Lilias Adie’s burial place is located on the Fife coast in the foreshore off of Torryburn, a muddy intertidal area of unconsecrated ground used by villagers up until the 19th century for those who had committed suicide. A heavy flat stone had been placed over her grave to assure the villagers she could no longer rise up and harm them.
Hers is the only known witch’s grave in Scotland. Those condemned to death for alleged witchcraft under the Scottish Witchcraft Act were usually burned to ashes at the stake.
I began to write a poem about Lilias Adie over seven years ago, soon after first reading about her, and seeing the image forensic artist Dr. Christopher Rynn had created of her face. The face of a woman approximately 60 years of age, with buck teeth and mild eyes, who even under extensive interrogation and torture had refused to give new names of other witches. Who likely died by suicide rather than suffer death at the stake.
I wanted to respond through poetry as a form of witness to her unmourned life, considered expendable in the name of moral authority, during a time in Scotland when the witchcraft panics were fueled by the zealotry of the Reformation, the rise of demonology, and the Scottish king’s own dedication to witch hunting. In his treatise Daemonologie, first published in Edinburgh in 1597, King James VI referred to witches as “detestable slaves of the devil.” He fervently believed witches were a menace from which his country should be cleansed.
My writing about Lilias Adie and about other witch trials in Europe eventually led to an invaluable resource,The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. Based at the University of Edinburgh, the project had been archived in January 2023. In the spring of that year, I began reading survey documents made available through the interactive witchcraft map developed as part of this project, accessing names and information about trials under the Scottish Witchcraft Act.
Certain details of narrative fragments compelled my attention, through the humanity they conveyed about the people accused, and through the devastating conditions of persecution they suffered. Dehumanization was as banal as it was cruel. I noted the times I found documents in which details of the accused were omitted while care had been taken to itemize the cost of materials for burning. I read as witness to this evidence, and I read as many cases as I could.
The survey documents, understood in the context of historical studies, made many of the persona poems of The Book of Fire possible.
Often there is barely more than a line to show that a person existed, and that evidence is in terms of accusations of witchcraft. “Not enough information” is one of the most frequently repeated phrases in this survey. This is true of the survey documents concerning Lilias (spelled “Lillias” in the Survey) Adie—nothing but her accusation is known about her life.
The Book of Fire imagines voices from the scant evidence of documents that nonetheless confirm the truth of the devastating harm of the Scottish Witchcraft Act, resulting in the accusation and torture of almost 4000 people, 87% of whom were women and girls. The details that do survive retain the energy of human lives— of folk healers threatened by the kirk sessions, of angry beggars who cursed those who did not share milk with them, of daughters of so-called known witches who were therefore guilty of witchcraft themselves, of widows grieving their husbands’ deaths and under suspicion for their grieving, of people who tried to escape those who persecuted them, who ran for their lives if they could. And some, like Lilias Adie, who were courageous until the end.
This collection is written out of protest against atrocity made law, and it is dedicated to those who suffered persecution under the specific atrocities of the Scottish Witchcraft Act.
I understand history as a living, ever shifting complex of narratives and omissions too often deliberately shaped by dominant powers. As a descendent of English and Scotch-Irish colonizers who brought the devastation of European oppressions to America, as a woman, and as a poet, I am interested in what has been deliberately omitted, because we are all harmed by those omissions. We are less than we should be. Less in our understanding of how our histories have shaped our assumptions, less in our connections with others whose stories we do not know. Less able to grieve and heal from past traumas, and less able to do better.
I hope to engage readers through this poetry as a way
of witness, as a way of empathy. Through poetry as resistance to the injustices
of erasure, allowing us to recognize ourselves in other lives, and understand
justice as a matter of mutual concern and interest.
Sources:
Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise
Yeoman, “The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft,” https://witches.shca.ed.ac.uk/
(archived January 2023, accessed beginning March, 2023).
The European Witch-Hunt by Julian Goodare (Routledge, 2016)
Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials by Marion Gibson (Simon & Schuster UK, 2023)
Online articles:
“How to bury a witch” by Louise Yeoman, 28 October
2014, BBC
“Forensic artist reconstructs face of Scottish ‘witch’ ,” 30 October 2017, BBC
