Piercing The Veil

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Piercing the Veil

The Experience of Trance in Early Modern Scotland
History Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
Exam Number: B052105
Supervisor: Dr. Julian Goodare
Word Count: 11,997
Date of Submission: 4th April 2017
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………………………………... 4
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5
Chapter One
The Medical, Psychiatric and Anthropological Literature on Trance ……………… …10
Chapter Two
Spotting Trance in Early Modern Scotland……………………………………………………… 17
Chapter Three
Were they in Control?...................................................................................................................... 28
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................... 36
Bibliography
Primary Sources................................................................................................................................ 39
Secondary Sources ........................................................................................................................... 40
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Julian Goodare for the many stimulating
conversations we had over the course of the year and for kindly allowing me to
consult his draft transcript of Janet Boyman’s indictment.
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Abbreviations
DSM-5 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.),
(Washington, 2013).
Maitland Misc Miscellany of the Maitland Club, 4 vols. (1833-47).
Pitcairn (ed.), Trials Criminal Trials in Scotland, 1488-1624, 3 vols. (ed.)

Robert Pitcairn (Edinburgh, 1833).
Spalding Misc Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 5 vols. (1844-52).
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Introduction
It may be supposed not repugnant to Reason or

Religion to assert ane invisible polity, or a
people to us invisible, having a Commonwealth,
Laws & Oeconomy, made known to us but by
some obscure hints of a few admitted to their
Converse.1
In early modern Scotland, as in the rest of early modern Europe, there

was an entrenched belief that man’s terrestrial world coexisted alongside ‘ane
invisible polity’. This dissertation is about those select few who developed a
relationship with this spiritual otherworld, whether that be receiving spiritual
visitors, travelling to unknown places or acquiring information inaccessible to
their human peers. In focusing on the means by which these diverse
relationships with the otherworld occurred, this dissertation will posit the thesis
that the altered state of consciousness known as trance was the critical facilitator
and will seek to understand how trance was experienced in early modern
Scotland.
Historians of early modern witchcraft, traditionally operating from a
baseline assumption that reports of supernatural experiences reflect nothing
more than superstitious stories, have tended to focus their attention on what
these stories can tell us about people’s beliefs and how such issues as gender,
religion and community conflict manifested themselves in witchcraft
accusations. As the discipline of History has begun to catch up with the ‘cognitive
revolution’ taking hold in other disciplines however, interest has been generated
in the ontological foundation of these experiences.2 By approaching reports of
supernatural experiences as ‘genuine experiences, which occurred in historical
time and space’, historians of the likes of Emma Wilby, Owen Davies, Julian
Goodare, Éva Pócs and Gabor Klaniczay have sought to understand what lay at
1 Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, in (ed.), Michael Hunter, The Occult
Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century
Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p.17.
2 Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern
Europe: Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life (Basingstoke, 2008), p.xx.
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the core of such experiences.3 Systematizing these various ad hoc investigations

in his controversial work The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early
Modern Europe, Edward Bever set out to irreversibly demonstrate how from a
neurobiological perspective early modern supernatural experiences were real.4
As Bever makes clear in his response to Michael Ostling’s critique of his book,
this was not an attempt to dismantle the interpretations of cultural historians,
but an effort to give neurocognitive explanations ‘a place at the table’; an attempt
to show how cognitive mechanisms and cultural constructs worked together to
create real visionary experiences.5 Coming from the other side of the disciplinary
dividing line, medical and psychiatric anthropologists Rebecca Seligman and
Laurence J. Kirmayer have similarly demonstrated the benefits of a cultural
neuroscience approach, insisting that ‘every complex human experience emerges
from an interaction of individual biology and psychology with social context’.6
Such an approach effectively derails the polemical fictional/real arguments that
have plagued the question of early modern supernatural experiences; these
experiences were neither the real result of neurobiological brain functions, nor
culturally scripted fictions, but the result of the two working together. In sharing
such a belief this dissertation will be rejecting even those psychoanalytical
3 Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft, and Dark
Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Brighton, 2010); Emma Wilby,
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early
Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton, 2005); Owen Davies, ‘The
Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations’, Folklore,
114 (2003), pp.181-203; Margaret Dudley and Julian Goodare, ‘Outside In or
Inside Out: Sleep Paralysis and Scottish Witchcraft’, in (ed.), Julian Goodare,
Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters (Basingstoke, 2013); Éva Pócs Between the
Living and the Dead: A Perspective on Witches and Seers in the Early Modern Age
(Budapest, 1999); Éva Pócs and Gabor Klaniczay, Communicating with the Spirits
(Budapest, 2005); Gabor Klaniczay, ‘The Process of Trance: Heavenly and
Diabolic Apparitions in Johannes Nider’s Formicarius’, in (ed.), Nancy Elizabeth
Van Deusen, Procession, Performance, Liturgy, and Ritual (Ottawa, 2007).
4 Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe.
5 Michael Ostling, ‘Secondary Elaborations: Realities and Rationalization of
Witchcraft’, Preternature, 4 (2015), pp.203-210; Edward Bever, ‘Culture Warrior:

