The Discoverie of Witchcraft

The Discovery of Witchcraft - Reginald Scott

The Discoverie of Witchcraft

Reginald Scot, the sceptic who tried to kill magic and accidentally taught it to England.

In 1584 a quiet man in Kent published a book that he hoped would stop the killing. His name was Reginald Scot. He was a gentleman, a sometime Member of Parliament, a grower of hops. He was not a wizard. That was rather the point.

England in his day believed in witches the way we believe in gravity. The belief was total. It was woven into sermons, statute, and the long memory of villages. When the harvest failed or a child sickened, someone had to be blamed.

Usually it was an old woman. She was poor. She was alone. She had perhaps muttered something at a neighbour who refused her bread. That was enough. England hanged its witches. The Continent burned them. Scot wanted neither.

So he sat down and did something nobody in English had done before. He looked at the machinery of fear and described how it worked. Then he wrote it all down. The result was a thick, furious, learned, and frequently very funny book. It would outlive him, outlive his king, and betray him in ways he could never have foreseen.

The man who grew hops

Scot was born around 1538 into the Kentish gentry, at Smeeth, near Ashford. He went up to Oxford and left without a degree. This was common enough for a young gentleman who had no need of one. He returned to Kent, managed land, served as a justice of the peace, and sat in Parliament for New Romney. He married, twice. He was, by every surviving measure, an ordinary provincial Englishman of the better sort.

His first book gives the game away. In 1574 he published A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden, the first practical English manual on growing hops. Consider that for a moment. The man who would demolish the entire edifice of English demonology began his literary career by teaching his countrymen how to brew better beer. There is something deeply reassuring about this. The mind that distrusts devils is the same mind that wants the ale done properly. Both are forms of paying attention.

What turned a hop farmer into a heretic was a trial. In 1581 Scot watched a woman accused of witchcraft answer for her supposed crimes. He saw the evidence for what it was. He saw the accused for what she was, which was frightened, old, and poor. He saw the court for what it was. And he decided that someone with a clear head and a good library ought to say so out loud.

The argument

The Discoverie of Witchcraft runs to sixteen books. The full title alone is a small essay, promising to detect the lewd dealing of witches and the knavery of conjurors, the impious blasphemy of enchanters, and the horrible art of poisoning. Scot was nothing if not thorough.

His case was simple and radical. Witches, as commonly imagined, did not exist. Old women could not raise storms, blight cattle, or fly. The confessions wrung out of them proved nothing, because they were extracted by terror and torture from people who were melancholic, senile, or simply desperate to make the pain stop. Where there was real harm there was poison or fraud, both of which were matters for the ordinary law. Everything else was delusion. He leaned here on the Dutch physician Johann Weyer, whose De praestigiis daemonum of 1563 had already suggested that the witch was a patient rather than a criminal.

Scot went further than Weyer dared. He argued that the witch hunt was not only irrational but un-Christian, an offence against God dressed up as service to Him. He laid much of the blame at the door of the Roman Church, whose appetite for marvels he regarded as a kind of theatre. To believe that a frightened pensioner could overrule the providence of God was, to Scot, the real blasphemy. It made the Almighty smaller than a hedge.

Read today, the tone is startling. It is dry, impatient, and openly contemptuous of cruelty wrapped in piety. He writes like a man who has lost his temper but kept his grammar. Underneath the wit, there is real anger, and underneath the anger, there is grief. People were dying for nothing. He could see it. He could not make them stop.

Behind the curtain

Then comes the part that made Scot immortal, and not in the way he intended. To prove that apparent marvels were mere trickery, he explained the tricks. In a single section of the book, he laid out, in plain English, how the travelling conjurors of the day fooled their audiences. How to make a coin vanish. How to work the cups and balls. How to seem to drive a knife through your skull using a false bodkin. How to perform the gruesome showpiece known as the decollation of John the Baptist, in which a man appears to lay his own severed head upon a platter.

This was the first time the secrets of conjuring had ever been printed in the English language. Scot meant it as a kind of inoculation. If you understood that the severed head was an illusion built from a hollow table and a hidden accomplice, you would not burn the conjuror, and you would not burn the old woman down the lane either. Knowledge was meant to cool the blood.

It did not work out that way. The conjurors read it too. Generations of magicians have treated that section as scripture. Its methods, sleight of hand with balls and coins and cards, the quiet use of a confederate in the crowd, are still working tonight in theatres and on pavements across the world. Scot set out to write the obituary of magic. He wrote its founding textbook instead. Every mentalist, every card sharp, every performer who has ever said pick a card owes a small unpaid debt to a Kentish gentleman who despised the whole business.

The displeasure of a king

A book like this does not pass unnoticed. The most consequential reader was James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England, a monarch with strong views on the subject. James had convinced himself that witches had raised storms against his bride's ship. In 1597 he published his own little treatise, Daemonologie, in part to answer Scot directly. He named him on the page, an Englishman not ashamed in public print to deny that there could be such a thing as witchcraft. From a king, this was not literary criticism. It was a warning.

