The supernatural in early modern Scotland

Julian Goodare, Martha McGill

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526134448
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Scottish History
• Index: History

This book is about other worlds and the supernatural beings, from angels to fairies, that inhabited them. It is about divination, prophecy, visions and trances. And it is about the cultural, religious, political and social uses to which people in Scotland put these supernatural themes between 1500 and 1800. The supernatural consistently provided Scots with a way of understanding topics such as the natural environment, physical and emotional wellbeing, political events and visions of past and future. In exploring the early modern supernatural, the book has much to reveal about how men and women in this period thought about, debated and experienced the world around them. Comprising twelve chapters by an international range of scholars, The supernatural in early modern Scotland discusses both popular and elite understandings of the supernatural.

1

Exploring the supernatural in early modern Scotland

Julian Goodare and Martha McGill

Upon a tyme the faierie elves

Having first array’d themselves

They thought it fit to cloath their king

In robs fit for revelling

He had a cobweb shirt more fin[e]‌

Then ever spider yet did spin

Bleach’d in the whytening of the snow

When the northern winds did blow.

This quotation is from a poem that circulated in seventeenth-century England and Scotland. In sixty-four lines, the poem describes the elaborate outfits donned by the fairy king and queen in preparation for a ‘revel’.¹ Humorous in tone, it explores the fairies’ fantastical environment in colourful detail. There was no expectation that its fairies should be taken seriously. But the poem may have echoed genuine folkloric stories, and this may have been one reason for its success. There was nothing innately incredible in a world of magical possibilities.

For early modern Scots, supernatural forces were real and present. People disagreed about how these forces might manifest themselves, but throughout the period from 1500 to 1800 there were men and women who might perceive the supernatural in a whirlwind, or a dream, or the shimmer of a neighbour’s eye. The supernatural was familiar. But it also – by definition – broke the laws by which the world generally operated. In thinking, talking and writing about supernatural forces, Scots were fashioning a reality that could never fully be known through experience or the evidence of the senses. Within this reality, there was no logical reason why fairies might not be out on snowy days, bleaching their shirts. To determine what was and was not possible, early modern Scots might look to theology, or metaphysics, or – for the common people – folkloric tradition. They were unlikely to find any clear consensus on the questions of when natural became supernatural, or legitimate supernatural belief became superstition – but that did not stop them exercising both their intellects and their imaginations in exploring the supernatural.

Sources on the early modern Scottish supernatural are varied. The contributors to this book draw on material including records from witch trials, accounts of visionary experiences, ministers’ and antiquarians’ descriptions of folk belief, religious and philosophical treatises, university lectures, sermons, songs, diaries, cheap pamphlets and artworks. Each of these source types was created to serve specific purposes. Some offer sober, reasoned explorations of the nature and capabilities of magical beings; others are sensationalised or romanticised. Many accounts straddle the boundary between fact and fiction. Ballads, folk tales and stories from pamphlets might be considered mere entertainment, but might also be believed or half-believed. Surveying different time spans, social groups, geographical areas and types of source material, the chapters in this book reveal a rich variety of ways in which early modern Scots imagined the world’s magical potential.

Academic interest in the supernatural has surged in the last few decades. Influential studies on patterns of belief in Europe have demonstrated how the study of the supernatural can reflect on broader historical trends. Euan Cameron’s survey of the changing understandings of ‘superstition’ is particularly relevant here, showing how intellectuals policed the boundaries of correct belief.² There have been studies of demonic possession and of ‘discernment of spirits’ – the process by which good and bad spirits were differentiated.³ Julian Goodare’s study of witch-hunting sets it in the context of broader processes including folk belief and magical practice.⁴ Edward Bever’s study of the ‘realities’ of ‘witchcraft and popular magic’ should be noted particularly for the way in which it, too, ranges beyond witchcraft and opens up a realm not of ‘belief’ but of magical action and experience.⁵

England has also been well surveyed. Keith Thomas’s celebrated Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) covered a wide range of supernatural beliefs, and demonstrated the value of devoting serious scholarly attention to topics such as fairies, ghosts and popular magical rituals.⁶ The witch trials have consistently attracted scholarly attention, and in recent years especially, there has been a proliferation of studies exploring other supernatural phenomena in depth.⁷ Thomas argued for the ‘decline of magic’ amid the rise of new philosophies and technologies, particularly in the seventeenth century.⁸ However, the more recent trend has been to underline the persistent cultural importance of supernatural beliefs in early modern England, and to stress the perpetual entanglement of science, religion and magic.

Most of the recent scholarship on England has focused on specific supernatural powers or beings. One exception is Darren Oldridge’s The Supernatural in Tudor and Stuart England (2016), which encompasses divine interventions, the Devil, angels, goblins, ghosts and occult (or hidden) powers. Oldridge contests the idea that supernatural beliefs were superseded by a scientific outlook in his period. He does, however, argue that ways of thinking about the supernatural changed, particularly in three respects. First, there was a ‘reformation of spirits’: Protestants excluded non-biblical supernatural beings from the officially sanctioned cosmos. Second, there was a fresh emphasis on the invisible, incorporeal and interior manifestations of supernatural forces. Third, the doctrine of divine providence took on new importance as ‘the dominant model for explaining the operation of supernatural powers’.⁹

Some of the chapters in this book identify similar patterns. Particularly relevant to Oldridge’s arguments, as we shall see, are Michelle D. Brock’s chapter on sermons after the Reformation, and Martha McGill and Alasdair Raffe’s chapter on providence. But Scotland did not always follow the same patterns as England. In the late seventeenth century, accounts of wondrous manifestations of providence declined in England, but proliferated in Scotland.¹⁰ Scotland had its own church, and distinct intellectual and literary traditions. The witch-hunts were significantly more severe; Scotland executed about ten times more witches by head of the population than England.¹¹ Folkloric beliefs also differed by region. Compared to England, Scotland placed more emphasis on fairies. Second Sight, discussed in this book by Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, was particularly associated with Scotland. Work such as Oldridge’s is valuable for Scottish historians, but we cannot assume that English trends replicated themselves across the border.

