The Art of Witchcraft Secret Knowledge

My father, Alexander Goudie,

was possessed by a witch.

As an artist, he was well-known for his portraits and landscapes,

but there was one subject he returned to more than any other.

And that was a witch called Nannie Dee.

Nannie is the terrifying figurehead

of Robert Burns's iconic poem Tam o'Shanter.

But she also became my father's muse,

consuming his life as an artist

and driving him to crazed fits of painting.

I remember as a child finding him in his studio,

repeatedly portraying this demon on canvas -

a toxic seductress, supple and strong...

and naked most of the time.

My father's obsession with his witch

has left me curious as to why the supernatural

has so often fuelled artists' imaginations.

To help me understand this fascination,

I'm going to explore the work

of some of the greatest artists in history.

All of them haunted and hypnotised by the idea of the witch.

Because from the dangerous young seductresses of the ancient world

to the hideous old hags of the Middle Ages,

it's artists who have conjured up our fantastical visions of witches,

often with dangerous consequences in the real world,

as their images stoked the flames of hysteria

that led thousands of victims to their deaths.

This is a story of obsession,

sensationalism and sex.

The dark art of unsettling images

that still have the power to haunt us today.

I hope you've had your tea.

In order to start my exploration of the love affair

artists have with witchcraft,

I've come here to reacquaint myself

with the sorceress that obsessed my father.

So this room is crammed with some of the paintings

my father created over his lifetime.

And, er...

this is one of the easels he laboured at,

still encrusted with paint.

When my father died,

the contents of his studio were placed in storage.

In this room, amidst all these canvases and folders,

I can still feel his presence.

His energy is in here.

His imagination...

the inside of his head, his thoughts.

They're all here.

And, um...

You know, it's a great companion to have.

Dad's witch became a familiar part of my childhood.

Nannie is one of the central characters

in Robert Burns's classic poem, Tam o'Shanter.

Its description of witches and warlocks

terrorising the unfortunate Tam

always fascinated my father.

And for the last 20 years of his life,

Nannie Dee had a powerful fix on him.

And here's Nannie.

He could never exorcise this witch as a muse.

Right up until his death,

he insisted on painting her time and time again.

It was so extreme, even we thought he was mad.

MUSIC: Elijah: Chorus by Mendelssohn

I can still see him in his studio,

a large glass of whisky in his hand,

loud classical music playing,

uttering lines from the poem, while sketching out his vision of her.

Pale skin, ruby lips, and a tormented look to her eyes.

And on the floor, all around him,

would be his books, which he treasured

and leafed through every evening in order to find gruesome inspiration.

He'd have monographs on Durer

and Goya -

all the great witch painters.

And into his own riotous, over-the-top cacophony of images,

he'd insert a detail or two,

virtually transcribed from his artistic heroes.

My father populated his hellish legion

with characters, caricatures that we recognise from Goya -

hooded figures, and here's Nannie, leaping out with seductive elan

from out of their grasp.

To help me discover more about the great artists

who've created some of history's most memorable witches,

I've come to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh,

where a major new exhibition

traces the depiction of the witch in art over the past 500 years

and gives me a rare opportunity to meet the other artists

in my dad's coven.

This exhibition reminds us

how artists have been entranced by witches for thousands of years,

right back to the earliest enchantresses of Greek mythology.

But, for me, the most menacing works

emerge in the woodcuts of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Many were created in Germany,

home to much of the original witch folklore.

And the greatest of those early witch artists was Albrecht Durer.

Albrecht Durer's witch

was an evocation of the world turned upside down.

This leathery old hag

is transported across 500 years of history

and slaps you right in the face.

She's a messenger from a time when the witch was real,

when across Europe, people believed

their communities were peppered with cunning women like this one.

Women whose evil powers were expressed

not only through magical potions and incantations...

..but by an unnatural sexual hunger.

She's definitely not here to entertain the kids.

The sinister clues are all there.

Durer depicts his hag

riding to her Witches' Sabbath backwards upon a goat,

because this animal symbolised lust

and was the form most commonly assumed by the Devil.

Her hair is loose,

straggling behind her to indicate unbridled sexuality,

and she grasps the goat's horn with a provocative firmness,

to let you know that she'll make you a cuckold, emasculated and impotent.

It's nasty stuff.

