From Persecution to Power: The Changing Face of the Witch

Memory, Misconceptions, and Modern Identity

The word witch has undergone a striking transformation. Once a deadly accusation, it has been reclaimed as a powerful self-identifier. Online, the phenomenon is everywhere: TikTok trends under #WitchTok rack up millions of views, YouTubers share spells and rituals, and massive retailers cash in with T-shirts and tote bags with slogans like ‘we are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn’t burn’.

But behind the modern mystique lies a much darker story. Witchcraft isn't just about crystals, cauldrons, or Instagram aesthetics. It’s rooted in centuries of persecution, fear, and forgotten lives. Throughout Western history, thousands were accused and executed in the name of rooting out witchcraft and nowhere was this persecution more widespread than in Scotland. With the highest rates of execution for witchcraft in Europe, Scotland’s legacy casts a long shadow. As modern movements embrace the term witch as a form of identity, it's worth asking: who were the people once condemned by it, and what does it mean to claim that word today?

The cycle of witchcraft

The renewed fascination with witchcraft is not random. Academic, writer, and practising witch Alice Tarbuck sees a pattern. “There are people who have been quietly working on witchcraft for decades, even when it has not been popular, but it doesn’t usually hit the mainstream consciousness like this,” she explains. “Witchcraft is really cyclical. It tends to coincide with periods of disruption; a feeling of disenfranchisement, particularly among young people.”

Economic instability and political unrest, specifically a lean to the right, have left many people looking for something to find strength and comfort in. “When we feel disempowered as individuals, we scramble around to find ways of gaining power,” Tarbuck adds. “Witchcraft is certainly something that leads to personal empowerment.”

Shadows of the past

Today’s celebration of witchcraft exists in stark contrast to the brutal reality of the past, particularly so in Scotland. King James VI, obsessed with the supernatural, even penned a treatise, Daemonologie, a philosophical dissertation on magic encouraging the practice of witch hunting. In 1563 he enacted the Scottish Witchcraft Act, which criminalised witchcraft for nearly 200 years, until 1735. His undying fixation combined with the ongoing conflict between the Catholic and Protestant church created the perfect breeding ground for a culture of fear and hysteria. An estimated 4,000 people – primarily, but not exclusively, women – fell victim to the Witchcraft Act, making Scotland’s per capita rate of witch trials the highest in Europe.

Coven Raising a Storm, 1591

Over the past few years, projects and advocacy campaigns have emerged across Scotland to confront this buried history. They are often not headed by people who call themselves witches, but according to Tarbuck, they still have a lot of connections with the Scottish Pagan community, because as she points out, reclaiming the label today requires acknowledging its violent legacy. “We view them and their work as very important and it reminds us that if you declare yourself a witch in Scotland, you cannot avoid speaking to a degree of that historical event.”

“If you declare yourself a witch in Scotland, you cannot avoid speaking to a degree of that historical event”

Remembering the Lost

One of the most prominent of those campaigns is Witches of Scotland, co-founded by lawyer Claire Mitchell. They strive for a pardon for those convicted, an official apology – which was granted in 2022 – and a national monument to honour the victims. Earlier this year, they created a tartan as an alternative to a traditional monument. But as awareness grows, so too do misconceptions.

Witches of Scotland Tartan

“All of history is a reinterpretation of what happened in the past through the lens of the present,” Mitchell explains, “but in terms of the witch hunt it is a particularly distorted one.” Social media, while helping fuel interest, often favours the sensational over the factual. This, combined with a general lack of education on the topic, has caused quite a few stubborn beliefs to take hold that have proven difficult to get rid of. “The reporting of the witch trials is so incredibly poor in Scotland that people just make up their own interpretations. And once you have a narrative, it's quite difficult to shed it. People want to see themselves in the past, and they want to be empowered by it. It's great that people have found solace in having a narrative, but it's a narrative that just didn't happen. That's the issue. We're not recording the history of women properly and as a result the stories of women are becoming lost.”

The accused witches

The image that comes to mind for many people when thinking of those who were accused and burned as witches may not be entirely accurate, or at least incomplete. Some attributes that are often named when talking about witches, like the idea that they were often midwives, are quite easily disproven by historical evidence, which shows only nine out of the 4,000 accused held that profession. Others are not quite as black and white.

The witch hunts can’t be chalked up to woman-hating alone. Rather, it was the sexist and patriarchal system that allowed for women to become such easy targets. “The prevailing idea at the time was that men were stronger and more morally robust than women, which made it harder for the devil to seduce them,” explains Mitchell. On top of this, women were seen as secretive, sly, and underhanded, all while holding very little societal power. To the average sixteenth-century Scotsman, the idea that the devil could influence those around you, was nothing short of terrifying.

Hexensabbath by Michael Heer, 1626

“These people weren’t stupid or uneducated,” Mitchell emphasises, “they just genuinely believed in the devil. Fear is a good means of control, but that doesn’t mean that there was someone evil, stroking a cat, saying ‘kill all the women’. It’s also important to realise that the patriarchy isn't men, the patriarchy is the system that we're all in. It wasn't men versus women, that's not what it's about.”

