I’m beginning to suspect that most of the women we burned at the stake were not actually witches. Even those we properly identified as conjurers can still be divided into subcategories, because not all witches are necessarily evil. There are good witches, like Samantha, from Bewitched, and then there are evil ones, like Janeane Garofalo. We’ve been wasting firewood!

Further, the methodology by which locals identified witches seems sketchy at best. In Scotland, third nipples were considered prime evidence of witchcraft. (Superfluous nipples are a real, though rare, condition). If you had a third nipple, Scots assumed you were using it to suckle the devil. That meant you were an occultist, and should be punished by death. Somehow this would all lead to clan wars and killing Englishmen the following month.

Birth marks also indicated Satanic collusion. A birth mark showed the exact spot where the Devil had touched you. (Remember, this is before you could “poke” people on Facebook. Back then the King of Hell literally had to poke you physically.)

I find this particularly amusing, as my girlfriend has a birthmark just about the same size and shape of a thumb print. She is also a redhead which, perplexedly, the Scots considered a prime indicator of sorcery.

This is an odd choice of witchcraft criteria, as the Scots possess the highest amount of redheads on the entire planet. About 14% of them sport red hair. (Ireland lags behind at a mere 10%, despite stereotypes.) The Scots would have even more redheads today, if they hadn’t periodically rounded up gingers every few crop failures to set them ablaze on charges of witchcraft.

Whereas today gingers are subject to schoolyard bullying and jabs on Southpark, in the Dark Ages copper tops were prime suspects of conspiring with Beelzebub. Now, there is some truth to this—IRS tax audits have indeed revealed that Kathy Griffin entered multiple contractual obligations with the Dark Lord in the late 1990’s. But she is an isolated example, and in any case we shouldn’t confuse causality with correlation. You could, hypothetically, be a redhead and not a witch.

Once charged with witchcraft you had two options. You could admit to your pact with Lucifer and plead for mercy, in which case the authorities would merely burn you at the stake to “purge” your sins by fire, allowing you possible “standby status” in Heaven. Shortly thereafter a clan war would erupt, culminating in yet another war with England.

If you foolishly maintained that you were not a witch, or that witches did not exist, or that maybe you fooled around a little with weird candles in college, but just for kicks, and never to cause infant mortality, then authorities would torture a confession out of you. Sleep deprivation was a popular method which, coincidentally, tends to prompt trippy hallucinations about flying around and dancing and such.

If you were too damn stubborn to succumb to torture, questioners employed an antiquated form of waterboarding. In Edinburgh, authorities bound the hands of accused witches to their ankles, then tossed them into Nor Loch. (Basically a large septic pool below the castle where all the city’s gutters and bedpans drained into whenever it rained. Daily.) If you sank, it meant there had been some kind of clerical error, and you were actually a good Christian. The authorities would send an apologetic letter to your family, then rally an army to kill as many Englishmen in as short a span as possible.

If you floated (the more likely option, given how physics works) it meant the devil was underneath you, holding you up. Thus, with your bewitchment confirmed, an angry mob would haul you to the castle esplanade to be burn you at the stake. To make things as absolutely mean-spirited as possible, following your incineration the Scottish government would mail an invoice to your family, billing them for the firewood.

So you can understand my growing suspicion about all of these alleged witches we executed in the Middle Ages. At best, we had, maybe, 40% accuracy. Perhaps lower.

We should all balk in horror at the prospects of people dying under such horrible circumstances. For me there are additional personal considerations. As noted above, my girlfriend has red hair and a birth mark. Three hundred years ago some idiot might have accused her of being a witch. Our weekend would have been ruined!

For instance, what if someone observed her harmless ability to make objects levitate, and mistook it as a form of sorcery? Or misidentified one of her vegetable juices as a “magic potion,” merely because of the purple smoke and echoey Celtic voices derived as a byproduct of the type of blender and cauldron she bought?

Like many people, my girlfriend relies upon a Ouija board as her CPA and financial advisor. Thus far, the Ouija board has done an excellent job of balancing her IRA between high-yielding equity stocks and secure government bonds. But in the year 1500 this auspiciously successful financial portfolio might have been evidence of “conversing with dark spirits,” or some other preposterous notion!

Fortunately Scotland repealed its witchcraft laws in 1736, so we can visit without fear. Between 1563 (when Scotland officially outlawed witchcraft) and 1727 (its final execution) an estimated 1,500 men and women were killed, out of 3,500 accusants.

Yet, some amends have been made. In 2004 the Scottish town of Prestonpans posthumously pardoned eighty-one of the people it executed for witchcraft during the Reformation.

Better late than never?

We Probably Overdid It On The Witch Executions