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In
the year 1696, the daughter of John Shaw, the Laird of Balgarran,
fell victim to one of the most well remembered cases of 'demonic
possession' in Scottish History. It resulted in a large number of
locals being implicated as her tormentors, and concluded with 3
men and 3 women being put to death on Paisley's Gallow Green on
the 10th of June 1697. |
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The
girl's name was Christian. At the time of the proceedings she would
have been regarded as a living illustration of the mighty power
of God. She, an 11-yr-old child, was able to sustain herself against
and repel the devil from her body. |
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Her
concerned family, with the advice of the Church, took Christian
to a famous medical authority, Dr. Brisbane, in Glasgow. Whilst
in his surgery, she spat out a coal cinder, which was said to be
as big as a chestnut, and almost too hot to handle. Dr Brisbane
announced that her affliction was preternatural. What followed were
a series of investigations into the community, witch trials and
the subsequent execution of the 6 guilty men and women who were
said to have cursed and thus invoked Christian's demonic possession.
As terrible as the grisly resolution of this case was, it seemed
to bring to an end the hysteria in Renfrewshire concerning witches
and witchcraft. |
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Through
the passing years, and as society became more sceptical and atheist
about the likes of witches and demons, the character of Christian
has come under close scrutiny, in particular the possible motivations
that drove her actions and prompted her 'condition'. In the early
stages of her possession she was said to have suffered bizarre and
gruesome seizures, below is a list of examples: |
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xxxxxxVomiting items such as straw,
pins, eggshells, orange pills, hair, excrement, and bones, |
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xxxxxxpresenting violent pinch marks
all over her body wounds caused by some unknown 'invisible' person(s), |
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xxxxxxfalling into a trance whereby
she could at times seem deaf, dumb, blind or dead, |
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xxxxxxciting sophisticated theological
points from the scriptures, concepts beyond her artifice, |
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xxxxxxsuccessfully predicting the future, |
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xxxxxxher body contorting and bending
almost double upon herself, |
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xxxxxxeyes sinking back into her head
until they looked to disappear, |
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xxxxxxflying unaided across her classroom, |
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xxxxxxpicking up her glove from the
ground without the use of her hands.
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The
years passed but the case would not be forgotten. The first new
reading of the events, proposed that the 11-year-old Christian was
an impostor (1), a wicked trickster who faked her ailments and enacted
hellish pranks on gullible audiences. She (perhaps aided by her
father) managed to manipulate both the Church and the Law, causing
the deaths of the local community members out of spite. |
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Another
and more contemporary reading is that Christian was in fact suffering
from a then undiagnosed mental illness resulting in her possible
hysteria, her fits and the 'strange' physical feats. 'While the
story is bizarre, modern psychiatry could certainly explain Christian
Shaw's condition
she was suffering from dissociative disorder/conversion
disorder, trance and possession disorder; pica of infancy and childhood;
localisation-related (focal) (partial) idiopathic epilepsy
and
acute and transient psychotic disorder.' (2) |
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But
most recently, using a feminist angle, scholars have investigated
the first hand documentation of the case (3). These quasi-legal/narrative
documents detailed both the dramatic acts of Shaw's possession and
the trial itself. They uncovered a shocking fact: that an anonymous
author wrote these original documents. To cast further aspersions
on the truth of these historical artefacts - the documents contained
many striking resemblances, in tone, and language, to the more famous
Salem witchcraft outbreak in New England in 1692, four years earlier.
(4) Is it possible that the anonymous author had access to and was
inspired by the accounts of events in Salem? |
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These
recent findings lead to many new questions: Was the narrative constructed
to verify the existence of the Devil and thus God? What could have
been the motivation to leave the texts anonymous? Did anyone gain
from this? |
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Whatever
the modus operandi of the author, the narrative has created a legacy
whereby the prevailing belief still remains that Christian was a
bad, or even evil, manipulative child, an embarrassment to Paisley
History. |
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The
fact that as a woman Christian became one of the earliest recorded
Scottish female entrepreneurs (she was responsible for establishing
the Paisley fine thread industry), is little remembered. What actually
happened to the young Christian Shaw and why 6 community members
were put to death, is unfortunately anyone's guess. The anonymity
of the author has turned the narrative into a fictional space, into
which prevailing social imaginings can exist; the idea of a young
educated evil girl is certainly a seductive archetype...
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My
personal response on hearing this tale, was one of curiosity, something
rang untrue about this 11-year-old, daughter of a Laird, who mischievously
conned all these erudite adults. Then the visual aspects of the
story - the eyes retracting into her head, her body bending double
seemed horrifically ridiculous and impossible, but my overall intuition
led me to feel that Christian, our cultural memory of her had been
unjustly distorted, 'Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw'
is my sentinel to who I think Christian might have been, a re-imagining
of her world. |
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What
follows are links to the traces of Christian Shaw's legacy as can
be found today: |
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Online: |
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http://www.magictorch.net/witchcraft.htm
(expanded context and detailed descriptions of the events) |
http://www.firstfoot.com/Great%20Scot/christianshaw.htm
(focusing on her professional live) |
http://www.oakleafcircle.org/Renfrew.htm
(lengthy description) |
http://fp.ayrshireroots.plus.com/Genealogy/Historical/Bargarrans%20Daughter.htm
(local run website) |
http://www.geocities.com/mjjodoin/paisley.htm
(perspective from a possible relative) |
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A
description of Christian from Dr. Hugh V. McLachlan, whose paper
sparked my interest: |
'I
think that Christian Shaw was very bright, very hard-working and
that she had a lot of entrepreneurial flair. After all, she was
the driving force behind the Bargarran Thread company. She outlived
several husbands (three I think) and so she must have been a robust
woman and, presumably, not an unattractive one. As a child she might
seem to have been over much interested in religious matters (although
that is, perhaps, merely how other adults depicted her- nonetheless,
there must have been something in this for the depiction to have
been attempted.) However, I suspect that her position was more balanced
in adult life. I doubt that she was an atheist. She married a minister,
after all. I doubt that she was a religious zealot: her life was
too full and rich for that. |
She
had, I think, a powerful personality. She had charisma. She was
a survivor. |
I
am not sure about what her education would have been. I am sure
she had a good one. I have no doubt that she was steeped in Church
of Scotland Presbyterianism. She would, I think, have been baptised
as a child by an episcopalian minister- such were the religious
revolutions of the time in Scotland. If she had been a religious
bigot and zealot, this might have troubled her. ' Dr. Hugh V. McLachlan,
January 2004. |
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Further
Reading on the wider context:
http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/witches/reading.html |
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References: |
1.
Anon., editor (1877), 'A History of the Witches of Renfrewshire
who were burned on the Gallowgreen of Paisley', Paisley: Alexander
Gardner, p.xxv. |
Sharpe,
C, K. (1884), 'A historical Account of the Belief of Witchcraft
in Scotland', London and Glasgow, p. 172. |
'Vediovis'
(1982), 'The Abuse of Justice by Means of Sorcery', The Scots Law
Times, December 3, p. 319. |
2.
McDonald, S.W., Thom, A and Thom, A, (1996), 'The Balgarran Witchcraft
Trial: A Psychiatric Re-assessment', Scottish Medical Journal,
vol.14, pp.156. |
3.
McLachlan, H.V and Swales, J.W, (2002), 'The bewitchment of Christian
Shaw: a re-assessment of the famous Paisley witchcraft case of 1697',
Brown Ferguson (eds.), Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance
in Scotland since 1400. |
4.
Rosenthal, Bernard (1993), 'Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials
of 1692', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
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