Despite being marginalised crones on the fringes of society, witches are having a moment. For several years, we’ve been hearing of their resurgence as “a symbol of feminist empowerment”. From young women casting spells against Donald Trump to British Vogue producing a “Guide to Being a Modern Witch”, now is the time for us to wield our wands against the patriarchy — or, failing that, a beleaguered female author will do. And 2023, we are told, is set to be the Year of “Witch Lit”, with novels such as Emilia Hart’s Weyward and Margaret Meyer’s The Witching Tide hitting the shelves.

In many ways, I am in favour of this. Not only am I a huge fan of dark stories about powerful women, but my own forthcoming non-fiction book, exploring the demonisation of middle-aged women, bears the title Hags. The witch has long been an important figure for feminists, capturing the relationship between women’s vilification, our otherness, and our strength. In the words of Kristen J. Sollée, author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists, she’s “a martyr mascot for the women’s movement”.

And yet, I’m not convinced by some of the qualities — moral purity, stylised rebellion — that seem most important to some of those who champion her today. Real witches don’t win the applause of Bafta audiences. Women who are truly hated, truly marginalised, might be role models in the sense that they teach us what it means to be an outsider, but they are not aspirational. In Women & Power, Mary Beard argues that fetishising the female monster is a poor substitute for challenging the forces that keep her in place: “despite the well-known feminist attempts over the last 50 years or more to reclaim Medusa for female power (‘laughing with Medusa’, as the title of one recent collection of essays put it) — not to mention the use of her as the Versace logo — it has not made a blind bit of difference to the way she has been used in attacks on female politicians”.

In my own writing, I am more interested in looking at the dynamics of misogyny, witch-hunting and demonisation than in “reclaiming” witch as an identity open to all. I just don’t think it works that way. What worries me about treating the witch as “one of us” — someone on our side, representative of our values, proof of our anti-establishment credentials — is that it prizes the external trappings of “witchiness” over a meaningful analysis of what might make a woman a witch today. At its extreme, the former becomes a substitute for the latter.

Through the witch — in fiction and fashion — you can engage in a kind of fantasy feminism, role-playing standing up to the mob. In this sense, “Witch Lit” corresponds to a psychological need that cannot be met in the real world, where fear of rejection and ostracism tempers rebellious urges. By making it fashionable to immerse yourself in stories where women go against social norms, becoming ugly, aggressive and dangerous, you create a paradox: a woman can use the witch not as provocation, but to signal her conformity. It’s a way of ticking off feminism’s “bad woman” objective without inconveniencing others, the literary woman’s equivalent of wearing a Girls Just Want To Have Fun(damental Rights) t-shirt.

It’s not that I don’t think fiction writers are producing some wonderful, highly intelligent work on the topic of witches and witch hunts. My issue is with where it sits in the context of feminism and publishing at this particular point in time. For instance, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies is a brilliant study of the way in which a self-sufficient, female-centred community is rendered sinister under patriarchy’s gaze, with members eventually turning on its most outspoken member as a way to save themselves. It’s based on events on the Norwegian island of Vardø in the early 1600s. Nonetheless, the Guardian describes it as “a witch-hunt tale for our times”.

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One of the most striking scenes involves the main protagonist, Maren, feeling compelled to participate in the condemnation of a woman who has been her friend: “Maren watches as the word [witch] ripples around the assembled women like a current… She watches, betrayal thumping its drum in her chest as Kirsten is bound at the wrists and led in the direction of Vardøhus.” Reading it, one feels dismay at Maren’s betrayal, but also senses that, in her place, we’d have done the same. It’s testimony to Hargrave’s skill and empathy as a writer that she doesn’t go down the easy route of focusing on heroic victimhood. She makes you understand the compromises. It is, absolutely, relevant to our times, if perhaps in more ways than the Guardian may have considered.

There are many behaviours I notice, in both feminism and publishing, which replicate the dynamics of the witch hunt. Accuse a woman — older, outspoken, perhaps too independent for your liking — of a ludicrous crime, such as causing crops to fail, bewitching your cattle, wanting to commit genocide or denying your right to exist. Vilify women who congregate without the presence of male guardians. Subject these women to punishments which rely on spectacle, then trust that the punishment itself will convince others of the validity of the original accusation. Create a climate of fear, so that other women will be afraid to assert themselves, perhaps even encouraged to point the finger at others to deflect attention from themselves.

