Pardoning Witches in Scotland

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, Scotland is considering pardoning those who perished during the witch hunts in Scotland in the early years. It would be an effort to right a passed wrong.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Advocates are calling on leaders to exonerate the thousands of women and men targeted in witch hunts during the 16th through 18th centuries

Nora McGreevy

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Officials have moved one step closer to pardoning the nearly 4,000 people accused of witchcraft in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries, reports Paul English for the London Times.

Witch hunts swept across much of Europe between roughly 1450 and 1750. Fear of the devil, social unrest and mass hysteria contributed to the frenzy of accusations and trials, which often arose from local disputes and typically targeted unmarried or widowed women, per the National Galleries of Scotland.

Scotland in particular was a hotbed of supposed “witchcraft” during the early modern era, writes James Hookway for the Wall Street Journal. A 2003 University of Edinburgh report found that at least 3,837 people were accused of witchcraft in the country between 1563 and 1735—the years in which the Scottish Witchcraft Act was passed and repealed, respectively. Around 84 percent of those accused were women, and more than half were over the age of 40. Five large-scale witch hunts took place in Scotland between 1590 and 1662 alone—a much higher rate than in England, according to the British Library.

Speaking with the Times, lawyer Claire Mitchell, who leads Witches of Scotland alongside schoolteacher Zoe Venditozzi, notes that “[p]er capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, [Scotland] executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women.”

One of Scotland’s first major witch hunts broke out in the coastal town of North Berwick in 1590. As Caroline Davies explains for the Guardian, James VI of Scotland believed that the town’s residents had used witchcraft to summon storms that delayed the ship carrying his Danish bride, Anne. Sixty or so people were accused over several months, including the servant Geillis Duncan.

In 1597, James himself wrote a treatise, Daemonologie, about demons and magic more broadly. He identified several signs of witchcraft, including the presence of a devil’s mark, interpreted loosely as any “marke upon some secreit place of their bodie.” The text amounted to a passionate defense for the punishment and persecution of witches, per the British Library.

James’ treatise became a bestseller. It even inspired playwright William Shakespeare to incorporate details from the North Berwick trials into his play Macbeth, which debuted shortly after the king was crowned James I of England and Ireland in 1603. Colloquially known as the “Scottish play,” Macbeth’s opening acts feature three witches who make prophecies, control the weather and incite powerful storms. As the Royal Shakespeare Company notes, the play was most likely performed for the first time in James’ court in August or December 1606.

The North Berwick trials took place almost a century before the infamous Salem Witch Trials broke out in colonial Massachusetts. The worst mass hysteria event in early American history, the trials resulted in some 150 accusations and 25 deaths.

Nora McGreevy can be reached through her website, noramcgreevy.com.

Haunted Lighthouses

Move Over, Haunted Houses

Pft. Haunted houses. Child’s play. Lighthouses are where the nightmares are at. Lighthouses are full of stories involving death, isolation, madness, and in some cases actual murder. While their light can be a beacon of hope to lost sailors, darkness has often haunted them. Almost every one seems to have a few ghostly inhabitants. Perhaps it’s time crumbling Victorian mansions made way for a different kind of haunted house, one that has always shone a light for both the living and the dead. 

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What it Takes to be a Medium in Lily Dale

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sarah Durn writes all about Lily Dale for Altas Obscura:

From the outside, this small, rural community in upstate New York looks like many others in the state. Victorian cottages cozy up to one another in various shades of green, white, and yellow. Large red oaks dot sidewalks, stretching their long limbs into a vibrant canopy. But look a bit closer and you’ll start to see the “Medium Open” signs or stumble upon the Healing Temple or the community’s pet cemetery. Welcome to Lily Dale, America’s oldest Spiritualist community.

Lily Dale was founded in 1879 basically as an adult Spiritualism summer camp. People would come, set up tents, and then wait for the dead to arrive. Seances, message services, and classes followed. Back in the late 19th century, Spiritualism was flourishing, with more than a million followers. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, actress Mae West, even Thomas Edison (maybe) all joined in. The basic tenet of the religion is that “life is continuous—in other words, we never die, we just change states of being. As a science, Spiritualism is committed to proving the continuity of life by communicating with spirits who have passed on,” writes Lily Dale medium Janice Dreshman.

