Barbara Meiklejohn-Free - Scottish Witchcraft: A Complete Guide to Authentic Folklore, Spells, and Magickal Tools

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Scottish Witchcraft: A Complete Guide to Authentic Folklore, Spells, and Magickal Tools 2019 by Barbara Meiklejohn-Free.

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First e-book edition 2019

E-book ISBN: 9780738761190

Cover design by Shannon McKuhen

Editing by Brian R. Erdrich

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meiklejohn-Free, Barbara, author. | Erdrich, Brian R., editor.

Title: Scottish witchcraft : a complete guide to authentic folklore,

spells, and magickal tools / Barbara Meiklejohn-Free ; editing by Brian

R. Erdrich.

Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Llewellyn Worldwide.

Ltd, 2019. | Summary: Scottish Witchcraft is an introduction and guide

to the magickal folk traditions of the Highlands of Scotland. Author

Barbara Meiklejohn-Free, a Scottish hereditary witch and the Highland

Seer, takes the reader on a journey through the history of the craft and

shares the ins and outs of incorporating these ancient magickal

traditions into ones own life. Discover the secrets to faerie magick,

divination, and communicating with ancestors. Explore herbal and plant

lore, Scottish folk traditions, and magick rituals for your specific

needs-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019034951 (print) | LCCN 2019034952 (ebook) | ISBN

9780738760933 (paperback) | ISBN 9780738761190 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Witchcraft--Scotland.

Classification: LCC BF1581 .M45 2019 (print) | LCC BF1581 (ebook) | DDC

133.4/309411--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034951

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034952

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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Dedication

To all the wise men and wise women of Scotland, past and present, who have contributed to our beautiful craft against all odds and in the face of all adversities. Without them I simply would not be.

Disclaimer

This book and its spells, rituals, and workings are intended for spiritual and emotional guidance only. It is not intended to replace medical assistance or treatments.

Contents

by Professor Ronald Hutton

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

Chapter Five:

Chapter Six:

Chapter Seven:

Chapter Eight:

Foreword

W hy does Scottish witchcraft matter? Historically there are three big reasons. One is that Scotland was one of the worst places in the whole of Europe for witch-hunts, clocking up a total of something between fifteen hundred and three thousand executions between 1563 and 1736. By comparison, England, which had five times the population, probably put to death less than five hundred people as witches in the same period. Two factors account for the difference. One was that the Scots had a much more extreme Protestant Reformation, which swept away bishops, cathedrals, and festivals like Christmas and Easter as well as all the other features of medieval Catholicism. As part of this zeal, they developed a more ardent fear of Satan, whose servants they deemed witches to be. The other factor was a difference in legal systems. In England a person accused of witchcraft was tried by a pair of professional judges, and the verdict was decided by a jury drawn from a wide area and probably not known at all to the accused. Evidence was therefore rigorously scrutinised, and an English person had an average 75 percent chance of being acquitted of the charge.

In Scotland, a suspected witch was arrested by the local gentry and clergy, who would force her or (more rarely) him to make a confession that was then sent to the central government. The latter then usually sent back permission to try to execute the person concerned, which permitted virtually no chance of escape.

The second reason why Scottish witchcraft matters is that it has had a great influence on Western views of witches in general, simply because Scottish writers took an interest in the history of witchcraft much earlier than those in England. In particular, two Scots in the early nineteenth centurythe poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott and the legal historian Robert Pitcairnpublished works on it which largely defined British knowledge of witch trials until the late twentieth century. For example, the word coven, to mean a group of witches, actually appears historically in only the trials of two women at Auldearn, a village east of Inverness on the Moray Firth, in 1662. One of those trials, however, happened to be of Isobel Gowdie, who left the longest, most detailed, and most lurid confession by an alleged witch in British history, telling of her adventures with the devil, the queen and king of the fairies, and her coven, a word which seems to have been coined by her and her companion from the contemporary term conventicle, meaning an illicit religious meeting. Pitcairn published the confession, and it became so famous that the word was accepted across the English-speaking world.