Durer's early woodcuts

reflected the dominant belief that women were inherently weak,

vulnerable to sexual temptation and the Devil.

This was a theme

Durer's contemporaries were happy to expand on.

Let me introduce you to Hans Baldung Grien, the king of crude.

He made a career out of designing and depicting the witch.

Baldung Grien came from a highly educated family

and his father was the Bishop of Strasbourg's councillor,

so I can't imagine they were too impressed

by his enthusiasm for creating such provocative sexual imagery.

Baldung adapts and brings a new twist

to the motifs we saw in Durer's engravings.

Why have one naked hag

when you can invite along a gaggle of lithe-limbed seductresses

to join in the devilry?

From this point onwards,

witches were cast as a group of cackling women

gathered around a cauldron.

And although nudity was the Devil's dress code,

there is no doubt that,

at a point in time when the female form

was only ever idealised in painting,

the depiction of witches allowed artists

to push at the boundaries of what had been deemed acceptable.

Nothing in these images has been arrived at by accident.

Everything that you see has been carefully adapted

from two texts which were a 15th-century publishing phenomenon.

Ulrich Molitor's On Female Witches And Seers

and the Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer Of The Witches.

These volumes were veritable handbooks

for identifying witches.

The Malleus particularly projected a disturbingly misogynist message,

one which the imagery of Durer and Grien

helped cement in the public imagination.

Listen to this, from the Malleus -

"Witches, to satisfy their obscene lust,

"burn with ardour to become adulteresses,

"prostitutes and concubines to powerful men."

The 15th-century revolution in printing

led to the Malleus Maleficarum being repeatedly republished.

And over the next two centuries,

images became more powerful than ever.

News could now spread with unprecedented speed

and the headline read, "Witches are real and dangerous".

The engravers of the 15th century were shrewd businessmen.

They realised that combination of horror and titillation

would up the circulation figures.

Witchcraft stories were a sure-fire hit

and the accompanying engravings proved vital

in cultivating a largely illiterate audience

and giving the sorceress a particular visual shape.

In these images, we see for the first time

the deadly stereotype of the witch.

In the late Middle Ages,

people genuinely worried

that the world was under threat from Satanic forces.

The men who dominated church and state

exploited these fears of demonic influence,

which, combined with deep-seated traditional suspicions about women,

turned the witch into a powerful weapon of propaganda.

These crude depictions of lustful women revealed

not just disapproval, but fear of female sexuality.

Step by step,

a dreadful visual code was itemised,

one which appeared to legitimise the persecution

of a whole disempowered section of society.

Witches are female. Watch out for them.

They gather in groups. Watch out for that.

They congregate around cooking pots, the implements of the hearth,

and brew up all manner of debased sexual nefariousness.

You'd better keep an eye out.

In the 16th century,

there was a climate of fear and panic surrounding the idea of magic.

Many of the legends and scandal emanated from Germany,

but some of the most traumatic witch-hunts and trials

took place here, in Scotland.

Between the mid-16th and 18th centuries,

nearly 4,000 people in Scotland were accused and tried for witchcraft.

These witch-hunts were propelled by the sermons of Protestant ministers

determined to stamp out any remains

of Catholic belief in their communities.

For the 16th-century Scottish crofter,

magic was real.

It was the undercurrent to everyday life,

written into the wild landscape,

where the wind in the trees and the running of the stream

symbolised the presence of folkloric beings,

like the fairies, the kelpie, the bogle.

For them, magic was not necessarily an evil force.

The local charmers and cunning women

were people who you approached for assistance

with your recurring back pain,

to help locate that misplaced purse

or to divine whether this year's drought was going to persist.

A bit like consulting a medieval Google.

But the church was determined to do away with heretical beliefs,

so they demonised them.

And the pursuit of witches soon gained a powerful ally.

James VI of Scotland and later I of England,

whose palace stood here at Holyrood,

had a personal and passionate hatred of witches.

When en route to meet his new bride in Norway,

James's ship was caught in a terrible storm.

It was decreed that the deranged weather event was so extreme,

it could only have been caused by a conspiracy of witches.

This attack on his divine person

amounted to nothing less than an assault on God himself.

The presses went into overdrive,

and this is a copy of the news from Scotland,

showing the witches' coven brewing up a storm

and supervised by Satan.