A Response to Michael Ostling’s Review Essay on The Realities of Witchcraft and
Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe’, Preternature, 5 (2016), p.113.
6 Rebecca Seligman and Laurence J. Kirmayer, ‘Dissociative Experience and
Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism’, Culture, Medicine

and Psychiatry, 32 (2008), pp.54-55.
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interpretations applied by Diane Purkiss and Lyndal Roper. 7 Whilst the

suggestion that fantasy elements of confessions served as vehicles for repressed
emotion surely reflects some truth, such an interpretation can, as Emma Wilby
has convincingly argued, ‘become reductionist’, closing our minds to other
possibilities.8
In opening our minds to the possibility of trance it is important to first
acknowledge that this was a recognized phenomenon in early modern Scotland.
Trance was explicitly recorded in a number of instances, as for example at the
1675 synod of Aberdeen where it was complained how ‘under pretence of
trances’, people were ‘goeing uith these spirits commonlie called the fairies’.9
Discerning incidents of trance has also been integral to a number of historians’
theses; Éva Pócs in her work Between the Living and Dead argued that magical
practitioners used trance to contact supernatural beings; Carlo Ginzburg in The
Night Battles demonstrated how the benendanti used trance to allow their souls
to engage in night battles; and in his discovery of the seely wight cult Julian
Goodare suggested that its human members entered into trances.10 In spite of
such discussions of trance little attempt has been made to understand the
phenomenon or how it was experienced. The exception to this is Emma Wilby. In
her books The Visions of Isobel Gowdie and Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
Wilby reconstructs a number of likely cases of trance-induced visionary
experiences.11 Without taking away from Wilby’s important contribution, her
almost exclusive use of anthropological studies of shamanic trance to guide her
search for early modern trance experiences is limiting. Shamanic trance
constitutes its own distinct form of trance in that it uniquely involves all three of
7 Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories

(London, 2000); Diane Purkiss, ‘Sounds of Silence: Fairies and Incest in Scottish
Witchcraft Stories’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative,
Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (2001); Lyndal Roper, Witch
Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (London, 2004).
8 Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, p.189.
9 Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery, and Synod of
Aberdeen, (ed.), John Stuart (Aberdeen, 1846), p.306.

10 Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead; Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles:
Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

(Baltimore, 1992); Julian Goodare, ‘The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland’,
Folklore, 123 (2012), pp.198-219.
11 Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie; Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits.
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the following: voluntary control over trance, interplay with audience and post-
trance memory.12 Given this restrictive definition of trance, it is likely the case
that Wilby overlooked other occurrences of trance that did not fit this mold.
Widening the scope of anthropological studies of trance and placing a greater
emphasis on medical and psychiatric insights into trance, this dissertation hopes
to avoid such a problem.
The present-day medical, psychiatric and anthropological insights into
trance will be set out in Chapter One, which intends to conclude with a list of the
salient symptoms of trance. Once equipped with this understanding, it will be
possible to turn to our two early modern sources, Scottish witch trial records
and the literature on Scottish seers, in search of trance experiences. Using the
cluster of likely examples of trance isolated in Chapter Two, we will turn in
Chapter Three to question whether any of these trances were experienced with a
degree of control. The evidence unearthed as a result of using present-day
medical, psychiatric and anthropological insights into trance, should hopefully go
some way in combatting the criticisms made of retrospective diagnosis as a
historical approach to early modern supernatural phenomena.13 In hoping to
answer Tom Webster’s question ‘what do we gain from such an analysis?’ for
instance, this dissertation hopes to demonstrate how using the modern medical,
psychiatric and anthropological literature to both confirm that someone was
experiencing a trance and understand how or why they experienced trance can
yield information about their lives that would otherwise go unnoticed.14
The early modern sources we will be mining for possible trance
experiences are not exempt from problems. Whilst the records of Scottish witch
trials offer an invaluable source of evidence in that they are replete with reports
of supernatural experiences, it has been suggested that such reports reflect elite
interests elicited through coercive interrogation questions. In overcoming this
problem, Chapters Two and Three will only be discussing reports that contain
12 Larry G. Peters and Douglass Price-Williams, ‘Towards an Experiential

Analysis of Shamanism’, American Ethnologist, 7 (1980), p.397.
13 Kathleen Sands, Demon Possession in Elizabethan England (London, 2004).
14 Tom Webster, ‘(Re)possession of Dispossession: John Darrell and Diabolical
Discourse’, in (ed.), John Newton, Witchcraft and the Act of 1604 (Leiden, 2008),
p.108.
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enough details of the sort that lie outside interrogators’ interests to convince us
that they really were told by the accused. Whilst early modern treatises on the
prophetic abilities of Scottish seers might also throw up some likely examples of
trance, we should be mindful of the fact that these authors were intentionally
setting out in search of supernatural phenomena in order to rebut the
mechanical world-view being expounded by contemporary Cartesians. 15 While
not entirely disregarding the insights into trance experiences offered by the
literature on the seers given that second sight is reported in other early modern
sources, this dissertation will nevertheless place less emphasis on the seers.
Ultimately it is the hope of this dissertation that in using these sources we will be
able to gain a multifaceted insight into the trance experiences potentially had in
early modern Scotland. Should we succeed in this aim, we will be forcing an
acknowledgment of both how and why the ‘invisible polity’ would have been
experienced as a complete reality by certain people in early modern Scotland.
15 Michael Wasser, ‘The Mechanical World-View and the Decline of Witch-Beliefs

in Scotland’, in (eds.), Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin & Joyce Miller, Witchcraft
and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, (Basingstoke, 2008).
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I. The Medical, Psychiatric and Anthropological Literature on Trance
Since the preliminary intention of this dissertation is to ascertain whether

