Famous Witches - Isobel Gowdie

Isobel Gowdie is described as a attractive red-headed girl who married Scottish farmer and lived on isolated farm in Morayshire. Not much is known about her, but she is famous for her confessions to witchcraft on four occasions in April and May 1662.

News from Scottish newspapers during witch hunt period

She had no children and her husband was said to be common boor so her life on farm was boring and dull.

As stated in her confession, Isobel began her involvement with the Devil in 1647 when she met him as a man in grey and arranged second meeting in a church.

The Devil standing in a pulpit with black book in his hand made her to renounce Jesus. She was baptized with her own blood, renamed Janet and given a mark on her shoulder.

Sabbath 1650

Isobel described the Devil as a big, black, hairy man who visited her couple of days later and had sex with her.

Isobel Gowdie described witches´ Sabbaths as a meeting of 13 witches who flew there on corn straws, beanstalks and rushes shouting:

Horse and Hattock, in the Devil´s name!

If someone should see them and not cross themselves, the witches would shoot them with elf arrows.
Isobel's confession described how she had intercourse with the Devil and other Demons and her ability to transform herself into hare or cat. She sad she had had an intercourse with one of her demons while laying besides her husband in bed and that Devil's enormous penis had caused her loads of pain but pleasure too and that his semen was cold as ice.
She confess about tormenting neighbors with storms, making farmland sterile, hexing children by sticking pins in the dolls or blasting a farmer's crops.

Witches kitchen

Isobel Gowdie confessed after 15 years and it remains unclear why she should suddenly do so. She seemed to welcome her punishment and allegedly said:

I do not deserve to be seated here at ease and unharmed, but rather to be stretched on an iron rack: nor can my crimes be atoned for, were I to be drawn asunder by wild horses.

It has been suggested that she was highly sexed masochistic woman with vivid imagination. She turned to her fantasies to ease the boredom. It is not known what happened to Isobel Gowdie or any other witches who were implicated by her confession.

This case is important because it demonstrates the importance of the imagination and sexual desire in the creation of fantasy and how this is connected with popular ideas about witchcraft. Isobel increase the excitement by shocking the Scottish community and added to their fears about evils of witchcraft.

However, to reduce all ideas and beliefs about witchcraft to fantasy would simplify and ignore the reality of magical world-view that sees the universe as consisting of various energies and powers that can be harnessed.