Witch Stories

This book is a collection of witch stories that tell the tales of women accused of witchcraft, condemned on the flimsiest of evidence, in England and Scotland. Scotland played an unenviable part in the great witch panic that swept like an epidemic over Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It suited with the stern, uncompromising, Puritan temper, to tear this accursed thing from the heart of the nation, and offer it, bleeding and palpitating, as a sacrifice to the Lord; and accordingly, we find the witch trials of Scotland conducted with more severity than elsewhere, and with a more gloomy and savage fanaticism of faith… And when James VI. came with his narrow brain and selfish heart, to formalize the witch-lie into a distinct canon of arbitrary faith, and give it increased political significance and social power, the reign of humanity and common sense was at an end, and the autocracy of cruelty and superstition began. It is a dreary page in human history, but so long as a spark of superstition lingers in the world it will have its special and direct uses.