Modern scholarship for the past century has tended to disregard the confessions of accused witches due to the fact that they were overwhelmingly elicited under torture. How could anything someone says under torture have any bearing on our understanding of the witch trials? The women (and some men) were obviously saying what their accusers wanted to hear in order to make the torture stop, right? Well, not so fast.

There is a new theory emerging that suggests that some (certainly not all) of these accused witches were participating in shamanic visionary practices that were holdovers from the pre-Christian era.

By shamanic, what is meant is that some of these women and men might have been participating in spirit journeys to the otherworlds through the use of trance and/or hallucination inducing substances (herbs or mushrooms). This would account for many of the things mentioned in Isobel's testimony.

Dr. Emmy Wilby, who has been studying witch trial testimony for much of her academic career, says that while some of Isobel's testimony was surely induced by her treatment in prison and framed by her interrogators, a good portion of it could have come from nowhere but the mind of Isobel herself. How do we know that?

Well, as discussed above, there were influential writings that circulated heavily among Church leaders and witch persecutors. King James' Daemonologie was one of many. The Malleus Maleficarum was the most popular. It was literally a manual for identifying and interrogating witches. It was originally published in Germany where it was called Der Hexenhammer, literally translated as The Witches Hammer.

First page from an early 20th century edition of the Malleus Maleficarum

So how can we tell which parts of her confession were influenced by her interrogators (because they asked leading questions such as "When did you make your pact with the Devil?") and which parts were her own invention?

Well, thanks to books like theMalleus Maleficarum andDaemonologie, we know exactly what the examiners were looking for. We also have the bulk of other surviving testimony to compare individual confessions with. So the parts of Isobel's testimony that line up with what the majority of other confessions said, and that jives with the content of these witch hunting manuals, we can assume she was coaxed into saying. But, certain things that seem to be an anomaly separating it from other confessions, or that don't quite fit with what inquisitors would be looking for, is a clue that these things were not coaxed but came directly from the mind of the person being questioned.

Yet, much of Isobel's testimony bears a stronger resemblance to the shape shifting and astral journeying shamans of Siberia than what her prosecutors were expecting her to say.

In 1921 an early folklore pioneer named Margaret Murray wrote a book called The Witch Cult in Western Europe, wherein she proposed that old paganism survived underground despite the persecutions of paganism during the conversion period of Europe in the early to mid-Middle Ages, that the witch trials targeted practitioners European indigenous religion, and that European ancestral faith remained underground throughout the ages into the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This theory has had serious criticism since Murray's day, and much of this is due to Murray's non-academic research and reporting methods. However, Murray was writing when the field of folklore was very young so methods of best practice were not yet established.

In the 1960s, however, an academic historian published a book called The Night Battles about his research into the Benandanti, a group of Italian witches tried for witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Benandanti also used visionary journeys to do spirit work. They claimed it was to fight evil spirits who were attempting to cause the local crops to fail.

It is speculated that other groups like this may have existed throughout Europe. Their visionary astral trips do seem similar in nature to Isobel Gowdie's, as well as similar to known shamanic spirit work elsewhere throughout the world. It's possible that even if Margaret Murray's methods were flawed, that perhaps her theory was not too far off.

A serious review of the data indicates that none of these people truly identified as anything other than Christian, especially in Britain by the 16th century which was a solid millennium after the conversion of England. Yet, more evidence is building that some of the people accused of witchcraft may have been practicing a hybrid form of folk religion that did, indeed, retain elements of old European Paganism.