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Season 2 is HERE, and apparently we’re kicking things off with Satan’s cold ass, witches sailing the Scottish seas in kitchen colanders, a weaponized cat, and one very paranoid king. The North Berwick Witch Trials started with a royal wedding, some seriously shitty weather, and King James VI becoming convinced that witches were personally trying to murder him. What followed was one of Scotland’s most infamous witch hunts. This week, we’re getting into the stories of Geillis Duncan, Agnes Sampson, John Fian, Euphame MacCalzean, and the other real people who found themselves accused of belonging to an enormous satanic conspiracy. There’s torture. Forced confessions. A Devil who apparently takes attendance. A supernatural assassination attempt involving a toad. And yes, an alarming amount of discussion about the Devil’s bare ass. But underneath all of that ridiculousness is a story that gets very real, very fast—because once powerful people decided the conspiracy existed, every denial became evidence, every confession created another suspect, and innocent people paid for it with their lives.
Welcome back, my feral little lore lovers.
Season 2 is about to get fucking weird.
Sources & Further Reading
I went down a DEEP rabbit hole for this one. If you want to join me—or just make sure I’m not personally inventing Satan’s cold ass—here are some of the main sources used for this episode:
- The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft — University of Edinburgh — This is probably the single best resource for the Scottish witch trials. The database was created by historians Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman and contains records for thousands of accused people, including the North Berwick cases.
Explore the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft - Lawrence Normand & Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI's Demonology and the North Berwick Witches — One of the major scholarly works on the trials, including surviving indictments for Agnes Sampson, John Fian, Barbara Napier and Euphame MacCalzean, as well as Francis Stewart's later trial.
- Newes from Scotland (1591/1592) — The infamous contemporary pamphlet describing the North Berwick cases, John Fian, the alleged witches' meetings, attempts to sink James VI's ship, and examinations conducted in the king's presence. This is also where some of the episode's wildest details come from. Important disclaimer: contemporary does not mean unbiased. This thing was basically 16th-century witch-panic propaganda, so I treated its supernatural claims accordingly.
View the Folger Shakespeare Library record for Newes from Scotland - Liv Helene Willumsen, “Witchcraft against Royal Danish Ships in 1589 and the Transnational Transfer of Ideas” — Research based on Danish court records, state papers and diplomatic correspondence examining the witch trials surrounding Anne of Denmark's disastrous voyage and how those ideas traveled from Denmark to Scotland.
Read the research article - Scottish Witchcraft Trials / Barbara Napier & Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell — Surviving trial material is particularly useful here because Barbara's case shows James's personal involvement after her jury refused to convict her on everything, while Bothwell became the highest-status person formally accused of witchcraft in Scotland.
- Scottish Government & Scottish Parliament records — In 2022, Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal posthumous apology on behalf of the Scottish Government to people accused, convicted, vilified or executed under Scotland's Witchcraft Act. A proposed bill that would have pardoned those convicted was later withdrawn in 2023, and the Scottish Government has explicitly confirmed that an apology was made, but no legal pardon was given.
Read the Scottish Government's 2022 apology
A note on the history: A lot of what survives from North Berwick comes from interrogations, accusations, legal records and Newes from Scotland. So when I say someone “confessed” to sailing across the sea in a sieve, kissing the Devil's ass, raising storms or doing some other absolutely unhinged shit, I'm describing what the historical record claims they confessed to—often after torture—not suggesting those things actually happened. Torture was used to obtain confessions during Scottish witch investigations, and the North Berwick panic was particularly notorious for physical torture.
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