In 2020, the year The Mercies was published, Hargrave refused to sit on a judging panel for Mslexia until the older novelist Amanda Craig stepped down. This was because Craig had signed an open letter in support of J.K. Rowling, who was receiving a torrent of death and rape threats — punishment as spectacle — for having had the temerity to express her own views on sex and gender. Rowling was being accused, ludicrously, of wanting others dead, and Craig, for standing by her, was tainted, too. Having read her novel, I was shocked by Hargrave’s behaviour: it seemed like such a crass replication of the very finger-pointing she’d depicted so well. The younger woman directs the mob towards the older one, like Abigail Williams in Salem, like Jennet Device in Pendle. Like, eventually, Emma Watson in front of the Bafta crowd.

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It was as though because Hargrave had “done” the politics of the witch hunt in fiction, she didn’t need to engage with it in real life. I’m not suggesting that every author has to better the choices made by their own creations, or that they should share the beliefs of J.K. Rowling. But if part of a book’s marketing relies on its moral import and relevance to modern-day feminism, then I think we need to question how far novels which deal with witchcraft and/or female persecution represent an extension of feminist activism — or merely a substitute for it. I’ve nothing against people immersing themselves in stories of “marginalised women with hidden powers, the kind of female traditionally hunted down or isolated”. It should not, however, become a kind of wish fulfilment, a way of easing the conscience, or not having to face it at all.

The witch is not a cool figure. No one gets burned at the stake for being too cool. Once you start claiming you’re here for “all of the witches”, the truth is, you’re here for the mob.

It used to be a hotspot for secret societies and occultists, such as Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon. And it was here that the 17th-Century English philosopher would allegedly associate with a group of Rosicrucians — a Western esoteric movement based on Kabbalistic and gnostic thought.

This sense of rebellion is not confined to the past; swathes of millennials and Gen-Zers are turning to online occultism and ritual magic in what seems like a rebellion against modern disenchantment. 

Digital forms of New Age spirituality go especially viral on TikTok (or WitchTok) — from virtual trans-Atlantic covens gathering to cast spells on politicians (and planets), to the idea of “manifestation” that is currently in vogue. These trends are paired with politics, where magic is channelled into anti-capitalist “spiritual activism”.

Occultism tends to attract young people because it appears subversive. The idea of Francis Bacon and his cabal of Rosicrucians practising magic behind closed doors seems inherently subcultural; a mark of an “alternative lifestyle”. Even the word itself — derived from the Latin occultus, meaning “hidden” — suggests something dissident; a left-hand path leading away from the masses. Its compatibility with anti-establishment sentiments thus tends to go unquestioned. 

Today, though, these connotations are deceptive. While occultism may have been subversive in the context of 16th and 17th-century religious societies, it rapidly ceased to be so with the birth of modernity. Why? Because the heirs of Western occult philosophy were also the heirs of the secular liberalism and capitalism that dominates the West today.

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Far from being a black sheep in Western intellectual history, it was Bacon — along with Hobbes, Locke, and Hume — who laid down the norms of our time. He was the father of British empiricism and the scientific method: the cornerstone of liberal, rationalistic modernity.

Bacon was one of the most proactive actors in building a world free from tradition and “superstition”. He was part of the same revolt against religion that brought about the Age of Reason, and, ultimately, the materialist dogmas upheld by contemporary science, philosophy and politics. On a more conceptual level, Western occultism came hand-in-hand with the founding principle of the modern age: Man’s domination over nature.

It is no coincidence that Bacon straddled both worlds, when both emerged from the same reaction against religion and the will to seek more “rational” and autonomous ways of arriving at truth. Liberal capitalism and occultism are both fruits of the Enlightenment. Both place man at the very centre of the universe, attempting to emancipate him from the constraints of tradition and the natural world itself. Both also attempt to manipulate nature, be that with magic or brute force. Though one clings onto a veneer of transcendence and the other admits to its own materialism, both tend towards this same end: “liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”.