trance lay behind reports of supernatural experiences in early modern Scotland,
it is critical that we first develop a clear understanding of trance through an
assessment of the present-day medical, psychiatric and anthropological
literature. In navigating its way through these diverse and often conflicting
disciplinary discussions of trance, it is the aim of this chapter to conclusively
offer a clear definition of trance, which can then be employed in the following
two chapters. Whilst the anthropological literature on trance tends to assess the
phenomenon in light of its social and cultural value, the medical and psychiatric
literature has focused its attention on the neurobiological basis of trance and, up
until recently, considered it to be a wholly pathological disorder. In trying to
avoid a polemical either/or definition of trance this chapter hopes to conclude
with something more akin to the understanding of trance promoted by medical
and psychological anthropologist’s Rebecca Seligman and Laurence J.
Kirmayer. 16 Rejecting the one-dimensional, dichotomous, interpretive
approaches to trance, these anthropologists embraced a cultural neuroscience
approach in their work ‘Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience’ and
in so doing have demonstrated the importance of assessing trance in the light of
its full cultural, social, cognitive and biological complexity.
For the larger part of its medical and psychiatric history trance has been
subsumed within the category of ‘dissociative disorders’, defined by the
American Psychiatric Association as the disconnection between a person’s
thoughts, memories, feelings, actions and sense of who he/she is.17 The problem
of subsuming trance within a larger medical category whose explanation centers
on a link to psychological trauma is that trance has been mostly studied through
a pathological lens.18 This has in turn encouraged clinicians and psychiatrists to
develop their understandings of only the most extreme types of trance, including
possession trance, catatonic trance and absence seizures. The symptoms of these
16 Seligman and Kirmayer, ‘Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience’.

17 Ibid. p.2; DSM-5, pp.291-307.
18 Seligman and Kirmayer, ‘Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience’,
p.35.
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severe trances include any number of the following: derealization (the feeling
that one’s surroundings are not real) and depersonalization (detachment from
the self), loss of consciousness, rigidity of body, unresponsiveness to external
stimuli, behaviors beyond one’s immediate control and distortion of time
perception.19 Indeed, it has generally been the case that any form of dissociation
that led to an experience of detachment from the self and the world and that
interfered with normal perceptual, cognitive, memory and attentional processes,
was considered pathological.20 In more recent years however there has been an
observed shift away from this pathological bias towards dissociation,
particularly in relation to trance.21 In recognizing the distinction between
pathological and non-pathological forms of dissociative trance, the American
Psychiatric Association opened the floodgates for numerous studies of normative
dissociative phenomena.22 As a result, it is now a widely adhered to fact that in
addition to sometimes being a voluntary and/or pleasurable experience,
dissociative trance takes place frequently throughout the day. Evidence for such
normative types of trance, involving subtle depersonalization and derealization,
are found in the simplest of everyday cognitive processes, such as: daydreaming,
‘highway hypnosis’ and ‘getting lost’ in a book or movie.23 These normative
dissociative experiences are not induced by trauma as other more extreme forms
of dissociative trance are, but instead by intense absorption (a narrowing of
one’s attention or concentration), leading one to become unaware of their
19 DSM-5, p.302; Johnna Medina, ‘“Other Specified” and “Unspecified”

Dissociative Disorders’, published on PsychCentral.com,
https://psychcentral.com/disorders/other-specifiedunspecified-dissociative-
disorder/ ; accessed 15 October, 2016.
p.37.
21 Peters and Price-Williams, ‘Towards an Experiential Analysis of Shamanism’,
p.402.
22 DSM-5, p.291; Rochelle Melina Kinson, Aaron Ang Lye Poh and Helen Chen,
‘Possession Trance, Epilepsy, and Primary Psychosis: the Challenges in Diagnosis

and Management’, The Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 26 (2014), pp.E26-E27; Julio
Fernando Peres, Alexander Moreira-Almedia, Leonardo Caixeta, Frederico Leao
and Andrew Newburg, ‘Neuroimaging During Trance State: A Contribution to the
Study of Dissociation’, PLoS One 7 (2012), e49360; Lisa D. Butler, ‘Normative
Dissociation’, Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 29 (2006), pp.45-62.
23 Lisa D. Butler and Oxana Palesh, ‘Spellbound: Dissociation in the Movies’,
Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 5 (2004), pp.63-88.
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external environment.24 Such absorption can be stimulated by engagement with