What began as that tented summer commune now is a small hamlet, with about 250 permanent and semipermanent residents, many of whom are registered mediums. For about $80 to $100, you can sit down with a Lily Dale medium as he or she relays messages from family members and friends who’ve passed on, at least until your half-hour is up.

All Lily Dale mediums are members of what’s called the Lily Dale Assembly, made up of members from around the world. And while all members are Spiritualists, not all members are mediums. Some members live and work in Lily Dale. Others don’t. All members can vote on Lily Dale building decisions, community matters, and who is elected to the Assembly’s Board of Directors.

The Board doesn’t allow just anyone to waltz in and start giving readings, though. Lily Dale requires all mediums to go through a rigorous testing process to be registered and allowed to set up shop. Today, there are 36 registered mediums at Lily Dale. Some, such as Gretchen Clark, have grown up in the community. Most, though, have bought homes and moved in. Regardless, all the mediums at Lily Dale had to hone their skills and pass numerous tests before they were allowed to charge visitors for readings.

In the early days of Lily Dale in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, becoming a registered medium “was based totally on competency,” says Elaine Thomas, a registered Lily Dale medium for 37 years. If you could talk to dead people, you were in. To become a medium today though, “there’s a lot of volunteerism,” says Dreshman, who’s been a registered medium since 2005. Many of the programs on offer at Lily Dale are only possible because community members donate their time.

Read more here.

Maybe this is the year to try it yourself --The Spiritualists' Handbook: A concise and extensive guide to Spiritualism and all its practices

Norway's Demon Wall

Atlas Obscura reveals the existence of a strange wall in Norway called The Demon Wall. Read this to understand its history:

The demons are tiny, and legion. Scowling, tongue-flicking devils, no bigger than a thumbnail, and strange animals pile together in a tangle of dog legs and rabbit ears, each smaller than the next. The lines of the painting are so fine that the tiniest figures seem to pull the viewer into an infinite Satanic menagerie.

The story of how the demonveggen, or demon wall, came to be is as strange and disturbing as the mural itself. It’s a tale of scandal, fraud, and possible madness that begins with Gerhard Gotaas, one of Norway’s leading conservators of the mid-20th century. His work preserving and restoring medieval church art was wide-ranging and respected. But in 1940, when he entered a small village church in Sauherad to restore centuries-old artwork, he saw demons. Researchers determined earlier this year that, instead of reviving a 17th-century painting, Gotaas actually spent two years creating a monstrous mural from his own imagination. That revelation is just part of the story, however. Scant and contradictory clues only deepen the mystery of what might have possessed him to create the hellish image.

“We couldn’t believe it. We were shocked by how much he really did,” says Susanne Kaun, a conservator at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage (NIKU). Kaun undertook the demon wall investigation with her colleague, art historian Elisabeth Andersen. Through archival research and scientific analysis of the mural itself, the team discovered not only that Gotaas invented the demons, but also that he destroyed all remnants of the original art, painted more than 300 years earlier. “That’s really the most shocking thing, from a conservator point of view,” says Kaun. “He found something there that was old, and he painted over that. He changed what he found. He has to have known what he did.”

Obsidian ‘Spirit Mirror’ Used by Elizabeth I’s Court Astrologer Has Aztec Origins

This from the Smithsonian Magazine -

An obsidian “spirit mirror” used by John Dee, an advisor to England’s Elizabeth I, traces its origins to Aztec culture, a new study published in the journal Antiquity suggests.

A Renaissance polymath whose interests ranged from astronomy to astrology, alchemy and math, Dee advised the queen from the start of her reign in 1558 to the 1570s. As court astrologer and scientific advisor, he advocated for overseas exploration and the establishment of colonies.

“Later he became involved in divination and the occult, seeking to talk to angels through the use of scryers (those who divine the future), who used artifacts—like mirrors and crystals,” the study’s lead author, University of Manchester archaeologist Stuart Campbell, tells Ashley Strickland of CNN.

Today, the British Museum owns the mirror, which is on display in London alongside two similar circular obsidian mirrors and a rectangular obsidian slab that may be a portable altar, reports Tom Metcalfe for National Geographic. Researchers had previously suspected that the artifacts originated with the Aztecs, and the new study confirms this chemically.

Read the full article here.