At least, this is what the early critical theorists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw as the Enlightenment’s end game. For them, the subjugation of nature that was justified by 17th century rationality was inextricably linked to “‘bourgeois liberalism” and capitalism — even though, ironically, they themselves ended up subscribing to the very materialism and atheism that defined these systems. 

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Given that this subjugation of nature is precisely what motivated Bacon to pursue the occult, it is clear that Western esotericism does not subvert the impulse behind capitalism, but compliments it. Nothing sums this up more perfectly than the “magick” of Aleister Crowley, the West’s most influential occultist after Bacon, which he based on the sole principle of “do what thou wilt”; a sentiment which can hardly be distinguished from that of modern liberalism.

This overlap is strongly felt in the New Age movement of the Sixties and Seventies — a strange and self-contradictory synthesis of quasi-transcendent freedom and consumerist self-actualisation. Despite its reputation for rebellion, the flower power generation only took the grounding principle of Enlightenment liberalism a step further, overthrowing tradition and nature in ways more forceful than ever before. Their attraction to the occult was hardly subversive; it simply served the 17th century urge to make man (and now, with birth control, woman) master of nature.

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Despite the deeply entangled roots of the Enlightenment and occult spirituality, the latter’s appeal is reliant on its performative claim to be an insurgency allegedly directed against the ruling forces of our society. Hence its attraction to young people as an alternative to “organised religion”, the Protestant work ethic, or whatever thin residues of traditional thought remain in the public sphere. 

But this relies on an outdated view: that there is such a thing as religious (and specifically Christian) hegemony. Numerous WitchTok videos play on this idea, sometimes stereotyping and mocking Christians for their alleged ignorance, “irrational” beliefs or lack of “critical thinking”. But far from being truly rebellious, their attitudes are simply echoes of those that govern the modern world.

WitchTok, being effectively stuck in the 17th Century, forgets that the status quo has shifted: it is now secularism that dominates in the Western world. Yet the members of its virtual covens continue to rebel against a phantom hegemony, using magic against power structures and religious dogmas that are too weak today to oppress anybody. It is out of this delusion that magic becomes merged with activism, as in the case of feminist witches hexing Trump. Despite sharing a philosophical genealogy with the modern establishment, acquiring magical power becomes a means of rising up against that establishment.

As with Francis Bacon, this power is of a distinctly individualist, rationalist kind, that looks to manipulate nature at the command of the human will — just like Adorno and Horkheimer’s “bourgeois liberalism”. Almost all of the practices that are popular on WitchTok are oriented towards personal gratification, be that “manifesting” money, beauty and success or casting hexes on enemies. Despite standing in opposition to modern capitalism, their individualism and materialism ends up succumbing to it; the very same paradox that ran through Sixties counterculture.

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One could even compare WitchTokers’ attempts to “manifest” or “reality shift” (a trend of inducing alternate states of consciousness — while filming oneself, of course) to the scientific method, in line with the double legacy of Bacon. When TikTok users sift through various magical practices to find which one works for them, they are undergoing the same procedure of experimentation to arrive at empirical proof as in scientific inquiry. That is to say, they are not really “superstitious”, but committed to the principles of modern science and rationality.

Once again, TikTok’s romanticisation of witchcraft as something subversive forgets the reality that Western occultism arrived in tandem with the very Enlightenment ideologies underpinning modernity. Its desires to forge transcendence “autonomously” and “rationally” do not go against the status quo; they are the status quo’s founding principles.

In reality, to be truly subversive in this day and age would be to free oneself from the shackles of individualism. It would entail drawing wisdom from the traditions that modernity has so violently delegitimised, and submitting to nature rather than seeking to manipulate (or mutilate) it. Prospects that are unlikely to appeal to many Millennials, Gen-Zers, or TikTok witches.

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

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Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

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Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

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This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

This piece was originally published in May.

Given that New England’s ideas about witches had been imported from the old country, the trials shared characteristics: illnesses that could not be explained, except by magic; familiars — demons in animal form — sucking on witches’ bodies; victims being tormented from afar, via apparitions or dreams (this “spectral evidence” would later dominate at the famous Salem witch trials). Both trials, too, have much to teach us about rationality and its limits, the power of collective opinion, and the psychology that leads people to identify others — and themselves — as evil.