either external objects or internal mentation.25 Given that the early modern
source material employed in this dissertation tends to only record extreme cases
of visionary experience it might not be possible to discern such normative
experiences of trance. This does not however mean that the following two
chapters will only be concerned with the most intense, pathological, forms of
trance. Possession trance for example will not even be considered. This decision
is justified by the recent update to the DSM-5, which has made clear that trance
and possession trance, given their phenomenological differences, cannot be
subsumed within the same category, the latter being more synonymous with
dissociative identity disorder.26
This shift away from the pathological bias towards dissociative trance
mirrors the anthropological discussions of trance. It is commonly agreed upon
amongst anthropologists that the ability to generate visionary phenomena while
in trances is a universal feature of the mind commonly experienced.27 Erika
Bourguignon in her study A Cross-Cultural Study of Dissociational Studies proved
for example that 90% of a worldwide sample of 488 societies displayed trance.28
More recently, the psychiatric anthropologist Richard J. Castillo has asserted that
withdrawal of attention from the environment and society need not be
considered an example of psychopathology.29 Most useful to our enquiry is his
conclusion that ‘the brain has the ability to create an alternative subjective
reality that can include divided consciousness, visions, voices, extreme beliefs,
and withdrawal from society by means of profound trance’.30 Complementing his
conclusion that trance can be a valuable human experience is the work of Sheryl
C. Wilson and Theodore C. Barber, ‘The Fantasy-Prone Personality’, and that of
24 Ibid.
25 Richard J. Castillo, ‘Trance, Functional Psychosis, and Culture’, Psychiatry, 66
(2003), p.12.
26 DSM-5, pp.292-298.
27 Castillo, ‘Trance, Functional Psychosis, and Culture’, p.13.
28 Erika Bourguignon, A Cross-Cultural Study of Dissociational States (Columbus,
1968).
29 Castillo, ‘Trance, Functional Psychosis, and Culture’, pp.17-18.
30 Ibid. p.13.
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Tanya Marie Luhrmann in her book When God Talks Back.31 In the former work, a
number of individuals (perhaps as many as 4% of the population), are reported
to have such strong hallucinate and hypnotic abilities that they are able to ‘“see”,
“hear”, “smell”, “touch” and fully experience whatever they fantasize’.32 By
becoming immersed in such hallucinatory fantasies these fantasy-prone people
will ‘lose either partial or complete awareness of time and place’ in an
experience that is ‘characteristic of hypnosis or trance’.33 In a similar vein of
enquiry, Luhrmann has successfully shown how evangelicals’ use of kataphatic,
or ‘imagination rich’, prayer allows them to experience mental images with such
sensorial richness as to completely convince them that they are talking and
walking with God.34 Such experiences of trance, fuelled by mental imagery
cultivation, do not typically involve the more pathological symptoms outlined
earlier, a fact which allows us to broaden the scope of our investigation into the
way trance was experienced in early modern Scotland.
Thus far in this chapter we have acknowledged that trance exists on a
continuum and how on the polarized ends of this pathological/non-pathological
spectrum, it can be induced in response to trauma, through the volitional will of
a fantasy-prone person and as a result of normative shifts in attention. There are
however a multitude of other ways to induce trance. The most exhaustive list of
trance inducements has been provided by Michael James Winkleman, who
includes:
… hallucinogens, opiates, and other drugs; extensive running or other motor

behavior; hunger, thirst and sleep loss; auditory stimulation and other forms of
intense sensory stimulation, such as physical torture or temperature extremes;
sensory deprivations, sleep states and meditation; and a variety of
psychophysiological imbalances or sensitivities resulting from hereditarily
31 Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber, ‘The Fantasy-Prone Personality:

Implications for Understanding Imagery, Hypnosis, and Parapsychological
Phenomena’, in (ed.), Anees A. Cheikh, Imagery: Current Theory, Research and
Application (New York, 1983); Tanya M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back:
Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York, 2012).
32 Wilson and Barber, ‘The Fantasy-Prone Personality’, p.340.
33 Ibid, p.353.
34 Luhrmann, When God Talks Back.
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transmitted nervous system liabilities… or other trauma to the central nervous

system.35
Whilst the majority of early modern reports of visionary experience tend not to
explicitly reference trance, let alone include a clinical break down of trance
symptoms, it may be possible to confirm in some cases that trance was at the
core of a person’s supernatural experience if one of the above trance
inducements is explicitly or implicitly mentioned. A prime example of this would
be the 18-week fast that was undoubtedly the cause of Jean Crie’s explicitly
reported experience of ‘trance’.36 An example of where this list of trance
inducements might help us uncover trance experiences in cases where it is not
explicitly reported is the case of Elspeth Reoch.37 The confessions of Elspeth
Reoch are replete with personal suffering and are highly suggestive, as Diane
Purkiss has convincingly demonstrated, of traumatic experiences including
incest, teenage pregnancy and pre-marital sex.38 While Purkiss believes that the
‘story’ Elspeth told in her confession reflects a symbolic narrative through which
she could cathartically discuss her traumas, the medical, psychiatric and
anthropological literature would strongly suggest that the very experience of
these traumas encouraged Elspeth to undergo trance and experience visions.39
This might allow us to suggest that there was more to Elspeth Reoch’s report
that just a story.
Finally, Winkleman’s mention of sleep-states as a cause of trance will
prove profitable to this enquiry. As a ‘betwixt and between’ state that falls in
between waking consciousness and REM sleep, trance often involves phases of
what neurologist James H. Austin has coined as ‘micro-REM dreaming while
35 Michael James Winkleman, ‘Shamans and other “Magico-Religious” Healers: A

Cross-Cultural Study of their Origins, Nature and Social Transformation’, Journal
of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 18 (1990), p.321.
36 John Hunter (ed.), The Diocese and Presbytery of Dunkeld, 1660-1689, (London,
1918), vol.1. p. 266.

37 ‘Acts and Statutes of the Lawting Sheriff and Justice Courts Within Orkney and
Zetland M.DC.II-M.DC.XLIV’, in Maitland Misc., i, pp.187-191.

