Books: A Fascinating New Take on Witch Frenzy

Polygon, £10

Review by Dani Garavelli

A CELL at the bottom of Edinburgh High Street. December 4, 1591 and/or August 1, 2021. Two women: Geillis Duncan and the mysterious Iris. Geillis is about to be executed as a witch; Iris traveled through the “null and ether” to bring her comfort in her final hours.

The characters in Jenni Fagan’s Hex are separated by more than four centuries, but bonded by their treatment at the hands of violent men. Their experiences of patriarchy are so closely aligned that their voices are interchangeable.

It’s Geillis who says, “I’m not a stupid girl. I know how to say yes when I am asked to do something, only yes and thank you and of course, and I would be happy to do so and please allow me! But it could just as well be Iris.

Hex is the second book in Polygon’s Darkland Tales: A Series of Fictional Accounts of Historical Events (the first was Denise Mina’s Rizzio). Geillis Duncan was the first woman accused in the North Berwick Witch Trials.

Still a teenager, she was stripped and tortured, her fingers crushed in winks, a thumbscrew shape. Finally, she made a feverish confession.

She spoke of dozens of witches sailing through the bay in sieves. They conjured up a storm to try to sink the ship bringing James VI and his young wife Anne from Denmark.

Fagan’s timing is impeccable. A campaign to seek a pardon for the 2,500 people, mostly women, executed for witchcraft in Scotland between the 16th and 18th centuries has fired the imagination and created a cultural moment.

As attorney Claire Mitchell fights to right this historic miscarriage of justice, artists have brought individual stories to life.

Heal & Harrow – a recently released album by harpist Rachel Newton and violinist Lauren MacColl – pays tribute to victims such as Lilias Adie, who died before she could be judged, was buried in a ghost grave in the intertidal zone of Torryburn Beach in Fife.

Then, just before dawn on International Women’s Day, the life-size metal figure of another North Berwick ‘witch’ will be burned on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. The event – Soul Murder V: The Exoneration of Agnes Sampson – is the creation of artist Laura Graham.

Fagan’s fascination with witches and the supernatural predates the current trend.

Witchcraft, spells and incantations find their way through his poetry and novels. But in Hex, Fagan draws a direct line between the misogyny of the witch trials and the violence inflicted on women today.

“I would like to reassure you that in 500 years this fine line no longer stretches from uncomfortable to fatal, but I can’t,” Iris told her alter ego.

While historians emphasize the banality of women stigmatized as witches, avoiding any allusion to magic, Fagan inhabits a less rigid imaginary space, embracing the mystical and mixing it with a hint of polemic. Iris is a shapeshifter summoned to a seance.

She presents herself as a crow, with shiny black feathers, and appears to possess eldritch powers. Is she the “familiar” of Geiliss? Neither woman seems sure. But then this confusion makes sense. Like many people accused of witchcraft, Geillis was gassed – a modern term for an age-old concept – until she barely knows what she is or isn’t.

Fagan recreates this process so well that the reader shares his loss of bearings. Working for bailiff David Seaton, Geillis tries to get everything right; to make herself small and docile. But the more she tries to please him, the more he insists that she is dishonest, lazy and suspicious.

Seaton starts rumors that spread around town until people start to “straighten their spine” when they see her as if she could “take an inch off their waist just by being near them”.

The mounting hysteria, along with Geillis’ fear and mental disintegration, finds an echo in Fagan’s prose which gathers pace as the accusations pile up. “Geillis Duncan has a broomstick. Geillis Duncan hates men. Geillis Duncan spat on my child. Geillis Duncan cursed the sidewalk, it’s like walking on the waves.

In the mist of his own breath, Geillis sees “two hundred witches in sieves, in cauldrons, in little paper boats in buckets, in soup pots”.

The reasons for the persecution of Geillis are prosaic. Seaton seeks revenge on his sister-in-law Euphame MacCalzean who inherited the money he believes rightfully belongs to his wife.

But he cannot sue her directly. He therefore accuses Geillis knowing that she will continue to accuse the others. (Geillis accuses Eupham and Eupham is executed before her). Geillis is an easy target. She is attractive – a temptation for men! – a healer and she is known to go out alone at night.

But Fagan’s writing is wild and exciting. As always, she is drawn to the wind, the sea, the moon which casts its reflected light on Geillis as on so many of her characters. She plays with the duality of “witches”, presenting their power alongside their persecution.

Together, Geillis and Iris are a force to be reckoned with. Their power lies not in black magic or pacts with the devil, but in their femininity; their fertility. Creating new life is presented as a kind of alchemy. “In our flesh we become flesh,” Iris said. “As we read books, work, beat, sit on a bus, we form ear flaps, blood, lungs, legs, nails, hair, eyes, ears.”

The metaphorical storms they evoke are born of their oppression. “That’s what happens when they cut off our souls,” Iris said.

Men hate women for their ability to give birth, but most of all they hate their luminescence. Geillis can’t help but shine. “[Men] are always looking for that reflection of pure light,” she says. “The absolute absence of light wants its opposite. So he can eat it.

When Geillis’ light has faded, she leans on her “secret moon,” a silver shell she picked up on the shore and smoothed with the roughness of her skirt.

Shortly before the Eternal Darkness descends, Iris brings him the shell to hold. At that moment, Geillis and Iris become one, sisters in pain, heading towards nothingness.