Witchcraft accusations were not exclusive to any one gender, though the majority of victims were women. While the prevalent view of these women as fierce, sharp-tongued feminists, standing up against the patriarchy might be an empowering one, many if not most of them did not fit that mould. “Anyone could be accused of witchcraft, you could be as demure, as gentle, as appropriate as you want, someone could still call you a witch,” Mitchell explains.  “Many women were accused by other women. They were taken away and tortured until they named other people, so they named their sisters, and their daughters, and their friends. Not because they wanted to, but because they were delirious and scared.”

“Anyone could be accused of witchcraft, you could be as demure, as gentle, as appropriate as you want”

Beyond the stereotype

Still, the feminist reading of witches isn’t without merit. “It was less difficult to persuade people that you might be a witch if you're already somebody who didn't play by the exact rules society put down for you,” Mitchell concedes. “People who didn’t live by the societal norms of the time, particularly for their gender, would be more likely to encourage conversation about them, which would be more likely to get gossip about them, which would be more likely to identify them as a witch. Some witches may very well have been quarrelsome dames.”

At the end of the day, those tried as witches were not a monolith. They were everyday people with many different backgrounds, professions, and personalities. Professor Margaret Malloch, who researches the witch trials at the University of Stirling, underscores this point. “They were ordinary people, and they were targeted and that exacerbates the injustice that they experienced. That's what happens to people across the world when they become subject to the laws and the legal system. It's often not because they're rebel leaders, but because they just happen to get caught up in the crossfire of the states.”

Burning at the stake, 18th century

The modern witch

The word witch has made its way from the horrific persecutions of the sixteenth century all the way to the modern day, where it has become a label worn with pride. However, Tarbuck warns against romanticising a direct lineage.

“When anybody describes themselves as a witch, they have the option of opting into a form of respectful remembrance”

“I think it's very important to remember that we are not the granddaughters of the witches they couldn't burn. We are separate people who have opted into a very broad-ranging set of beliefs and practises which have nothing in common with these women who were tried and killed. There's almost no evidence that any of them had a magical bone in their body or wanted to.”

However, this doesn’t mean there is no connection between contemporary witches and the accused witches of the past. “When anybody has an interest in witchcraft or describes themselves as a witch, they have the option of opting into a form of respectful remembrance,” says Tarbuck.  “We have the privilege now of calling ourselves witches if we want to, to broadly no negative effect. But when these people were called witches, it wasn't their choosing. Although there is no continuous line, it is very useful to think about those women in terms of the broader project of witchcraft, which is I think, intersectional and against oppression. It's very important that we remember those women who were innocently killed, not because we are their inheritors, but because we are linked by name.”

Lessons for the Living

Campaigns like Witches of Scotland and academic work like Malloch’s are helping restore a forgotten chapter of history, and their message does not fall on deaf ears. Earlier this year, Mitchell and co-founder Zoe Venditozzi published a book, How to Kill a Witch, which sold out within days and was met with critical acclaim. But even beyond their own efforts, their impact is growing. “There are plays being made, there are books being written; this cultural conversation, which we in part have promoted in Scotland, has led to a huge uptick in people engaging in this part of history,” says Mitchell. “And, you know, one day maybe a teacher who comes across this will say ‘why don't we stick something about witches in our curriculum’. I can only imagine how amazing it would’ve been as a wee lassie growing up in Glasgow, to learn about the history of people being accused of witchcraft in my own country. It might have been useful for me to know what the state did to people, mostly women, when times got bad.”

The Witches' Well, Edinburgh

For Malloch, remembrance is a form of resistance. “Recognising the injustice, noting the fact that this happened, and that some of the things that allowed it to happen are still in place, is really useful. When you can start making these connections to the past, we're all in a better position to challenge some of the things that are happening today. Theorizing what might have happened is useful as a form of resistance, because people did resist, and do resist, and so often acts of resistance are dismissed.”

“People did resist, and do resist, and so often acts of resistance are dismissed”

Memory and Change

On International Women’s Day Witches of Scotland posted a picture on Instagram with the words ‘Less Live, Laugh, Love; more shout, swear, subvert’. The witch hunts may be history, but the systems that enabled them are not. As Mitchell puts it, “People just go, ‘well, that was then, this is now, that wouldn't happen now’. Yes, it would. And what's more, if history is anything to go by, it will. That’s how patriarchy survives, it organically tends to itself. That is why remembering history is so important, it allows us to notice the patterns in our society so we can try and change them.”

In times of instability, we look for something that gives us strength. For many, witchcraft and reclaiming that word offers that. “Some people say witchcraft practice is just listening to your intuition, but there’s strength in even knowing that you have an intuition, especially in a world that taught women to ignore it,” says Tarbuck. “Not that you must be a woman to be a witch. You can be anybody of any gender or none. I do think that being able to take that name and say ‘actually, I do these things, and I am that person, and I have those beliefs’ is inherently empowering. It is a very empowering thing to believe oneself able to make change in the world and that that can look really different to different people.”