Posted on 06/10/2021 8:56:09 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1697, the Paisley, Renfrewshire Gallow Green played stage for the strangling and burning of six “witches.” They’re known as the Paisley witches, the Renfrewshire witches, or the Bargarran witches, and are sometimes acclaimed the last mass-executed witches in western Europe.
In a setup bearing a disturbing similarity to the Salem witch trials,* an 11-year-old brat named Christian Shaw, the daughter of a local laird, got a tongue-lashing from the family servant and then turned around and accused her a sorceress.
The psychological mechanisms at play make interesting speculation in such cases. Was she merely a spiteful little monster, or did she believe in accordance with the superstitions of her time that the servant’s curses had effect, and suffer real afflictions that ensued upon this belief? Can we see her in the end as a creature necessarily produced by her nation in its troubled hour, unmoored as it was by the political and religious dislocations of the Glorious Revolution, gnawed by famine, and hurtling towards an unwilling union with England? (The bizarre execution of an Edinburgh university student for blasphemy also unfolded in 1696-1697.)
We leave such speculations to the reader as we plunge into the onset of supernatural doings in these environs almost a year before the consequent executions — via a 1698 pamphlet titled “A True Narrative of the Sufferings and Relief of a Young Girle Strangely Molested, by Evil Spirits and their Instruments, in the West”...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
What also floats in water?
Small rocks.
It’s a fair cop.
Very small rocks
1697? Paisley was more a 1967 thing...
Or, maybe they were real witches. Just because many people were falsely accused doesn’t mean they all were.
There are millions of witches in America today.
Young black women are leaving Christianity and embracing African witchcraft in digital covens.
The founder of BLM admitted on Youtube she was a witch. She calls up dead spirits to help her. That’s why she says “Say their name”.
Back then they had a fail-safe test to smoke out witches. They were tied up in a certain fashion and thrown in the water. If they sank and drown, they were innocent. If they floated, they were witches and executed.
Sadly at that time, “Spectral Evidence” was still legal in British Law Courts.
The primary English law about witchcraft was the so-called Witchcraft Act of 1604, actually An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits. This made witchcraft a felony; a witch convicted of a minor offense could receive a year in prison, but any witch accused and found guilty a second time was sentenced to death. [To read the Act, see this 2008 conference volume Witchcraft and the Act of 1604, page 237-239.]
Interesting that in the New England Witch Trials, those who were accused and pleaded “Guilty” were fined and given prison time.
Those accused and pleaded “Not Guilty” and were found Guilty were hanged.
bfl
Crazy stuff. So glad my ancestors left Scotland, England and Northern Ireland about then. They landed in Massachusetts but were persecuted for having Christian worship in their homes.
Some then moved to Pennsylvania for greater freedom some moved to North Carolina for the same reason. From the Carolinas a lot of them later moved to Midwest because they didn’t want to have anything to do with slavery.
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