A Collection of Rare and Curious Tracts on Witchcraft and the Second Sight With an Original Essay on Witchcraft — Text and Context

From Essay to Indictment: Shifting Registers

The volume's structure moves deliberately from Webster's philosophical essay—which speaks of 'oracles, augurs, soothsayers, diviners' in a generalizing, Enlightenment-influenced tone—into the raw language of indictments and depositions. The essay treats superstition as a universal human trait, but the documents that follow ground that abstraction in the particular: named women, specific locations, exact dates. The indictment of Annaple Thomsone, for instance, describes a meeting with the devil 'in the lyknes of ane black man' on the road between Linlithgow and Borrowstowness, and records the precise transformation of a gold coin into a 'sklaitt stone.' This shift from the general to the concrete is the collection's central structural device.

Recurring Images: The Devil's Forms and Gifts

Across the trial excerpts, certain images recur with striking consistency. The devil appears 'in the lyknes of ane black man,' as a 'black dowg,' or as a piper at a dance. He offers ale—'sevin gallons' brought from a neighbor's house—and gives gold that later turns to stone. These details are not merely colorful; they form a recognizable pattern of accusation. The depositions also emphasize bodily signs: a right hand that is 'grevowslie pained' after the devil's touch, then healed by a second touch; carnal copulation described in formulaic language. The repetition suggests that both accusers and accused worked within a shared imaginative vocabulary, one that the compiler lets speak for itself without editorial comment.

Movement Between Scenes: Roads, Wells, and Houses

The documents trace a geography of suspicion. Accusations frequently locate encounters at thresholds and transitional spaces: 'the toun-well of Borrowstownes,' 'the coal-hill of Grange,' 'the Croce of Murestaine above Kinneil.' The indictment of Annaple Thomsone moves from a meeting 'in your cwming betwixt Linlithgow and Borrowstownes' to a later encounter 'abowt fyve wekes ago, when you wis goeing to the coal-hill.' The devil also appears in domestic interiors—'in yowr awin howss'—and in the house of Bessie Vickar, where witches 'eatt and drink with the devill.' This alternation between open road and closed room gives the proceedings a restless, almost cinematic quality, as if the accused could never be sure where temptation might find them.

The Second Sight: A Different Kind of Evidence

Following the trial materials, the collection includes a 'Brief Discourse concerning the Second Sight, commonly so called' by an author identified as Frazer. This section introduces a different mode of supernatural belief—one based on vision rather than compact, and treated with more ethnographic curiosity than the legal condemnations that precede it. The juxtaposition is telling: the witchcraft trials rely on confessions extracted under duress and formulaic indictments, while the second sight is discussed as a natural phenomenon, something to be described rather than prosecuted. The compiler does not reconcile these two treatments, leaving readers to consider how the same culture could approach the unseen in such divergent ways.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the gaps between its parts: between Webster's rationalist essay and the credulous legal documents, between the formulaic language of the indictments and the specific, often poignant details that break through. The volume does not argue a single thesis but presents a mosaic of early modern Scottish belief, inviting comparison across genres and decades. It rewards those who read slowly, noting how the same images—a black man, a dance, a coin that crumbles—reappear in different voices and contexts.

Reading Webster’s records of those poor souls tried under such certain laws, I found myself thinking of how power always writes its own evidence. Then my mind drifted to another volume, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 8, part 2: Grover Cleveland — Context and Discussion, and the same quiet weight of official words deciding fates. Odd, the company old books keep.