Isabel

Very disconcerting. I've just written a 10,000 word story about Isabel Goudie the famous local witch who is said to have been of great influence to witchcraft across Europe since her death and possibly even shaped the present day Wiccan cults. (I don't suppose for one minute she looked like the image above but I think the lady exudes my heroine's warrior spirit!)

Mine is a rather air-brushed, Hollywood tale I know, (and shows I have the makings of a good Mills and Boone writer hopefully!) but I 'm of a romantic turn of mind and I felt I had justifiable reasons for portraying her as a rather fine rebellious specimen of C17 womanhood. Possibly I've been too influenced by a novelist, J.W.Brodie-Innes, whose work of fantasy, published in 1915, was much approved by Dennis Wheatley. Brodie-Innes claims to have found substantiating evidence from 'contemporary' sources for the incidents that form the structure of his novel "The Devil's Mistress". The process of recovery of these documents he claims to have had access to would, in his own words, 'form exceedingly interesting matter for the Society for Psychical Research' by which I take him to mean there were supernatural forces at work leading him to his goals! Perhaps Isabel approved of his approach to the telling of her tale.

Anyway, the disconcerting bit is that I bought a recently published work by an academic entitled 'The Visions of Isobel Gowdie' and, apart from choosing to spell her name in a way I don't like, the writer of this authoritative , comprehensive, one might almost say exhaustive, work has rather brought me down to earth by claiming that poor Isabel would have been a lice-ridden peasant woman folded about in coarse homespun tartan, all soggy round the hems with farmyard muck, stinking from her unwashed body and the smell of the peat smoke (which is also quite sour and pleasant I know from experience) . Most unaesthetic.

The author has given me a few crumbs of hope. Her book includes transcripts of Isabel's 'confessions' which were said to be voluntary, and as the records of the actual trials still exist they can't be ignored. They, of course, show her in a much more gruesome and violent role than my tale allows, with an emphasis on the darker side of witchcraft (the practice of digging up the corpses of unshriven babes for instance.) In mitigation the author suggests that the confessions may have been made 'voluntarily' but only after some fairly unpleasant encouragement which itself has been airbrushed out of history. Furthermore, analysing the content of the confessions she has deduced that Isabel's statement didn't come as a single uninterrupted account of her doings as a witch but was the result of a succession of leading questions to which certain answers were expected - perhaps demanded.

It's still a dilemma: To be true to the accounts that remain, though they themselves may be distorted, or to continue with the illusion? I think I shall press on with my glamorised, sanitised version - after all folk tales are for entertainment and that's what Isabel has become to me, a lively, spirited young woman with a vivid imagination, possibly a natural talent for healing and otherwise influencing the natural world, who carries in herself the still-strong threads of earlier beliefs in the spirits of air, fire, earth and water.

It was a restrictive, dour age she lived in, an age of religious turmoil, when religious expression was changing in form and substance and the Scottish Parliament was trying to control the country through the strict, narrow tenets of Calvinism with its depressing emphasis on original sin. It was a time when almost any earthly pleasure was considered the work of the devil, a temptation thrown in the way of god-fearing folk to keep their sensibilities focused on their mortal life instead of on their salvation.

As Isabel herself might cry: Horse and hattock in the de'il's name! Ride on Isabel!