating ” Sol Invictus”, the opposite is more likely to be true with the cult of Sol Invictus being used by Roman authorities as an attempt to undermine the growing influence of Christianity.
I seem to recall that James VI and I acquired his witchcraft obsession from his marriage to Anne of Denmark. Witch hunts were all the rage in Denmark at the time.
Yes, he was deeply affected by a stormy crossing from Denmark during which the ship was almost wrecked and which was attributed to witchcraft. His obsession has meant that the UK has some meticulously detailed accounts of witchcraft trials (he always took an interest) and this is why we know that it wasn’t a deliberate “purge” of paganism as such. In the infamous Pendle witch trials it seems to have been much more associated with paranoia, bad luck, the settling of old grudges and secret Catholic activities raising suspicions.
As Dr Samuel Johnson so amusingly put it,
“Knowledge was divided among the Scots like bread in a besieged town, to every man a mouthful, to no man a bellyful”.
Which was poppycock when he wrote it. He was an elitist who saw the near universal education in Scotland & turned his nose up at it. Scottish education turned out the administrators of the Empire. The Scots were better educated than most ordinary public school English. Our soldiers fought for it while our clever boys administered it & our merchants profited from it. While the Cleared emigrated, sometimes forced, to it.
Your are perhaps confusing literacy with education. Scotland’s literacy rate in say
1700 was about 90% whilst Bedfordshire’s was about 18%.
However the Scotch had nothing to do with foundation of the Empire because they had no sea power beyond a few fishing smacks, and no cash whatsoever. Thus they had nothing to do with the foundation of the East India Company or the settlement of Virginia and New England, or for that matter the West Indies.
When they did make their own pathetic attempt to found an ’empire’ in Darien in the 1690’s, it was, as I am sure you are aware, a complete fiasco. This off course, allowed England to literally’ ‘buy’ Scotland for a ‘bargain basement’ price in 1707.”Bought and sold English gold”, as Mr Burns so appositely put it a century later.
However in that wonderful spirit of generosity that England is so famous for, the Scotch were allowed to pillage the Empire to the best of their abilities, and it
must be said, made a good job of it. Who can forget the sterling work of Hector Munro at Buxar for example?
What now astonishes most Englishman, is the grossly ungrateful nature of most of the Scotch, and their continuous whinging litany of self pity. Without the generosity of England and the Empire,
they would have continued to be a poverty stricken medieval hell hole of dubious repute, do you not agree?
The less sensational truth is that very few witches were executed in medieval times. Like most pop culture knowledge of the middle ages, this was exaggerated by propaganda from the Enlightenment onwards in order to make themselves look better by comparison. (See also the supposed medieval torture devices, which were almost all either anachronisms or outright inventions.)
In the case of witchcraft this has been compounded by identity politics. Modern feminists’ insatiable desire for victimhood led them similarly to exaggerate the proportion of witches who were female”in reality, the gender split in accurate histories is far more even than is portrayed. And nationalist groups have long identified themselves with their locations’ pagan religions and attempted to find a victimhood story there. This holds be they German Nazis idolising Wagner (Himmler was especially obsessed with Germanic paganism), Italian Fascists aping Roman culture, or Scottish Nationalists obsessing over Celtic paganism.
Not in Medieval times no, but after the Renaissance. The Medieval mind could perfectly happily cope with witches and saints; it was the rationalist mind which could not, and felt it necessary to exterminate the former. Hence the rise in witch burning late 16th century onwards…
Indeed!
Gaelic paganism? In Aberdeenshire? Gaelic was not spoken in the east of Scotland until Christianity was well established (and then not for long). And this Queen of the Fairies stuff sounds distinctly English (or Scots English, but not Gaelic).
Shhhh the Scots Gaelic extermination of the indigenous Brittonic culture of Pictland doesn’t fit with the approved Scottish Nationalist version of history in which Scots are saints and all their problems stem from English interference.
Given that the original kingdom of alba was an alliance between Picts and Gaelic speakers it wasn’t really a cultural extermination but a dying out of a language. One of those languages eventually dominated, and then came french and English. French also died out and then mostly Gaelic was replaced by English.
Alba was not the “original kingdom” except in Scottish revisionism. There were Brittonic-speaking Celts in the far north of Britain long before the Gaelic invaders arrived from Ireland with their alien Scottish language, and progressively eradicated nearly all trace of the indigenous Brittonic culture that we call Pictish.
Sigh, the excavations at Dalriada show a continuous occupation displaying a cultural continuity with a wider maritime culture along the Western European seaboard. The Scotti would have had kin in parts of Ireland but that doesn’t make them Irish or invaders.
The Kingdom of Alba was formed after the battle of Dun Nechtan in 685 when the Picts killed the king of the invading Norhumbrians who owned up to the Lothians at the time. The Strathclyde Britons and the Scotti had also had to fight the Northumbrians off.
It was thus a case of my enemy’e enemies are my friends. They combined to better defend themselves. They chose Gaelic as the lingua franca which is why we have so little Pictish come down to us.
The Scotti were Gaelic speaking Scots with trading & marriage links with the Hebrides to Iberia. Much like later east coasters trading with the Low countries, the Hanseatic league in the Baltic & Scandinavia.
Why the Scandis see us as another Scandinavian country.
Yes, the author doesn’t seem to know too much about actual Aberdeenshire.
I am not too sure that there was a strong pagan influence in Aberdeenshire by the late 1400s.
After all did not the Irish come to Iona in the late 500s as Christians (St Columbus).
They then Christianised most of Pictland in the 600s.
Of course there are always people around with different faiths, but to suggest that there was a Gaelic pagan influence nearly 900 years after St Columbus is strange.
It was unfortunate for Andrew Man and his co-believers that they were living in a very aggressively anti-occult country, Calvinist/ Presbyterian Scotland. John Knox and his fellow ministers would have done all they could to wipe out pagan and occult activity, and for very good reason. Firstly these activities are forbidden in the Bible which they and most Christians take to be the authoritative Word of God. Secondly they were aware that these these things could open the door of a person’s life to evil forces which could do grave spiritual and mental damage. Jesus spent time with people suffering from evil possession/oppression and set them wonderfully free.
Its very important not to exaggerate nor dramatise this phenomenon. The abuse of the ministry of deliverance or exorcism in the past has been well documented, and there are now good safeguards in place. In my 42 years of parish ministry I was involved in 6 cases of evil oppression of people or places, 2 of which were more to do with spiritual and emotional need than with anything sinister.
It’s easy to treat these matters lightly, scornfully or out of rather bemused intellectual interest. But these forces are real and the teaching and experience of the Church should be respected.
With respect, Michael, the bible contains 2 diametrically opposed views – the old testament full of Zionist propaganda and the new testament describing the teachings of the great Palestinian scholar/thinker, Jesus. Followers of the old testament do not believe in Jesus while, in Islam, Jesus is the second prophet. We might respect the church if it had anything rational or useful to say to us. Darwin Bless You.
John, I don’t, as they say, recognise your description of the Old Testament. Christians see it as a looking forward to the coming of the Messiah fulfilled perfectly in Jesus recorded in the New Testament. We believe that one of the events prior to the glorious return of Christ will be the acceptance of Jesus by the People of Israel as Messiah. Many Christians are praying that Islam will come to see in Jesus someone far,far greater than a prophet.
What fascinates me is that burning ‘witches’ is itself a pagan rite among the Norse/Germanic, long predating Christianity. You have to first believe in witches to think they need burning!
There’s a pun here that I have just about resisted.
Tease.
How Come Nicola Sturgeon has managed to avoid Matthew Hopkins?..