38 Purkiss, ‘Sounds of Silence’.
39 Ibid. p.82.
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awake’.40 This explains why trance-induced visions often take place during that
transitional state from wakefulness to sleep known as the hypnagogic state, a
phase when the muscles relax, the breath is controlled and internal mentation is
uninterrupted.41 Pertinent to this type of natural trance inducement is the
evidence of early modern sleeping patterns reported in Roger Ekirch’s article,
‘Sleep We Have Lost’. 42 Ekirch discusses in this work how early modern Western
Europeans on ‘most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by
up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness’ that generally took place around
midnight.43 The fact that fairy and witch visits were most popularly known for
taking place at midnight might not be a coincidence and thus attention to the
time visionary experiences were reported to have taken place may very well
reveal likely experiences of trance.44 Indeed, many pre-industrial conditions
would have been conducive to experiencing trance; chronic under-nourishment,
physical toil, long working hours, ingestion of hallucinogenic plant toxins like
ergot and exposure to high-levels of disease are all things commonly experienced
in pre-industrial Scotland that are conducive to experiencing trance. 45
Additionally, we must not lose sight of the fact that early modern Scotland was
committed to an animist worldview and, as such, intercessions with occult forces
were both believed to be real and valued.46 As Seligman and Kirmayer have
demonstrated, in cultural contexts where spirit communication is valued, there
will be ‘increased opportunities to experience dissociative phenomena like
trance’.47 Combining the conviction and value placed on spirit communication
40 Stanley Krippner, ‘Trance and the Trickster: Hypnosis as a Liminal

Phenomenon’, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53
(2005), p.112; James H. Austin, quoted in Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and
Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, p.197.
42 Roger Ekirch, ‘Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles’,
The American Historical Review, 1 (2001), pp.343-386.

43 Ibid. p.364.
44 Julian Goodare, ‘Boundaries of the Fairy Realm’, in (eds.), Karin E. Olsen and
Jan R. Veenstra, Airy Nothings: Imagining the Otherworld of Faerie from the
Middle Ages to the Age of Reason (Leiden, 2014), p.159.
45 Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, p.248.
46 Ibid. pp.248-49.
p.50.
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with the heightened psychological and physical stresses on early modern man,
we can assume that trance-induced visionary experiences would have occurred
with greater frequency than they do in present-day Western societies.
This survey of the medical, psychological and anthropological literature
has revealed the huge range in the type and depths of trance that can be
experienced. The symptoms we have discerned at the more extreme end of the
trance spectrum are as follows: derealization and depersonalization, loss of
consciousness or stupor, rigidity of body, behaviors beyond one’s immediate
control and distortion of time perception. Given the fact that there are a number
of different trance experiences to be had, it is not however the case that all of
these symptoms must be present to indicate that someone was experiencing a
trance. Common to all types of trance, the normative everyday trances as well as
those that are intentioned and driven by mental imagery cultivation, is a loss of
awareness of one’s surroundings. Equipped as we are now with a thorough
understanding of trance and its most salient characteristics, as well as the likely
assurance that early modern conditions and beliefs would have made trance a
frequently experienced phenomenon, we can now turn to the early modern
sources in search of such experiences.
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II. Spotting Trance in Early Modern Scotland
Equipped with a thorough medical, psychiatric and anthropological

understanding of trance we now turn to the early modern sources where we will
meet with reports of spirit encounters, uncanny prophetic sight and journeys to
the witches Sabbath and Fairyland. Whilst it is the view of this dissertation that
these experiences were visionary in nature rather than records of empirically
real events, this does not take away from the degree to which they were
experienced as real. In redefining what is meant by having a real supernatural
experience, this chapter hopes to demonstrate how in those cases where trance
can be discerned, the visions generated would have been experienced with such
vividness as to make the claim that they were nothing more than fictions or
dreams nonsensical. In order to prove this, the following chapter will be looking
to discern the salient symptoms of trance in reports of supernatural experiences
found in the Scottish witch trials and the literature on Scottish seers. Should we
be successful in this aim, our secondary objective will be to understand the
extent to which early modern trance was experienced on the spectrum that was
indicated to us by the present-day medical, psychiatric and anthropological
literature.
Trance seems to have been a readily used word in early modern Scotland.
In the Dictionary of the Middle Scots Language, ‘trance’ (also ‘traunce’ or
‘trauns’) is defined as any of the three following phenomena: i) An abnormal
state of mind, typically of excitement, ecstasy or terror; ii) A state of semi-
consciousness between sleeping and waking; and iii) A state of complete
unconsciousness.48 We see trance occasionally receiving mention in Middle Scots
anthologies, such as in the case of the anonymous Middle Scots poems ‘Christis
Kirk on the Green’ and ‘Peblis to the Play’.49 In both poems ‘trance’/’transs’
seems to be a word that is used to express a feeling of overwhelming ecstasy, as
indicated in the following line from the former poem: ‘He playit so schill and
48 Trance n., Dictionary of the Scots Language,

