1./ A story about "witches". This shocking footage of a woman bullied by a crowd dressed in black can't help but remind a Scot of one of the worst aspects of our history. Some claim it's fanciful to make a comparison with witch hunts but there are some striking similarities.
2./ I was raised on one witch story in particular. This is the Lynn Falls in Dalry, Ayrshire where I grew up (shot by a local in suitably Blairwitch style). The Falls were where Bessie Dunlop, a local woman, collected 'healing' herbs. In 1576 Bessie was accused of witchcraft.π
3./ Bessie lived in a time of crisis when thugs screamed elites were morally bankrupt and key institutions were dismissed as irredeemable. Statues were overturned, paranoid conspiracy theories spread like wildfire and there were riots in the streets. Nothing at all like today.
4./ The men driving this crisis were certain they were right (hello antifa) and just as in LA their behaviour was suffused with misogyny. Not long before Bessie's trial the leader of the Reformation,John Knox, published his denunciation of 'A Monstrous Regiment of Women'. 
5./ In it Knox expressed contempt for the few women in any position of authority. Isn't there something of his disgust in those antifa protestors trying to shame a woman who dares to answer back? Here's David Tennant channeling Knox in the movie 'Mary Queen of Scots'. π
6./ One of the Reformation's targets was the Virgin Mary (not another woman!) Knox once threw a statue of her into a river saying 'let her learn to swim'. At his instigation Kilwinning Abbey near Dalry was plundered when Bessie was a teenager. Icons of Mary were burned. Women!!
7./ When Bessie was arrested irregular troops -like antifa gangs- were scouring Ayrshire for hidden monks and nuns so it didn't help her case when she said she'd been guided in her work by a stranger she'd met at Monkcastle House, the old Abbot's palace.
8./ If antifa had interrogated Bessie I'm sure they'd have shared his self-righteousness. He believed in predestination. God had chosen his Elect before they were born. Everyone but the Chosen Few would go to hell. The chosen were saved come what may. So very antifa.
9./ The Elect -or the Woke- can harass and humiliate but they're doing the good work they are called to do. People who answer back or dare to believe biology is real are evil incarnate and must be hounded. I bet they yearn to do to unbelievers what they did in the old days....
10./ Bessie's interrogators may have thought her stranger was a priest in hiding. Soon there was a bigger issue. The stranger, Bessie said, introduced himself as Thomas Reid, who just happened to have died 30 years before. He'd also appear from a tiny hole in a wall. As you do.
11./ Bessie was no doubt a little 'touched' tho is it stranger to believe in ghosts or that God is talking directly to you as John Knox did? Or in a Virgin birth as the entire Catholic church asserted? Under questioning Bessie Dunlop revealed her own idiosyncratic world view.
12./ In Ayrshire, as elsewhere, Christianity was layered on top of folklore. Bessie was clearly immersed in it. She now described how she'd been introduced to the inhabitants of Elfhame, the court of the fairies, at a strange limestone cave in Dalry now known as Cleeves Cove.π
13./ It's hard reading extracts from her Trial not to mutter...shoosh Bessie. Not least when she reports, seemingly matter of factly, she'd even been visited by the Queen of the Fairies. There was probably nothing Knox's followers hated more than a Queen, even a Fairy one.π
14./ Was Bessie's fantasy mixed up with, or inspired by, events? The actual Queen of Scotland had fled from Scotland just 8 years before Bessie's trial. Knox, her persecutor, had died just 4 years before the trial. What's astonishing tho is how resolute Bessie's story remained.
15./ The self-righteous thugs who interrogated her hung Bessie from her thumbs, lit a fire under her feet and slashed her face with a knife. Despite this she denied ever meeting the devil or wishing anyone harm. Nor did she implicate anyone else.
16./ On 8th November 1576 Bessie was burned at the stake at Edinburgh castle. Her crime, however it was described, was effectively having a view of the world that was her own, that challenged the strict orthodoxy of the men who controlled her and her society.
17./ That view was all the more suspect for Bessie just being a woman. 20 years after her execution King James VI published his denunciation of witchcraft, Daemonologie, which explained why there were 20 times more women accused than men. It was, he said, all the fault of Eve.π
18./ Sure, antifa's ideology is different from that of 16th Century Protestants but hate for women courses through both. The visceral anger seems to be triggered whenever a woman refuses to accept as real a male delusion. In the case of the Knox lot it was a Satanic conspiracy.
19./ At the weekend the woke bullies were angry because a woman wouldn't accept the delusion a male was really a female. Bessie refused to unsee her own visions. That woman in LA refused to unsee the harm of knobs waving around in front of little girls.
20./ Of course there is an obvious difference between these two stories. Bessie wasn't wholly sane. In LA the only side hiding from reality and intent on enforcing a lie was the one dressed in Presbyterian black doing to women what John Knox spent his life doing: silencing them.
21./ RIP Bessie Dunlop. And here's to women - and fairies- who refuse to go along with delusions enforced by thugs dressed in black.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oβ¦
theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oβ¦
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