Been doing a little reading & discovered that James I was basically responsible for that whole witch hunt nonsense!  Apparently it all started when the Earl of Bothwell (not the one who married his mother LOL) led a conspiracy to kill James through the use of "sorcery", aided by some "witches". James was determined to get to the bottom of this treasonous plot. Called the North Berwick Trial after the place where the alleged sabbats took place, James himself questioned the women involved in the Great Hall at Holyrood House. Here comes a lot of the stereotypical fantasy surrounding witches! One of the accused, Agnes Sampson, under torture confessed to holding a sabbat for 200 witches on All Hallows' Eve. She admitted performing rituals at night in the local church whereby "the Devil himself started up in the pulpit....calling the roll..." & that he enjoined them to "kiss his buttocks, in sign of duty to him". Agnes said they "christened a cat, & afterward bound to each part of that cat, the chiefest part of a dead man, & several joints of his body, & in the night following, the cat was conveyed into the middle of the seas". The purpose of this was to create a storm intended to shipwreck James when he sailed from Denmark to Scotland. When this failed, the witches supposedly delivered to the Devil a waxen image of the king. This also failed, so the next plan was to smear toad venom on James's clothing!  The reason none of these spells worked was because James was a man of God who could resist the wiles of the Devil. The witches were found guilty & burned at the stake in Edinburgh, while the instigator of the plot fled unharmed to Sicily. James became immersed in the subject, writing his famous Demonology in 1597, lending political credence to the witch-hunting craze which followed. When doing his translation of the Bible, in Exodus 22:18 is the infamous "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". Supposedly that was an inaccurate translation. The original Hebrew word in that sentence was kaskagh, meaning poisoner or sorcerer, & had been previously translated into Latin as maleficios, which at the time meant a person who causes harm, any sort of criminal. James's rendering of it as "witch" changed its meaning entirely & gave support to witch-hunters. His interest in things occult were pandered to by those seeking to curry his favor, notably Shakespeare, whose Weird Sisters in the Scottish play were directly modeled upon the North Berwick witches, with a scene in which the witches are discussing a shipwreck. The play premiered at Hampton Court for the king's pleasure & further influenced public opinion on witches. |
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