By focusing upon witchcraft, this study considers the apparent conundrum that there was arguably more interest than there had ever been before, on the part of the elite and the learned, in folk belief, superstition and the supernatural, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the decades that were giving birth to the Scottish Enlightenment. Despite what “enlightenment” terminology might imply, Scotland did not emerge overnight from some sort of preternatural gloom to the dazzling light of a new day. Rather, the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment has been widely recognized as a period of transition when, perhaps ironically, the supernatural received unprecedented questioning, investigation and scrutiny. A further irony is that the Kirk, which had been attacking popular culture ever since 1560, now embraced and exploited the very superstitions that both church and state authorities had been seriously attempting to destroy, in order to defend religion against what were perceived to be the ravages of atheism.

The main intention of this study is to demonstrate that folk or popular beliefs – those of the subordinate classes – not only survived, but in some cases were actually reinforced by elite attitudes and interests. One figure who made a massive contribution to the dissemination of information and ideas about a wide range of such beliefs was Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). Scott could be said to have founded his literary career on the collection of ballads, folklore and traditions of Scotland, particularly of his ancestral Border region. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03) enjoyed immense popularity and influence as well as providing a useful quarry of information. A lifelong fascination with the subject led to the publication, very late in his career, of Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830). However, reviewing John Galt’s Gothic novel The Omen in 1826, Scott argued that “belief in the superstition of the olden time, which believed in spectres, fairies, and other supernatural apparitions” could no longer be sustained. “These airy squadrons have long been routed, and are banished to the cottage and the nursery.”⁷

This study concentrates on the years after 1662 – which marks the last full-scale witch-hunt in Scotland – around which time it is generally recognized that the persecution of witches steeply declined.⁸ Much of the material used in this book on the persecution of witches is concerned with pre-Enlightenment Scotland, or what I have referred to as the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment. Though Enlightenment ideas had been evolving since the last three decades of the seventeenth century, 1740 is often used to mark the manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment proper. David Allan noted that “1740 also marks a pivotal point in the problematic historiography of Scotland’s intellectual life. Hereafter, Scotland is unashamedly regarded as a country in the grip of an Enlightenment.”⁹

The changing attitudes towards witchcraft and folk belief with which this study is concerned might loosely be divided into two transitional phases – 1663 to 1740 and 1740 to 1832 – representing a shift from one dominant ideology to another, encompassing the period from the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment until the death of Sir Walter Scott. The situation during the “long eighteenth century” was remarkably fluid, representing the perennial conflict between the elite and the subordinate classes, but there was also considerable diversity of opinion within the ranks of the elite, and indeed of the folk themselves.

Superstition, as applied here by Voltaire, carried the meaning of unfounded, false, or the irrational religious beliefs of others. As he observed, while no one could agree about the nature of superstition, half of Europe in his own day was in full agreement that the other half “has long been and still is superstitious.”¹² Voltaire was by no means the first to consider such matters, but his was a powerful voice. At the same time others were arriving at similar conclusions, as the above quotation from Allan Ramsay suggests. David Hume wittily described how some “opposed one species of superstition with another” while others escaped to “the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.”¹³

Superstition, like witchcraft, is a heavily loaded term, pejoratively applied to the beliefs of others. In classical times the word was used to condemn so-called barbarous, or non-Roman, religious rituals and practices. Etymologically, the word is derived from the Latin superstitio, meaning “irrational religious awe or credulity, particular superstitious belief or practice, foreign or non-orthodox religious practice or doctrine,” and Middle French, supersticion, which referred to “unorthodox or unfounded (especially non-Christian or heretical) religious belief, magical or occult practice.” “Superstition” thus entered historical discourse as a pejorative and an encapsulation of the beliefs and social mores of one’s enemies or opponents. In the Reformation era, the term retained a stress on religious beliefs, ceremonies or practices “considered to be irrational, unfounded, or based on fear or ignorance,” primarily in the context of Protestant criticism of Catholicism. In the Age of Enlightenment, the meaning of “superstition” retained much of the same emphasis as before. Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), while not the first English dictionary, nor the most comprehensive, was the most popular of its day. Johnson compiled his dictionary with an aim of capturing the everyday language people actually used, as opposed to the so-called “inkhorn” terms in Latin or Greek rarely used in ordinary parlance. Johnson’s definition of superstition makes no explicit note of the anti-Catholic resonances of the term, nor ties it to any particular sense of the supernatural, but keeps the focus on the idea of “false religion or worship.”¹⁴ Other commentators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, however, beginning to use the term with further connotations of “irrational belief in supernatural influences,” such as John Brand, who was an avid collector of “superstition among the vulgar.”¹⁵ By the late eighteenth century, in an era of growing empiricism, “superstition” could additionally be used in non-religious contexts, in the sense of an “unreasonable, groundless, or mistaken notion.” Scottish geologist James Hutton, for instance, spoke derisively about “men of science” whose beliefs in certain scientific theories were based on “prejudice or superstition, i.e. without having seen its evidence.”¹⁶

“Superstition” represented the “other” – the irreligious, the sinful and the diabolical. In the age of the witch-hunts heresy, or worse apostasy, was a significantly more severe crime for it implied “a conscious deviation from the truth,” while “superstition” incorporated “error through ignorance.”¹⁷ From very early on in the polemics of Protestant reform, “superstition,” which included aspects of folk religion, was said to be undermining the foundations of Christianity. A sustained attack on some of the more visible apparatus of late medieval Catholic theological practice ensued; multiplication of masses, lighting candles, the consecration of material objects and the belief in transubstantiation, for instance, were all dismissed as “superstitious.” The Protestants were attempting to take the “magic” out of religious practice by pointing the finger of “superstition” at Catholicism. In so doing, they were simultaneously denying this label as a descriptor of their own beliefs and practices. The question over what constituted superstition was not, therefore, a minor quibble over trivial matters, but a serious debate over fundamental issues of spirituality, faith and religious doctrine.¹⁸ Moreover, the distinction between Protestant and Catholic theological interpretations of magic were actually not as profound as the reformers claimed, at times sharing more in common than either side would have liked to admit. For instance, providentialist interpretations were frequently read into monstrous births, freak weather events and suchlike signs, portents and omens of God’s displeasure with sinners. Both Protestants and Catholics in early modern Scotland “lived in a magical universe,”¹⁹ but the Protestant contention – built as it was upon a foundation of rhetoric that sought to distinguish itself from what it viewed as the darkness and superstition of Catholicism – attributed all magical manifestations to the omnipotence of God. By the late seventeenth century it might be assumed that the process of distinguishing what was deemed superstitious, and what was not, might have been worked out and well understood, yet this was not the case. The lines between religion, folk belief and superstition were still blurred.

One of the acclaimed catalysts of Enlightenment was Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) who, though known as the “philosopher of Rotterdam,” was actually French. In a book about comets as supposed supernatural portents, he lamented the persistence of superstition and tradition, throughout history, owing to the antiquity and universality of beliefs, which had never been challenged by reason.²⁰ Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) in his Histoire des Oracl...