When it comes to work on Scotland specifically, orthodox religion – and, especially, the impact of the Reformation – has been widely discussed.¹² The witch-hunts have proved a popular topic, in part because of the relative richness of the surviving source material.¹³ Recent work has also focused on fairies, Second Sight, the Devil, folk belief and ghosts.¹⁴ Again, most studies discuss particular beliefs in isolation, rather than looking at several together. A notable exception is Lizanne Henderson’s edited collection Fantastical Imaginations (2009).¹⁵ The essays in that book range from the late medieval period to the present day and cover a wide range of topics, demonstrating the vitality and variety of the Scottish supernatural. The present book builds on the foundations laid down by Henderson’s collection, offering a specific focus on the early modern period – a time when religious and intellectual change was calling into question old sureties about the operations of the supernatural world.

This book is concerned with any beings or forces that transcended the natural order. This includes the ‘faierie elves’ of the poem at the start of this chapter, as well as other kinds of spirits. It encompasses occult (or hidden) knowledge, and magical powers. Early modern Christianity also had prominent aspects that one cannot avoid characterising as ‘supernatural’: a creator God who intervened in the world, a Devil who also intervened in the world and who tempted humans to sin, life after death for humans – either in Heaven or Hell – and spirits in the form of angels and demons. There is no denying that these Christian phenomena were ‘supernatural’. As the impact of the Scottish Reformation has been covered in previous literature, we have aimed to avoid duplication by focusing specifically on what was supernatural about Scottish Protestantism. We have also placed relatively little emphasis on the Scottish witch-hunts. Some of the chapters draw on evidence generated by the witch trials, but this is in order to gather information about topics other than witchcraft. We have aimed so far as possible to take discussion of the Scottish supernatural in new directions.

In defining ‘supernatural’ so broadly, we are following common usage, while deviating from the pattern set down by Stuart Clark in his influential Thinking with Demons. Clark points out that early modern demonologists distinguished between the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘preternatural’. God, and his unmediated actions, would be described as supernatural. Other spirits (with the possible exception of angels) were understood to be preternatural. Extraordinary occurrences that happened by the agency of created beings, or through the patterns of nature, were also interpreted as preternatural.¹⁶ The division between supernatural – God and his miracles – and preternatural – wonders and created spirits – was important in theological and philosophical writing. It will therefore be considered in some of the chapters in the book, particularly those on providence, sermons and astrology. However, when discussing folk culture it is unnecessary, and perhaps even misleading, to differentiate between supernatural and preternatural. Elite debates were inaccessible to the vast majority of Scotland’s population, and there is no evidence that ordinary men and women made use of this categorisation.

To define the early modern supernatural, it may help to ponder the question of what was considered ‘natural’. Students at Scottish universities studied natural philosophy. This encompassed lectures on matter, the planets, light, sound, motion, time and the workings of human and animal bodies. More obviously supernatural topics were reserved for metaphysics courses, which dealt with spirits, including God. However, the division between natural and metaphysical topics was not always obvious from a modern standpoint. The human mind was understood to be a spiritual substance, and was generally a topic within metaphysics. The soul, however, was discussed in natural philosophy courses until the eighteenth century, following an Aristotelian tradition of interpreting the soul in physical terms. Crossover between lectures on natural philosophy and metaphysics was common, highlighting the difficulties of drawing stark divisions between natural and supernatural.

In the early modern period, just as much as today, people did not comment explicitly on the ordinariness of their everyday experience. The question of what was ‘natural’ was directly addressed only in a negative context: something was ‘natural’ by virtue of not being supernatural. James VI debated whether the nightmare experience, ‘the Mare, which takes folkes sleeping in their bedds’, was to be attributed to ‘spirites’, but decided that it was ‘but a naturall sicknes’.¹⁷ Early modern Scots seem to have reasoned that ‘if you don’t see this every day’, or ‘if you can’t produce an everyday explanation for it’, then it was ‘not natural’ and thus probably supernatural. A similar process of reasoning operates today. The question may thus arise: who has authority to decide what is natural and what is supernatural?¹⁸

Today, what is normal or natural is defined by science. There is nothing unscientific about the concept of large marine animals, and no basic scientific assumptions would be violated if a large marine animal were to be found in Loch Ness. However, a common-sense approach to the way in which the Loch Ness Monster is discussed indicates that belief in such a monster is in fact paranormal; the belief operates in similar ways to belief in more obviously paranormal phenomena such as telepathy.¹⁹ The present book does not address ‘paranormal’ questions directly, because modern discourse on the paranormal is framed in scientific or at least quasi-scientific terms that lack precise early modern equivalents.

The search for fabulous beasts, known today as ‘cryptozoology’ and exemplified by tales of the Loch Ness Monster, nevertheless finds early modern parallels.²⁰ Sixteenth-century Scotland inherited a medieval literary tradition of ‘barnacle geese’ – not the modern birds of that name, but legendary geese engendered from barnacles growing on wood. The birds’ legend may have been connected with the fact that some species of wild geese were never observed to build nests or raise young (they did so on migration to the Arctic, but bird migration was unknown before modern times). A description of Scotland published in 1458 ascribed barnacle geese particul...