The story of the Parsons is told in Malcolm Gaskill’s magnificent new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (out 4th November). Hugh and Mary were among the 25,000 Puritans who fled to New England in the seventeenth century to build a Promised Land. Both settled in Springfield, a town unusual in Massachusetts because it had at its heart not only a godly enterprise, but also a commercial one: its founder William Pynchon ran a trade in furs, buying them from the Native Americans they called Indians and sending them on to London.

Gaskill vividly evokes the reality of early colonial life, from the voyage in the crammed, low-ceilinged hold of a pitching ship — the reek of unwashed bodies, the snoring and bickering of other passengers — through to the sheer hard labour that made up their lives on land — the unremitting work of felling timber, breaking rocks, digging drains, mowing grass, tending cattle, chopping firewood, slaughtering pigs, clearing chimneys, sweeping floors, and on and on.

Their external struggle with nature was matched by internal wrestling: Puritan theology required its adherents to be gravely introspective. Gaskill describes it as a “strained, oppositional way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation.” As frontier neighbours, they were completely dependent on each other (and literally indentured to Pynchon), yet the contemplation of their own sins led quickly to the censure of others. And if the melancholy, constant toil and endless self-doubt were not enough, this was a society facing the constant, terrible death of beloved young children.

In this fraught environment, the accusations of 1651 settled on Parsons — an ambitious man whose eyes seemed full of sullen envy — and his wife — who talked too much of witches. The evidence of their witchcraft could be seen in many incidents — trivial in themselves but creating a cumulative, attritional effect: trowels and knives went missing and mysteriously reappeared; the making of a pudding repeatedly failed; people received night-time visitations from snakes or a small boy with a face as red as fire, while others suffered fits and convulsions; a two-year-old saw a spectral dog; and, above all, children were bewitched to death. All these incidents occurred after the victims had crossed the Parsons.

Gaskill’s finely tuned story unfolds less like your average history book and more like a Stephen King novel, building such a convincing sense of the mounting tension that it is possible to see why the inhabitants of Springfield came to believe that this must incontrovertibly be witchcraft — and yet also why their inferences were disbelieved by the court in Boston. The journey from enchantment to disenchantment was a mere 90 miles. What is collective and rational and what is unconvincing and marginal depends largely on where one is standing.

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Perhaps it’s surprising to discover that scepticism was less in evidence 30 years later, where the accusations of Bideford carried undiminished to the court at Exeter. In The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition (out last week), John Carrow meticulously explores the haunting tale of the Bideford witches: three women who were accused of witchcraft chiefly, he argues, because of “their poverty in the midst of plenty”. People don’t like to be reminded of their privilege. Temperance Lloyd was probably an abandoned wife, left without resources; the widowed Susanna Edwards, who had lost children, came from a family tarred by a history of unwed births; and Mary Trembles is seldom granted her own identity in the records Carrow has painstakingly trawled, suggesting her physical and mental dependency. All three were long-term recipients of the dole and begged for their living.

One thing that sets the Bideford witches’ case apart from the Parsons’ is that theirs was a story of emotional discrepancies between people of different economic status. Susanna Edwards’ visits to beg for food at the door of John Barnes’ house were seen by Barnes’ wife as “frivolous”; soon she was an alleged victim of Edwards’ witchcraft. Parsons, too, bothered people by turning up without obvious purpose — on “sleeveless errands” — but for New England the “most sensitive fault-lines,” Gaskill observes, “lay between near neighbours of similar status.” Yet even between the New Englanders, envy and perceived envy was at the root of accusations. Fear also, writes Gaskill, “incubated guilt, which was projected and returned as anger — much as colonists in New England imputed their own aggression to Indians, easing their own consciences and justifying drastic counter-measures”. In the New World, witches were not the only Other.

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In 1680s England, the monarchy had recently been restored, bringing with it an Anglican regime. In Bideford, a substantial proportion of the population were nonconformist or Puritan, but now had to put up with an Anglican rector who drank, swore and extorted. Just when the witch trials hit, the Puritans had little in the way of responsible leadership, and that would turn out to matter.

