Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Michael M. Hughes 2018

Witches versus Kings
Witches and Occultists versus Kings and Nazis

968, Scotland

According to George Sinclair, a group of witches were caught reciting malefic spells while roasting a wax effigy of Scottish King Duffus on a wooden spit and basting it with poisonous liquid.³ The king had fallen ill and had been unable to sleep. When the effigy was destroyed the king recovered, and the witches, as might be expected, were burned at the stake.

1558—1602, England

Queen Elizabeth I, according to Francis Young in his superb Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England, was “perhaps the most magically attacked monarch … in English history.” ⁴ The crafting of effigies and poppets and predicting her downfall by horoscopes were the most common accusations. Catholics were often suspect because it was widely believed that masses could be held for magical purposes.

In 1568 a worker found three wax effigies in a pile of horse dung near a stable outside of London. They were covered in magical symbols and stuck with pig bristles, and one of the figurines had Elizabeth written on its forehead and a pin stuck in its breast. The queen summoned a council, including renowned magician John Dee, to study the effigies. Dee did a form of countermagic to nullify the effigy magic.

After several people were tried, convicted, and executed for magical treason, it was discovered the effigies weren’t aimed at the queen at all, but had been created by a cunning man as part of a love spell for two unrelated people. One very lucky magician and alchemist, John Prestall, who had been awaiting execution, had his death sentence overturned.

Accusations of treasonous magic, however, continued throughout the queen’s reign.

1588, England

Sir Francis Drake, long rumored to have had dealings with the devil, was alleged to have met with a coven of witches at Devil’s Point at Plymouth Sound. Together, Drake and the witches Conjured up diabolical storms that drove away the invading Spanish Armada. Even today, when the fog rolls in, some people say you can still hear the chants of the sea witches.

Although its historicity is in doubt, the story inspired another well-known tale of witches and resistance—as you will read shortly.

1590, Scotland, Halloween Night

Francis Stewart, the fifth Earl of Bothwell and a man said to have a deep interest in the occult, allegedly met with a coven of sixty witches led by highborn women in a churchyard on the coast of the North Sea.⁵ Their goal was to conjure a storm to sink the ship carrying the new bride of King James VI, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland using black toad venom, an oyster shell, and a piece of the king’s clothing. Three storms drove her back before she finally succeeding in meeting her husband.

Stewart was interrogated and tried for treason and conspiracy to kill the king but was acquitted, allegedly because the townspeople were afraid of him. The king eventually led an interrogation that led to the torture and murder of a number of women for witchcraft, but Stewart fled to France and then Naples, where he was said to have continued to dabble in the occult.

King James later wrote a book about witchcraft, Daemonologie, which is believed to have served as source material for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The book also fueled later witch hunters, such as the infamous mass murderer Matthew Hopkins, who tried and executed an estimated three hundred women for witchcraft. You probably know King James better for his other book, though—that famous translation of the Bible.

Circa 1662, Scotland

Isobel Gowdie freely confessed to becoming a witch and mistress of the devil after meeting him in the guise of a tall, hairy, cold-skinned man. As well as admitting to other malefic magic, including destroying crops and shooting people with deadly elf arrows, she is thought to have taken revenge on her landlord, the Laird Hay of Lochloy and Park, and the local witch-fearing minister, Harry Forbes.

With the aid of her coven, Gowdie made a poppet (doll) out of clay and baked it in an oven to curse the laird’s children and leave his estate heirless.⁶

It is considered likely, but not recorded, that she was murdered for her confessions of witchcraft.