http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/trance_n ; accessed 15 February 2017.
49 Allan H. MacLaine (ed.), The Christis Kirk Tradition: Scots Poems of Folk
Festivity (Glasgow, 1996), p.5, p.12.
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sang so sweit Quhill towsy tuke a trans’.50 Whilst this is by no means evidence of
a real trance, it does alert us to the fact that trance was a recognized
phenomenon in early modern Scotland. This would certainly lend support to our
earlier stated assumption that trance would have been experienced with greater
frequency in early modern Scotland than in present-day Western societies.
In order to find real trance experiences we now turn to the early modern
Scottish witch trial records. Whilst trance is explicitly mentioned in a number of
reports, it is unfortunately the case that most lack the details that would indicate
to us how the actual individuals experienced their trances. The 1675 Synod of
Aberdeen simply mentions that people ‘under the pretence of trance’ were
‘goeing uith these spirits commonlie called the faeries’, a statement which at
most makes the connection between trance and visionary experiences.51 In the
cases of Margaret Wallace and Jean Crie we see examples of trance being
connected to some of the trance-inducements Winkleman gave us in Chapter
One: the ‘suddane transe’ Margaret Wallace experienced was surely in
connection to the ‘diseis that sche had tane the day befoir’, whilst Jean Crie ‘lay in
trance for certain days’ certainly as a result of having undertaken a ‘fast for 17 or
18 weeks’.52 Other than confirming for us that trance can be induced by severe
nourishment deprivation or as a result of illness, these reports give us little
insight into how Margaret or Jean experienced their own trances, their voices
being drowned out of the records.
The most detailed report that explicitly mentions trance is the indictment
of John Feane.53 In this case, John Feane’s state of ‘extasies and transis’ is directly
linked to his experience of being ‘transportit to mony montanes, as thocht throw
all the warld’ and to the more general feeling he describes of ‘his spreit [being]
tane’.54 Some classic symptoms of trance are present in these descriptions of
50 Ibid. p.12.
51 Selections from the Records of the Kirk Session, Presbytery, and Synod of
Aberdeen, (ed.), John Stuart (Aberdeen, 1846), p.306.
52 Pitcairn (ed.), Criminal Trials in Scotland… Embracing the Entire Reigns of
James IV. And V. Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI (Edinburgh, 1833), III, p.510;
John Hunter (ed.), The Diocese and Presbytery of Dunkeld, 1660-1689, (London,
1918), vol.1. p.266.
53 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, III, p.209-213.
54 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, III, p.210.
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flight, indicating to us that John Feane was experiencing intense derealization

and a degree of depersonalization, as well as likely distortion of time perception
and unresponsiveness to external stimuli. In other cases where trance is not
explicitly mentioned but descriptions of flight to either the Sabbath or Fairyland
are, we can use the similar descriptions of how individuals felt suddenly
detached from their bodies and immediate surroundings to suggest that they too
were experiencing trance. There are a number of cases where experiences of
derealization and depersonalization are strongly suggested: Isobell Elliot in 1678
reported how “she left her bodie in Pencaitland, and went in the shape of a
corbie, to Laswade”; Isobel Gowdie in 1662 confessed how ‘ve vold flie away,
quhair ve vold, be ewin as strawes wold flie wpon an hie-way’; and Bessie
Henderson was reportedly ‘carried by the said green kirtles wherever they
pleased’.55 What is particularly interesting about these descriptions of flight,
with the potential exception of Bessie Henderson given that this is not her own
description, is the suggestion that these women believed they were flying in
spirit rather than in body. This is clearly indicated in Isobell Elliot’s case since it
is said that she ‘left her bodie in Pencaitland’, but it is also suggested by Isobel
Gowdie, who reported how members of her coven would ‘put boosomes in our
bed with our husbandis, till ve return again to them’.56 If taken literally, this
might suggest to us that Isobel Gowdie flew physically, leaving behind a fake
magical body with a view to fooling her husband. It is equally feasible to suggest
however, as Emma Wilby does, that Isobel was making recourse to subtle body
lore, believing there to be a mode of herself which was detached from her
physical body and able to roam the world with spirits.57 If the latter is more
reflective of Isobel’s understanding of her own experience then we can suggest
that what she was undergoing was catatonic trance, a type of trance that causes
muscular rigidity and decreased sensitivity and which results in a conscious
awareness of the weight of one’s own body in contrast to the lightness of one’s
55 Trial of Isobel Elliot, quoted in John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions
of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1834), p.590; Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, iii, II, p.604; Bessie
Henderson’s Confession, quoted in Goodare, ‘The Cult of the Seely Wights’, p.208.
56 John Graham Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, p.591; Pitcairn (ed.),
Trials, iii, II, p.604.

57 Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, pp.295-297.
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spirit. Without the neurobiological understanding of catatonic trance states

Isobel Gowdie and perhaps also Isobell Elliot were rationalizing their
experiences in the only way availarble to them: through subtle body lore. A view
of what this might actually have looked like from an onlooker’s perspective,
which at the very least strengthens the evidence that catatonic trance was
experienced in early modern Scotland, is offered in King James VI’s
Daemonologie; James reports how the bodies of certain magical practitioners
would appear ‘senseless’ and ‘as it were a sleepe’, at the times they claimed to
have had visions.58
In cases where flight to otherworldly locations do not feature in the
record but details of visits from otherworldly beings predominate, it is more
difficult to discern trance experiences since we often lack the most obvious
symptoms of trance: derealization, depersonalization, unresponsiveness to
outside stimuli, rigidity of body and/or distortion of time perception. Deprived of
descriptions that would be suggestive of such symptoms and in the face of often
completely naturalistic descriptions of spirits, it is not surprising that these
visionary encounters have on occasion been confused for empirically real events
or people. A prime example of this is Bessie Dunlop’s confession; her detailed
description of Thome Reid as ‘ane honest wele elderlie man’ who was ‘gray
bairdit’ and dressed in a ‘gray coitt with Lumbard slevis of the auld fassoun’
seemed so real as to make Robert Pitcairn, the first editor of her trial, question
whether this was not in fact a real person, ‘some heartless wag, acquainted with
the virtues and use of herbs’.59 Whilst lifelike descriptions like this almost
convince us of the reality of Bessie’s encounters, the illusion is broken by
fantastical anomalies that give us an insight into her dream-like state of
consciousness. We see for instance how Thome Reid was able to enter spaces
that no ‘erdlie man culd haif gane throw’.60 A similar interplay between realistic
58 James VI, Daemonolgoie, quoted in Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits,
p.178.
59 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II, p.51, p.50.
60 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II, p.52.
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descriptions and slips of fantastical detail permeates the confessions of Andrew