The hysteria culminated in Scotland's first mass witch trial,

overseen personally by the King.

The trials lasted two years

and hundreds were arrested, many gruesomely tortured.

The religious fundamentalists who had a grip on the country

pressed home their advantage.

If you believed the hype,

Scotland was under assault from Satan

and his greatest adversary was the King himself.

Over the next 200 years,

the nation became a crucible for witch-hunting.

In the villages scattered across the Caledonian wilderness,

people lived under a heightened threat

and many unfortunate women paid a terrible price

for the hysteria the artists had helped ignite.

One of the victims of this national paranoia

was my namesake, Gowdie. Isobel Gowdie.

My father's obsession with witches wasn't sparked by Tam o'Shanter,

but by family lore.

He relished telling his children

that we were descended from a bona fide witch.

And as a consequence, for me, Isobel got up out of the pages of history

and joined our family.

But Isobel was a real person,

whose experiences of persecution and conviction

were a direct legacy of the witch-hunts.

In her extraordinary confessions,

she renounces Christ,

describes having her blood sucked by the Devil,

flies on a beanstalk,

mixes potions and murders passers-by.

And worst of all,

she fornicates with the Devil,

relishing the experience

and describing it in shockingly intimate detail.

"He was a very mickle black, rough man.

"His members are extremely great and long.

"No man's members are so long and big as they are.

"The youngest and lustiest woman

"will have very great pleasure in their carnal copulation with him.

"Yea, much more than with their own husbands."

Isobel's story reminds us of the real tragedy

that lies behind the history of the witch-hunts.

She could only have absorbed her ideas from the world around her.

In Scotland, traditional folklore

was now bolstered by the graphic propaganda of the presses,

in which the role of the artist was essential.

In their hands,

a gathering of women was tantamount to a Witches' Sabbath.

And at the heart of the incantations

was the familiar domestic cauldron,

now recast as a metaphor for cooking up trouble.

Women are no longer a comforting presence in society.

The feminine symbols of fertility,

maternal care, food

are all corrupted.

Isobel was clearly a vulnerable and deluded person,

whose visions merely repeated ideas about witchcraft

which were embedded in the popular imagination

by storytellers, gossip

and the printed image.

She was convicted of witchcraft

and most likely strangled and burnt.

In the heat of the moment, when the frenzy of terror was at its highest,

James capitalised on his unfortunate victims

to cement his power and reputation.

Later in his reign, the King became more sceptical.

It was harder to convince him that those accused of witchcraft

were actually guilty.

Artists, poets and playwrights

were going to have to run to keep up with their enlightened monarch.

King James's changing views reflected the age.

By the end of the 17th century,

witchcraft laws were being repealed across Europe.

In the battle between reason and superstition,

belief in witches belonged to an ignorant, outdated past.

Italian painter Salvator Rosa was one of the first to mark the change.

In his great masterpiece Witches At Their Incantations,

Rosa creates a scene so macabre, it verges on farce.

For those in the know, it embodied a sense of scepticism.

An expose of hokey beliefs.

But the man who signalled the new enlightened era more than any other

was my father's hero, Francisco de Goya.

At the end of the 18th century,

Goya was official artist to the Spanish court.

But after illness plunged him into depression,

he created one of the great works of European art -

Los Caprichos -

and turned the witch into a powerful political metaphor.

The spirit of these engravings

rests within images that appear to have been conjured

from the wildest recesses of the imagination.

But in the velvety world of Goya's aquatints,

we are immersed in a nightmare that is deeply disturbing.

The engravings were intended to satirise society

and in order to make that satire really bite,

Goya populated his world with witches.

Across the series, the stereotypes reach a crescendo.

There are broomsticks and child sacrifices,

bats and bristling cats.

Nearly 300 years has passed

since Durer first unleashed his naked hag upon us.

But there she is, still flying around,

still grasping her staff suggestively.

Except now...she's got a girlfriend.

And although Goya is spinning out all the old themes,

he's doing so knowingly.

Durer reinforces the stereotypes,

but Goya breaks them down.

Disgrace and shame were the weapons of choice

for an authoritarian state.

They can be exploited to control the masses.

And the shame of sex, the shame of illness,

the vulnerability of old age

all burn off the pages of Goya's engravings.

And those themes had always been associated with witches.