The case against the three women started with an encounter in September 1681 between Lloyd and a sick woman called Grace Thomas. In attempting to appear kind and concerned, Lloyd instead seemed overfamiliar and intrusive. That evening, Thomas experienced “sticking, pricking pains”. These continued for months, and her memory of the conversation with Lloyd took on a sinister tone. A stray cat left a doll on her bed: the cat was deemed to be a witch’s familiar, the doll a poppet used to direct the stabbing pains to her body. A magpie that flew confusedly into Thomas’s sick chamber appeared as invasive as the beggar woman: it was thought to be another imp, acting on his mistress’s bidding. Both cat and bird, unwelcome visitors who scavenged for food and lived in the alleyways and fringes of the town, were reminiscent of the sinister figure of the beggar and, by equating them, Thomas was effectively dehumanising Lloyd.

She could because Lloyd already had a reputation as a witch and had even been tried — though acquitted. This past run-in with the law laid the groundwork for her later condemnation, for it meant that the respectable matrons of Bideford had once before searched her naked body for a “witch’s mark” or a teat on which a demon could suck. When they examined her again in 1682 — the violation far more genuinely invasive than the charges against her — they found what had not been there before: “two Teats hanging nigh together like a piece of flesh had suckt … in her Secret Parts … each … about an Inch in length.” What Carrow suggests might have been cervical polyps — not uncommon in menopausal women who have had children — was thought to be evidence that Lloyd had been feeding diabolic imps.

Lloyd herself quickly confessed to a devilish pact and to causing sickness with witchcraft. But she couldn’t get her story right: the familiars seemed to have control over her rather than the other way around; she had no grudge against her victim. The devil appeared not as a handsome man dressed in black, but as a creature (“about the length of her Arm”), with very big eyes, that capered, hopped, and leapt before her; he failed to entice her with promises of wealth and power.

What motivated Lloyd’s confession? She was highly suggestible, for one thing, and eager to please. But there was also potential satisfaction in appropriating one’s reputation as a witch (as many self-describing witches are finding today). Carrow suggests that Lloyd came to assume the identity that her neighbours had assigned to her because owning it gave power to a woman who had formerly been powerless. Thinking of herself as a witch made her feared and able to extract more charity. But the disguise came at a price: she came to believe it was real, and with that came guilt and shame, and an inability to defend herself convincingly. Mary Parsons, who claimed for some time that she was a witch, too, also experienced guilt, though Gaskill wonders if it slipped into the dangerous “thrill of notoriety”.

Mental ill-health was very obviously at play. Mary Parsons suffered from severe postnatal depression — possibly even postpartum psychosis. All three witches from Bideford were noted to be slipping into depression during their imprisonment — but it was only viewed as a further symptom of demonic suggestion. A later account by Roger North described them as “miserable old creatures that … were scarce alive; but were overwhelmed with melancholy, and waking dreams, and so stupid as no one could suppose they knew either the construction or consequence of what they said.” Another commentator said that they appeared “weary of their lives”.

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In this age, on the cusp of the Enlightenment, much responsibility lay with authority figures who could validate or dismiss fears of witchcraft. In Bideford, every unexplained ailment that later became part of the evidence of witchcraft had first been suggested by a doctor or apothecary to be of unnatural origin. The town’s Anglican ministers, in an unusual annotation, wrote “bewitched” in the parish register when Lydia Burman died in 1672 — a clear sign that they believed in the reality of witches.

Much also came down to the application of the law, for witchcraft was a crime and had to be proved as such. And here the Justices of the Peace in Bideford abrogated their responsibilities, by allowing the gathering of all pre-trial evidence to be conducted by the alleged witches’ chief accusers. In gaol, Lloyd was questioned by Grace Thomas’s sister and brother-in-law without the supervision of authorities. It was to them that she confessed to having met the devil and having tried to destroy Thomas by witchcraft. We do not know, therefore, “how many of her recorded words were actually her own.” Edwards was questioned by a man called John Dunning, about whom we know little: he did not give sworn testimony, and his questioning was reported second-hand by one Joane Jones, whose husband claimed to experience spectral tormenting by Edwards. We don’t know what she made up.

But it is clear that the accused assented to much that was put to them, even when it did not make sense. There were so many slips in the chronology and inconsistencies in the substance of what the women confessed that had anyone cared to cross-examine, analyse and pick apart their testimonies — if anyone had cared, in short, if they were innocent — then the huge holes would quickly have been exposed. No one spoke in their defence while they “talked themselves”, said North, “to the gallows”. The alternative — recognising how melancholy, pain and madness shaped their testimonies — meant taking on the responsibility of their keeping. It is often easier to condemn the vulnerable than to care for them.