Man, Elspeth Reoch, Alison Pearson and Janet Boyman.61
In looking to explain what lay behind these encounters, Emma Wilby
insists that ‘we can be in no doubt that the experiences described occurred in a
dramatically altered state of consciousness’.62 Her common sense conclusion is
supported by a comparison with anthropological studies of shamanic trance,
which in her mind effectively ‘indicate that this lack of reference [to altered
states of consciousness] cannot be taken as evidence that visionary experience
or trance did not occur’.63 There is however more concrete evidence within the
trial reports that might allow us to strengthen Wilby’s conclusion. It is at this
point that Winkleman’s list of inducements prove helpful in suggesting that
trance was occurring, in particular, his mention of sleep states. As a ‘betwixt and
between’ state of consciousness, trance states typically involve periods of ‘micro-
REM dreaming while awake’, something that would help explain the vivid,
disjointed and often nonsensical visionary narratives described by the likes of
Bessie Dunlop, Alison Pearson, Elspeth Reoch and Andrew Man. 64 This
hypothesis is further strengthened by the fact that these individuals appear to
have experienced their visions in hypnagogic states, as suggested in the
following descriptions, which show that: i) Bessie Dunlop was visited by Thome
Reid while she was ‘lyand in child-bed-lair’; ii) Alison Pearson ‘wald be in hir bed
hail and feir’ when she saw the Queen of Elphane; iii) Elspeth Reoch would be
tormented by the fairy man who ‘wald never let her sleip’; and iv) Andrew Man,
after a night of being with the fairies and Christsonday would ‘find thy self in a
moss on the morne’.65 This evidence might allow us to hypothesize that what
61 Spalding Misc., i, pp.119-125; ‘Acts and Statutes of the Lawting Sheriff and
Justice Courts Within Orkney and Zetland M.DC.II-M.DC.XLIV’, in Maitland Misc., i,
pp.187-191; Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II, pp.161-165; National Records of Scotland,
indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67, cited from a draft transcript
by Julian Goodare.
62 Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, p.174.
63 Ibid. p.173.
64 Kripner, ‘Trance and the Trickster’, p.112; Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft
and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, p.197.

65 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II, p.54; Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II, p.162; ‘Acts and
Statutes of the Lawting Sheriff and Justice Courts Within Orkney and Zetland
M.DC.II-M.DC.XLIV’, in Maitland Misc., i, pp.187-191; Spalding Misc., i, p.121.
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these individuals were experiencing was a heightened and extended version of

the trance states that most people are able to naturally experience in hypnagogic
states.
Pertinent to this evidence of nightly encounters with spirits is A. Roger
Ekirch’s research into early modern sleeping patterns discussed in the previous
chapter.66 Taking this discussion further, it seems particularly germane to this
investigation that according to Ekirch, during the intervening period between
first and second sleep, individuals would experience ‘confused thoughts that
wandered at will’, coupled with ‘feelings of contentment’ in an experience that
Ekirch believes to be similar to the ‘the “altered state of consciousness”
researchers have detected in clinical experiments’.67 The comparison made
between this intervening period of wakefulness and an altered state of
consciousness was made even stronger by Dr. Thomas Wehr, who, after
conducting a controlled experiment where these pre-industrial sleeping patterns
were re-created, concluded that the intervening period of wakefulness possessed
an ‘endocrinology all of its own’, which, owing to the heightened levels of
prolactin (a hormone that allows chickens to sit contentedly atop their eggs for
extended periods of time), was akin ‘to something approaching an altered state
of consciousness not unlike meditation’.68 In light of this evidence and in light of
the fact that it seems very likely that most of the accused witches in question
experienced their vivid hallucinations in periods of intervening wakefulness, it
would not be unfeasible to suggest that their vivid hallucinations took place in
naturally-entered trance states, which subsequently allowed their conscious or
unconscious thoughts to generate vivid and self-propelling illusory narratives.
Such a hypothesis is strongly supported by a reference made to trance in William
Dunbar’s poem Fasternis Evin in Hell: ‘OFF Februar the fyiftene nycht/ Full lang
befoir the dayis lycht/ I lay in till a trance;/ And than I saw baith hevin and
hell’.69 These poetic lines would certainly endorse the connections we have thus
66 Ekrich, ‘Sleep We Have Lost’.

67 Ibid, p.373.
68 Sir Thomas Wehr, quoted in Ekirch, ‘Sleep We Have Lost’, p.41.
69 William Dunbar, Fasternis Evin in Hell, in James Kinsley (ed.), The Poems of
William Dunbar (Oxford, 1979), lines 1-4, p.150.
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far been drawing between hypnagogic states, trance and the experience of vivid
visions.
The fact that these hallucinations were experienced through a number of
senses other than sight and the fact that they were evidently believed to be real
by those that reported experiencing them, would refute the possibility that these
visionary experiences were dreams that took place in REM sleep states as
opposed to in trances. The research conducted by Wilson and Barber into the
ability of what they term ‘fantasy-prone personalities’ sheds some useful light on
this particular issue; in a similar experience to what occurred amongst our
accused witches, Wilson and Barber’s fantasy-prone subjects ‘experience[d] a
reduction in orientation to time, place, and person that is characteristic of
hypnosis or trance’ and in this state would ‘experience their fantasies at
hallucinatory intensities (“as real as real”) in all sense modalities’.70 Isobel
Gowdie is a particularly useful example of how early modern visions could be
experienced in all sense modalities: in addition to the obvious visual element of
her experience, there was a potential auditory element, as indicated in one
example of how she ‘said the forsaidis wordis thryse ower’; a touch element
manifested through imagined pain, as evidenced in her reports of how ‘[the
Devil] wold be beating and scnurgeing ws all wp and downe … and we wold be
still cryeing’; and potentially even a taste and smell element, as implied by the
references to feasting.71 In the case of Wilson and Barber’s fantasy-prone
subjects, the result of experiencing hallucinations as “real as real” not only meant
that 85% of the subjects would ‘confuse their memories of their fantasies with
their memories of actual events’, but even on occasion meant they would put
themselves in harms way.72 One of the fantasy-prone subjects found herself on
one occasion in the middle of a traffic-filled street, believing all the while that she
had been ‘walking with her imaginary pet lamb through an imaginary
meadow’. 73 An almost direct parallel for this individual’s experience was
reported in the trial of Andrew Man:
70 Wilson and Barber, ‘The Fantasy-Prone Personality’, p.376, p.353.