Legend has it that when James took the English throne in 1603 he ordered every copy of the Discoverie hunted down and burned. It is a satisfying story. A book that defended people from the fire, fed to the fire by a king. The trouble is that no contemporary evidence for the bonfire survives. The historian Philip Almond has shown that the burning is most likely a later invention, a tradition grown up around the book like ivy around a ruin. Which is its own quiet joke. Scot spent his life arguing that frightening stories should be checked against the facts. Three centuries later, the most famous story about his own book turned out to be one of them.

Scot himself was spared the worst of it. He died in 1599, four years before the king he had angered crossed the border. He never saw the throne change hands. He never learned whether he had won. He had not.

The book that would not stay dead

Here, the tale turns genuinely strange. The Discoverie was reissued in 1651, and again in 1654. Then in 1665 a third edition appeared, fattened with nine new chapters and an entire extra book, a Discourse concerning the nature and substance of devils and spirits. Scot had been dead for sixty-six years. He did not write a word of it.

Worse, the new material believed in precisely the things Scot had set out to destroy. An anonymous hand had taken the great sceptical treatise and stitched a grimoire onto its back. The padding drew on the very sources Scot had quoted in order to mock them, the catalogues of demons, the conjurations, the borrowed spellcraft of the Key of Solomon. Readers no longer came to the book to be cured of magic. They came to learn it. The exposé had been hollowed out and reupholstered as the thing it exposed.

And so Scot achieved a kind of immortality that would have appalled him. His debunking became a spellbook. Occultists treasured it. Collectors hunt the early editions still. The man who wanted to drain the swamp of superstition wrote the one book the swamp decided to keep. His enemies could not burn it out of England. His admirers did something stranger. They turned it inside out.

It went on echoing through better company too. His chapters on fairies and hobgoblins, on Robin Goodfellow and the spirits of the hearth, fed straight into the imagination of the playhouse. Scholars have long heard Scot behind the witches of Macbeth and behind the mischief of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson raided him for stage business. The book meant to empty the world of marvels ended up restocking the English stage with them. Reason wrote it. Wonder kept it.

The view from the Grey

There is a lesson in this, and it is not the comfortable one. The comfortable version says that Scot was a hero of reason ahead of his time, and that the fools simply failed to listen. That is true as far as it goes. It does not go very far.

The deeper lesson is about what scepticism can and cannot do. Scot believed that if you showed people the strings, the puppet would stop dancing. It is a beautiful faith. It is also wrong. We watch the conjuror reveal the trick and we still gasp at the next one. We learn that the severed head is a hollow table and an accomplice, and the head on the platter is no less unsettling for that. Explanation does not always kill enchantment. Sometimes it just gives the enchantment somewhere to live.

This is the territory of the Grey. Scot stood on the bright clean ground of the rational and assumed that ground was the whole world. He was right about the witches. He was right about the cruelty and the nonsense and the frightened old women dying for the failures of the weather. He was simply wrong about people. We do not want the strings explained so that the magic ends. We want them explained so that we can choose, with open eyes, to be moved anyway. The wonder that survives the explanation is the only kind worth keeping.

So read the original, if you can find it. Read the fury and the patience and the very funny contempt. Then notice the shape of what happened to it. A man told the truth in order to save lives, and the truth was promptly dressed up in robes and sold back to the credulous he was trying to protect. Hold both halves at once. That uncomfortable double grip, the cold eye and the open mind, is not a failure of thinking. It is the beginning of it.

Reginald Scot wanted to discover witchcraft, in the old sense of the word. To uncover it. To strip it bare. He did exactly that. Then England, with a straight face, used his confession to learn the trade. He would have hated it. He might, in the end, have laughed.

Alan /|\

References & Further Reading

1.    Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. London: [Henry Denham for] William Brome, 1584. (First edition; the foundational text.)

2.   Scot, Reginald. A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden. London, 1574. (Scot's first book, on hop cultivation.)

3.    Scot, Reginald. The Discovery of Witchcraft. London: Printed for A. Clark, 1665. (The expanded third edition, with the posthumous and anonymous “Discourse concerning the nature and substance of devils and spirits.”)

4.   Nicholson, Brinsley, ed. The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot. London: Elliot Stock, 1886. (Scholarly reprint of the 1584 text with the 1665 additions.)

5.    Summers, Montague, ed. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. 1930; repr. New York: Dover. (Widely available modern edition.)

6.   James VI of Scotland (later James I of England). Daemonologie. Edinburgh, 1597. (The royal rebuttal that names Scot directly.)

7.    Weyer, Johann. De praestigiis daemonum. Basel, 1563. (Scot's principal medical and sceptical source.)

8.   Davies, S. F. “The Reception of Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, Magic, and Radical Religion.” Journal of the History of Ideas 74, no. 3 (2013): 381–401.

9.   Almond, Philip C. “King James I and the Burning of Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft: The Invention of a Tradition.” Notes and Queries (2009). (Demonstrates the lack of evidence for the burning legend.)

10. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, full text online at Project Gutenberg, eBook no. 60766:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60766