By contrast, in Springfield Pynchon did not interpose his own views as he gathered testimonies about the Parsons. Nor did he take sides. The court in Boston listened to the depositions of 30 witnesses, though only seven were present, which made a material difference: undistracted by passionate speeches, the bench could easily sift the stuff of evidentiary substance from the “hotchpotch of trivia”. Under Massachusetts law, a witch was one who had made a pact with the devil and, while there was much that was suspicious surrounding the Parsons, it was hard to discern proof of a diabolic covenant.

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The trouble with witchcraft is that it was a “slippery crime, suspended between fantasy and reality, credulity and scepticism,” writes Gaskill. Now, some might think that believing in magic as absurd, but Carrow is at pains to stress its rationality in the seventeenth century. Gaskill similarly notes that we need to approach witchcraft as witchcraft and not as fraud, hysteria or delusion. Besides, belief and doubt are not quite as distinct as we might think. Even those who believed in witchcraft doubted, and those who doubted believed.

Giving testimony that would lead to one’s neighbour being hanged required the overcoming of one’s inherent doubt. This is why Gaskill concludes, citing Marina Warner, that “people believed what they heard, less in spite of its outlandishness than because of it”. What was being believed had to be sufficiently awful to contemplate, in turn, the awfulness of what might result from accusing someone. If you chant “witch!” loudly enough, you can drown out your misgivings. And you need to chant it with others for it to become true.

While both historians are keen to stress the non-hysterical nature of witchcraft charges, Carrow notes that the women of Bideford were questioned in “an atmosphere more akin to a bear-pit than a courtroom” and could not be acquitted for fear of mob reprisals. It is also evident that the weight of collective opinion can create guilt. Pynchon had prosecuted an earlier solo accusation of witchcraft as defamation, but when more than half the town had joined the chorus, reason dictated there must be something in it.

There is much of obvious parallel to today — the echo chambers of social media, the credibility of extreme fake news, the harshness of the judgements we make on the poor, on migrants, on our “Others.” But, quoting Peter Laslett, Gaskill reminds us that “only by taking the strange on its own terms can we understand ourselves in time”. It is that which contrasts with today that lends us understanding, not just that which is familiar; it is in deeply absorbing the realities of our predecessors’ lives — as witchcraft depositions, well handled, can help us to do — that we can perceive the otherness of the past and look more dispassionately on our own place in history.

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

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Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

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Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

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This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

And just as calm was restored, yet another witch was arrested, in October: Andrew Man, apparently a wandering magician from Rathven, who could cure sick animals and people using skills given to him by “the people of the hills”.

Andrew does not fit our stereotype of the witch. For one thing, he is a man. For another, unlike the blank-faced and completely innocent victims of the Salem witch trials, Andrew did believe himself capable of using powerful magic. According to his testimony, he was the lover of the Queen of the Fairies, and had gotten many children with her. He was also helped by a supernatural entity called Christsunday, and had seen the king that died at Flodden (James IV) and Thomas the Rhymer with the fairies, along with other dead people.

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The material in Andrew’s confession includes the tips of some huge story icebergs. Perhaps most interesting is the forgotten culture of Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland. In Aberdeenshire, the Highlands meet the Lowlands, and it was there that Christianity alternated between assimilating with the Gaelic paganism that preceded it, and clashing savagely with it. The fairy Otherworld lay alongside the everyday world, and it was both dangerous and exciting; its moral neutrality was intolerable to a Christian theology that emphasised life as a war between evil versus good. The witch trials of the sixteenth century were another Christian attempt to purge the last vestiges of Gaelic paganism from rural Aberdeenshire.

For Andrew Man, there was a fairy underworld, physically below the world of men, and culturally subordinated or even repressed or forgotten. Andrew and other magic users were left to carry the traces of this underworld to the surface. In the harsh light of resurgent Scottish Calvinism, such stories were of course misinterpreted as tales of demons. But in the twenty-first century, we are relatively familiar with the idea of the Queen of the Fairies, thanks to us fantasy literature. The very strange figure to us is Christsunday.

