Isobel Gowdie was likely a real witch, if by “witch” you mean “a shamanic specialist operating at the social margins and employing syncretized folk traditions that incorporated elements of an ancient agrarian cult with the medieval Catholicism that had been forced on her people by English colonization.” This was the definition I learned from the eminent historian Emma Wilby in The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, but a simpler way to say it is “cunning woman.” To heal a sick child, Isobel said in her confession, she diverted the sickness into a dog by “shakis the belt abow the fyre, (damaged—words missing) down to the ground, till a dowg or a catt goe ower it.” This was a common charm among Scottish cunning women, found as often in poems and letters that alluded to these widespread folk healers as in the transcripted words of tortured women on trial for witchcraft. Isobel’s trial for such acts was likely a consequence of the landed gentry’s hardening commitment to a rigid Calvinism, which provided the lairds with theological justifications for maintaining strong personal holds over the estates to which families like Isobel’s were tied as tenant farmers.
This transition in customs was abrupt—before, women were allowed to flyte in the streets for the delight and amusement of their neighbors; suddenly, this became cursing, an act of malfeasance. Before, a trial in such a small, rural community was just one more occasion to tell one of your very good stories with only the risk of a modest fine for such sorcery; now, a trial was the place where diplomatic displays of fealty to a colonial order were enacted with nooses and fire. Before, you could gather with friends and family and complain about how the landlord just raised the rent again. After, you were a dangerous coven who wished to see him and all his heirs dead.
To think about witches is to think about shifting perspectives. A spell or an amulet or a talisman is sometimes helpful in letting a person imagine a different world is possible. Though I personally do not believe that the spells, hexes, fairies, or transmogrification of people into animals that Gowdie describes in her confessions are possible, I am committed to believing women.
Phenomenologists use the phrase “homeworld” to describe the kind of lived experiences and epistemological assumptions that shape a person into knowing what they know and how they know it. My homeworld, for example, bears many features of the oppressive Catholicism I was raised in and many other landmarks shaped by how I said no to that faith and to the elders pushing it on me. It is a world perched on pillars of defiance and guilt, martyrs and monsters. When I meet a witch, I try to find a passage from the world I understand into the one they do. Sometimes, when I’m looking through these hagstones, I get caught between.
How different is it for Isobel Gowdie to have believed, as she confessed she did, that “I wes in the downie hillis, and got meat ther from the qwein of the fearrie” than for my relations to pray a queen of saints will lead me home from the pagan path I seem to be on? When she described the exhilaration of flying over the countryside to the sea and back in the company of the devil and her coven, saying they were “thes strawes in whirlewind”—well, haven’t I known well how erotic it can be to float and spin and fling myself beyond the limits of all reason?
For years I thought I was just a dumb girl who didn’t get it—“it” being The Critique of Pure Reason, the collected poems of John Donne, the whistle from across the street, why a man would shout bitch from the window of his car into the ear of a passing stranger, the blood pouring down my legs as I clung to my seizing belly. How careful I once was to remain polite and respectful when the doctor answered my question about what he’d just asked a nurse to inject me with by muttering, “You read too much,” before he went back to yanking my placenta out by the umbilical cord. Even now it feels as perilous as a flyte to suggest the scientific method is just one more socially constructed epistemological system of communal faith in a particular kind of truth, no more valid than a spell. Such a risk to dare assert the lead tailings oozing through the soil where we lay our picnic blankets, the crop-dusting bi-plane overhead, the keening I feel for the nearly extinct tinytim earthfruits and pond berries and grotto sculpins and yellow mud turtle, all this is predicated on that moment when Rene Descartes imagined he could, like a god, invent a whole world out of nothing but the thought “I think, therefore I am.”
Am I starting to believe Gowdie when she says “all the witches yet that are untaken haw their owin poweris and our poweris which we haid”? I asked the critical theorists, who cast the runestones I know how to read, and Zaid Ahmad answered that he too wants to find ways for all of us to know each other. In his essay comparing homeworlds, he recounts how it was in roughly the same period, but on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, that Ibn Khaldun, like Descartes, tried to figure out what would allow a person to believe their own senses. He concluded that you are alive when you can wonder how it feels to some other being to feel alive. Ibn Khaldun’s homeworld is based on fikr, unlike Descartes’, which is built on the cogito. Fikr: By asking the stones how it feels to be them, Ibn Khaldun heard in his question the very nature of his own being.
Isobel Gowdie, it seems, knew she was alive by how she was fighting. She cursed Harry Forbes, the man who first accused and then interrogated her, reciting three times the refrain: “he is lyeing in his bed and he is lyeing seik and sore, let him lye intill his bed, two monethis days more.” These confessions of maleficium, if they are evidence of anything, prove perhaps her real desire to give certain men what she thought they deserved.