A NEW award-winning play will tell the tale of a woman who dressed as a man so she could interrogate and torture suspected witches in 17th century Scotland.
Former Edinburgh ghost tour guide Jen McGregor wrote Heaven Burns after hearing the story of Christian Caddell, who pretended to be a man called John Dickon so that she could work as a so-called witch-pricker.
“Witch-pricking was a giant racket,” McGregor explains. “It was basically a group of men who would prick people accused of being witches with needles. If they bled or were in pain then it was supposed to prove they were witches and when the witch prickers managed to find witches they were paid a huge amount of money.
“Christian appears to have been masquerading as a man called John Dickson. We don’t know what happened to the original John Dickson although the play has some ideas about that. And we don’t know what prompted Christian to become a witch-pricker, although she seems to have felt justified that God was prompting her to do this.”
A SPELLBINDING TOPIC THEN?
THE play has already won the Assembly Roxy Theatre Award for new work debuting at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and McGregor believes it is very relevant, even though it is set in Morayshire in the 1600s.
“Unfortunately, I think it does have parallels with today,” she says. “It is quite frightening to see how there is still that massive belief in a cause and that fear of the other and the unknown.”
McGregor wrote the play after hearing the story of Caddell from Susan Morrison who runs Previously – Scotland’s History Festival.
“Caddell seems to be a very little known figure but I think she possibly believed that because she was a woman she could get closer to the ‘witches,’” says McGregor.
“Eventually she crossed the wrong man who asked her to produce her licence, but she did not have one. He was a member of the King’s Privy Council but she accused him of being a witch and tortured him to death.”
THAT DOESN’T SOUND WISE …
MCGREGOR agrees that it seems surprising that Caddell chose such an influential person to accuse.
“Maybe she just got too big for her boots or thought God would protect her,” she says.
What did happen was that the accused managed to complain to the authorities before he died.
“He wrote a letter saying he had been tortured by a witch-pricker who would not show a licence.”
Caddell was then arrested and it was discovered that she was a woman.
“She was sentenced to be transported to Barbados but I don’t think she survived the journey as she disappeared from history,” McGregor says. “My feeling is that if she had got there she would have caused more trouble and there would have been some record of her.”
At the same time that Caddell was operating, Isobel Gowdie went to her parish authorities to confess she was a witch.
“She is a bit better known as she left detailed confessions obtained without torture, although we don’t know what happened to her in the end.”
There is no record of Caddell and Gowdie meeting but given that they were both around in the same area at the same time their paths may have crossed and this possibility is considered in the new play.
WHY WERE THERE SO MANY ‘WITCHES’?
MCGREGOR believes social conditions triggered the Scottish witch hunts. It is a subject she has been interested in ever since she was a child, and her interest was whetted even more after she left school and worked as a guide for the Edinburgh ghost tours.
Wanting to find out what actually happened, as opposed to the stories told to the tourists, she took a course in Edinburgh in historical witchcraft and has also delved into the online database created by Dr Joyce Miller and Dr Louise Yeoman.
“I suppose Heaven Burns is a culmination of a very long process of being somewhat obsessed by the subject,” admits McGregor, whose previous work includes the play Creepie Stool based on the story of Jenny Geddes, who started a riot in Edinburgh in 1637.
WAS IT EASY TO WRITE THE PLAY?
FOR McGregor, the difficult part of writing Heaven Burns was trying not to pour all her research into it.
However as it developed, she became really interested in the characters and the question of certainty.
“Caddell has a huge amount of certainty and thinks she knows what God wants her to do. It could be that Isobel is drawn to the charisma of having that certainty but does not possess it herself.”
McGregor adds: “The social questions behind the witch hunts really interest me such as the religious strife and the social conditions of the time – what the weather was like and how many fishing boats were lost at sea.
“It’s interesting to see how panics like this relate to things like poor weather and the availability of food. It often seems like we are looking for something to blame when something goes wrong.”
For McGregor that is as true today as it was in the 17th century.
“There are a lot of things I feel we ought to be better at dealing with by now – we no longer blame the devil but we still perceive threats even if we categorise them differently. It’s unnerving,” she says.
McGregor, who is working alongside director Flavia D’Avila, is hoping the play will be supported for a tour after its Fringe run.
Heaven Burns runs at the Assembly Roxy from August 2 to 27.
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