Christsunday is a curious name. Perhaps it was meant to be read as Christian at first glance, but the entity in question could hardly be mistaken for a Christian one. From Andrew, we learn that Christsunday is a stag some of the time — a stag that bursts up out of the snow. In Gaelic writings, deer are often able to pass from this world into the Otherworld, and to guide mortals across that border. Figures who rise from below are associated not only with the fairy realm, but with a particular idea about fairies: that they are linked to the dead who die before their time (like James IV and Thomas the Rymer.)

This movement of the Otherworld — from perpetually at the margins of human life, fitfully accessible to those with guidance, to a dark underworld inhabited by the dead — lightly Christianises the Gaelic Otherworld and assimilates it to an afterlife of punishment for sin. These dead figures can be understood by pious Christians as in hell or Purgatory, even though in pagan Gaelic tradition they are in neither.

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This kind of partial Christianisation was common in cultures that abruptly met medieval Catholicism in its evangelical form. New world cultures are full of figures like Christsunday: Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, is an ideal example. The word saint is a Christian cover hurled over what is very plainly an Aztec goddess: Mictēcacihuātl, the “Lady of the Dead”, who ruled Mictlan, the last layer of the underworld. Similar processes occur in both Hoodoo and Voudoun, and also in fully creolised religions like Santería.

But just as the modern Catholic Church condemns the votaries of Santa Muerte, so both the Presbyterian Kirk and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church sought to condemn those who told tales about such hybrid figures in sixteenth-century Scotland.

Nevertheless, even as local folklore cloaked itself with Christian imagery to protect itself, Christianity appropriated local imagery to make itself more influential. For Andrew Man and most of his countryfolk — for pagans throughout what is now Britain — the solar year still dominated understandings of the supernatural. (If you strip the word Christ off the name Christsunday, you are left with Sunday — or SUN-day.) Medieval Catholicism made a reasonable fist of appropriating this, converting the figure of Sol Invictus, the unconquered Sun, into the figure of the risen Christ.

As long as the agricultural year dominated human experience, the seasons of the sun mattered profoundly; the yearly growth cycles of crops kept representatives of solar triumph in circulation, even if they had once been owned by the Romans and were always disowned by pure Christians. The compromise arrived at in medieval Christianity was, however, unacceptable to reformed Protestantism: it was the pagan elements absorbed by Christianity that ardent Protestants sought to destroy.

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And it was this, ultimately, that condemned Andrew Man to death in 1597. There has long been a connection suggested between a tentatively identified Gaelic stag-god, sometimes called Cernunnos, and Dīs Pater, a Roman lord of the underworld. Andrew himself would not have known these names, but it is likely that some of his interrogators would have been able to make the link. Certainly, Scotland’s James VI made any number of such connections in his book Daemonologie, published the same decade as Andrew’s trial.

For a Christian courtroom, the idea of a dark world beneath, from which people might frequently emerge — an underworld dominated by a highly sexual queen — could not be made to harmonise consistently with any Christian idea of a wholly spiritual resurrection. It may have felt uncomfortably close to a medieval story of the birth of Christ from his human mother’s flesh. Such adjacencies killed Andrew because they could not be tolerated.

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. Among many losses are lost records: we have only fragmentary material on any of the Aberdeenshire trials, and for some we have no records at all. That is as the prosecution wished. The last thing the record offers on the Aberdeenshire witch panic is a series of chilling payments for the materials of execution: 20 pieces of peat, four tar barrels, a length of rope to tie the victims to the stake, along with their stories that might unsettle the prevailing religious powers.

It’s worth remembering how these identities were forgotten. It was no accident; they were deliberately destroyed, burned to the bone. It is not insignificant that the last linguistic traces of Highland Gaelic paganism are about to disappear with Scottish Gaelic. In England, witches were not burned, but hanged as felons. In Scotland, they were first strangled to death, and then the body consumed by fire in a ritual designed to ensure that they were gone completely, gone for good. Such extirpation suggests an uneasy sense that stories like these might still emerge out of the Gaelic underworld, bringing with them a horde of restless dead rebels — who might threaten current governance in the way that the Aberdeenshire witches terrified the ruling class.