Goya challenges this power

of prejudice and superstition in society by making us complicit.

First we shrink from the withered hags,

which repulse us with their nudity.

But, for me, this is rapidly followed by a smile of bewilderment

at the ridiculousness of it all.

The engravings become a mirror to our own folly.

Goya conjured up these images from his troubled imagination,

but in the late 18th century, artists in Britain

turned directly to literature for inspiration.

Here, witch imagery was valued for its ability to provoke

Romantic excess and Gothic horror.

British audiences knew a witch when they saw one.

They'd seen her being performed on stage in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

But the painters gave their public

the weird sisters... Hammer Horror-style.

The Swiss-born artist, Henry Fuseli,

worked in Britain most of his life.

His depictions of Macbeth were intended to provoke fear.

But this painting is rooted in high camp and melodrama.

In the Romantic period,

artists still found the witch irresistible,

but the stereotypes are ever more exaggerated.

In the witch's new theatrical profile,

prosthetic noses and slap-on warts

became an instantly recognisable look of the era.

In the confident, educated and mature society

Britain was becoming in the 18th century,

the witch was no longer unleashed for political purposes,

but instead, to entertain us.

The terrifying early imagery of vicious old crones,

rooted in genuine social fears and anxieties,

now seems a world away from the theatrical 18th-century version.

Of course, there was one great exception -

the extraordinary visual alchemist of British art...

William Blake.

His Whore Of Babylon is inspired by a literary source -

the Bible.

But this image has a nightmarish, twisted quality

that could only be created

by an artist channelling visions through his mind.

Blake was a titan

who haunted the border lands between dreams and reality.

The Whore Of Babylon is a symbol of evil

and, by association, of the power of female sexuality.

A kind of mother witch.

For me, Blake is a haunting example

of how the most powerful depictions of the supernatural

come with a touch of the surreal.

A lurid quality to the imagery,

which abstracts and inverts the order of the world,

forcing you to question what it is you're being shown.

But a different kind of nightmare

emerges on the canvases of the 19th century.

Medea and Vivien materialise before us as cool as porcelain.

Underneath the skin, they may still crawl with evil thoughts,

but on the surface, they're tantalising beauties.

Those old hags belong to folklore.

Now we're in a much more sophisticated, literary world.

These classical beauties, Medea and Vivien,

are presented to us by Frederick Sandys

as the ancient embodiment of the femme fatale,

who seduce men with their beauty and magic.

Their origins lay in Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

The kind of timeless literary precedent

beloved of the Victorians.

Although these paintings retain some anxiety

about the power of women's wiles,

they also embody a shift in attitudes towards the supernatural

and to women's role in society.

For me, it marks the evolution of the witch

into a more comfortable literary fiction.

The witch has lost her bite.

Today popular culture has tamed the witch.

We've sugar-coated the warts,

turned her into a prime-time phenomenon.

It's virtually impossible to make a literal depiction of the witch.

We've become so familiar

with the visual shorthand that has evolved over 500 years.

Any attempt to exploit the cauldron, the wrinkly old hag, the broomstick

tips us quickly over into pantomime.

Perhaps the reason the witch has proved such an irresistible subject

is because there's something in their magic

that artists envy.

Painters have always mixed their pigments like potions,

desperately trying to create images

that will exert power over their audience.

For artists, the witch's real magic

has always been her ability to captivate the viewer

with grotesque images...

..provocative sexuality...

..and veiled attacks on enduring prejudice and social taboos.

The witch, through all her many incarnations,

has confirmed the enduring power of art to unsettle and provoke.

My father certainly wanted to unsettle and provoke

through the obsessive depiction of his own witch, Nannie.

But he also wanted to tell a tale in paintings.

One which acknowledged that the potency of magic

and witches is rooted in reality,

in the elements...

..and in the landscape.

When his paintbrushes failed him,

this is where my father came to confront his demons.

These are the fields that he walked

to feel the texture of the myth and folklore,

in order to touch something

of that real history of persecution and terror.

He would come out here to these pockets of northern wilderness,

because in such places the ghosts of those long-executed witches

still wander the sodden tracks.

When I close my eyes and magic her up in my imagination,

the legacy of the witch painters

plays across my mind with terrifying clarity.

And at their head, the surging, spectral seductress...

Nannie Dee.

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