In September 2021 Martha and I stayed for a few days in Edinburgh. It was unusual to be in Edinburgh at that time of year; typically accommodation is so expensive that it's out of the range of folk like us. However, in September 2021 many people were feeling the after-effects of spending much of the previous eighteen months as voluntary prisoners in their own home. They still didn't feel much like coming out to play, so desperate hotels were offering good deals to anybody brave enough to come out into the big wide world.

The convid theatre was still very much in evidence: masks on the buses, in restaurants, keep your distance. Not doing that..... Preparations in place for the autumn-and-winter programme of shock-and-horror on those who didn't want to be jabbed. No social life for you lot, you bunch of lepers. And forget about keeping your job, too. Not doing that, either...

One day we went out to the little seaside township of North Berwick, just along the coast from the Scottish capital. It was a bright and vaguely warm early autumn day; the small-scale resort was quiet and calm, yet somehow animated. It was difficult to imagine a more peaceful place if you tried. Yet warm and smiling North Berwick keeps a secret of its darker past: the North Berwick witch trials.    

The story goes something like this. King James V1 of Scotland (who became James 1 of the United Kingdom - he created the Act of Union) travelled to Denmark to get married. Returning to Scotland with his new bride, one Anne of Denmark, he was on a ship which fell foul of a storm, nearly sank, and the were almost drowned. James got it into his head that some women - witches - from North Berwick were implicated in all this; specifically that they conjured up the storm which nearly proved fatal. And thus began the Great Scottish Witch Hunt. 

This period lasted all the way from 1563 to 1736, and during this time there were Five Great Witch Panics. Panics?? It is essentially the same psychological game at play as the one rolled out worldwide centuries later about convid: fear, panic, madness. 

James V1 became a witch obsessive, and wrote an entire tome entitled 'Demonology', which outlined what to look out for in a witch. Even owning a black dog was sufficient to get you branded as one of the evil ones. 

Most women accused of being witches were natural healers, who ordinary folk would turn to in times of ill health. Some of them were what we might nowadays call psychics and sensitives, in contact with non-material worlds. This was their real crime, that they were in contact with spirit worlds and divine knowledge, and as such posed a direct threat to the official powers.

Many were reported by neighbours and fellow villagers, in a move reminiscent of how neighbours would snitch to the authorities upon people who invited friends into their house during lockdown, or went for two walks a day when you were only supposed to take one. Same thing going on....

Witch trials took place all over Europe, but Scotland was especially severely hit. It is estimated that between 2500 and 4000 people were executed, out of a Scottish population that was then tiny (Edinburgh probably had around 2000 inhabitants at the time).

In a moving chat with Gareth Icke on Ickonic, Laura Graham, former lawyer and now an artist, describes the horrors that were suffered by those accused of being witches. Burning was the preferred method of killing them, but they might be strangled slowly first, by slowly tightening a wooden implement around the neck, before throwing them onto the fire. Suspects were stripped naked, and examined - sometimes by male members of the village - for witch marks eg certain kinds of spots. Witch prickers, sharp objects plunged deep into the body, were utilised. Thumbscrews, toescrews, sleep deprivation. Difficult to imagine.        

The best-known of the North Berwick witches was Agnes Sampson. She was a rather elderly lady, who was implicated by a fifteen-year-old girl in 1591. She was taken to Holyrood House, where James was in residence. There she was tortured, found guilty, and taken up the Royal Mile to be burnt.

Some people consider King James to be a not-bad sort of guy. He's the Bible bloke, after all: well-known for the authorised version of the Bible - great stuff! He doesn't sound like a very nice person to me.....

Laura Graham points out that the same kind of dynamic re-emerged with convid. This time round the heretics were not witches, but were the mask refusers, the not-getting-jabbed, the disbelievers in the vairuss panic. At least we (let's get personal) were not burnt; it was more a case of being threatened with exclusion from society - no trains, planes, restaurants, or clubbing for you, jimmy; and you might end up without a job... Pariahs, excommunicated from society. But the psychology was the same. 

Laura ran her own art event, called 'Soul Murder 5: the exoneration of Agnes Sampson' to make a point. "What horrors sit in our society from that, energetically?" she asks. Good question. It hangs like a grey pall over events in this country - and continues to affect the energy grid passing across the land.

It does need to be addressed. Not in the more trendy modern fashion of reparations. Not at all. These are a manipulation of the dynamic of victim and perpetrator, a never-ending to-and-fro of accusations. Follow the philosophy of reparation and you will never reach an end - which is the point of the thing: it is intended to fuel perpetual conflict, nothing else.

What is required is more like a sober acknowledgement. This took place here; the horror of these events has not been properly accepted; once accepted, society can be purged, purified, the energy lines cleared, and we can move on. But until then, the horror will reverberate, affecting the nation. It does, it does...

What is showing itself to me at the moment is enabling me to understand a little better some things about Scotland. The atmosphere, the mystery, the magic, the mess. Energetically, the country expresses an attraction - repulsion quality. I feel both.

There is a great sense of age, of the ancient, the primordial even, which can become strong in Scotland to anybody who is sensitive to such things. This is entangled with sorrow, tragedy, a dark and messed-up (there, I use that word again) feeling. 

As I found myself focussing more on the topic of the unspoken, generally unrecognised, past of Scotland, so did all these myths, stories, and notions come my way on the theme, as if by magic, and as if confirming the validity of this fascination. A mental/energetic attraction, I guess.

So we have the Culdees, a very early group of Christians, who appear in various places in southern and central Scotland. There are those who consider the Culdees to be a continuation of Druidic knowledge, seamlessly merging with early Christianity. There are those who consider Scotland to have played a part in the forming and founding of Christianity. And there are even those who opine that Jesus actually came from Scotland, and that Scotland is the Holy Land. Michael Feeley, researcher into the esoteric, can point to linguistic evidence to back up this possibility. 

Then there is the great wealth and abundance of stone circles, cairns, tumuli etc, scattered across the face of many of the typical landscapes of Scotland. And the theme of ancient civilisations is taken up by those who implicate Scotland (and often Ireland) in deeply ancient civilisation, as a place that the survivors of drowned Atlantis turned up and rekindled human culture. In a variation on the theme, Michael Tsarion talks of how Atlantis was actually located where Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Scandinavia are today. When it sunk, remains were left as Scotland and Ireland, cradles of a new yet ancient civilisation.

There is story upon story. They can't all be right; but there is such a plenitude that I don't think they can all be completely wrong, either. They all point in a similar direction. 

Images: North Berwick beach; James with the witches; North Berwick golf course and hill; Scottish witch trials.

https://lauragraham.art