71 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, iii, II, p.610, p.613, p.612.
73 Ibid. p.348
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Thou grantis the elphis will mak the appear to be in a fair chalmer, and yit thow
will find thy self in a moss on the morne; and that thay will appear to have
candlis, and licht, and swordis, quihilk wilbe nothing els bot deed gress and
strayes.74
Alison Pearson and Janet Cowie were reported to have had very similar
experiences.75
Whilst we can certainly count these individuals’ experiences as amongst
those shared by as many as 4% of people in our present-day population who are
able to generate “real as real” hallucinations while in trance states, we should
also consider sleepwalking as a probable cause. This would not mean
categorizing the experiences of Andrew Man, Alison Pearson and Janet Cowie as
something markedly different from trance, rather it would demonstrate yet
another way that trance was experienced in early modern Scotland. Often
defined as a half-waking trance, sleepwalking is a combination of sleep and
wakefulness that takes place as a result of arousals during slow-wave sleep at
the beginning of the night.76 It is the fact that this very particular altered state of
consciousness takes place during slow-wave sleep (the deepest sleep within non-
rapid eye movement) that ambulation, dream-like visionary narratives and high
performance tasks are possible. 77 This would contrast with the earlier
experiences of trance we isolated which appeared to have taken place in
hypnagogic states. Having already observed trances that were induced by
sickness and nourishment deprivation, likely examples of catatonic trance and
probable instances of fantasy-driven trance taking place in hypnagogic states, we
have now potentially fallen upon another type of trance that involved the up-
until-now elusive trance symptom, namely, behaviors beyond one’s conscious
74 Spalding Misc., i, pp.121-122.

75 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II, p.162; Records of Elgin, 1234-1800, II (Aberdeen,
1908), p.357.
76 Christian Guilleminault, D. Poyares, Falak Abat and L. Palombini, ‘Sleep and
Wakefulness in Somnambulism: A Spectral Analysis Study’, Journal of

Psychosomatic Research, 51 (2001), pp.411-416.
77 Antonio Zadra, Alex Desautels, Dominique Petit and Jacques Montplaisir,
‘Somnambulism: Clinical Aspects and Pathophysiological Hypotheses’, The

Lancet Neurology, 12 (2013), pp.285-294.
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control. All of these experiences exhibit the fundamental trance symptoms of

derealization and depersonalization whilst also involving a variety of other
respective symptoms. This would indicate that there was in fact a variation in the
type and depth of trance that was experienced in early modern Scotland.
Finally, it is possible when we turn to the literature on the Scottish seers
to observe instances of trance that took place on the more normative end of the
spectrum. Although we should be careful not to categorically distinguish
between the trance experiences of accused witches and seers, it is possible to
observe some general differences between the two. The most distinctive way a
seer seems to have experienced trance is spontaneously and in waking sense, the
trance being short in duration and the corresponding vision being more akin to a
flashing image than a film-like narrative. A representative example of this can be
seen in John Frazer’s A Brief Discourse concerning the Second Sight, where he
reports how a certain Duncan Campbel was ‘one morning walking in the Fields’
when ‘he saw a dozen of men carrying a Bier, and knew them all but one, and
when he looked again, all was evanished’.78 The fact that seers’ visions seem to
have generally taken place during an ‘awaking sense’, as Kirk reports, and
usually lasted only a ‘few seconds’, as Martin Martin tells us, marks a clear
difference with the trance-induced visions we have thus far encountered.79 In
accounting for this difference and also proving that trance was still likely at the
core of the seers’ visions of future events we turn to what appears to be inducing
these visions, which in most cases seems to be a monotonous focus. As we
observed in the first chapter, monotonous focus can effectively destabilize
ordinary states of consciousness, inducing trance and the visions they
precipitate. Evidence that this process was at the core of seers’ visionary
experiences comes most clearly from The Secret Commonwealth:
The sight is of noe long duration, only continueing so long as they can keep their
eye steady without twinkling. The hardy therefor fix their look, that they may see
78 John Frazer, A Brief Discourse concerning the Second Sight, Commonly so Called,
Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.194.
79 Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p. 86; Martin Martin, A Description of the
Western Islands of Scotland (c.1695), in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.56.
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the longer, But the timorous see only glances, their eyes alwayes twinkling at the
first sight of the object.80
Kirk’s hypothesis for how seers experienced their visions is highly indicative of
trance, reminding us of Richard J. Castillo’s discussion of how trance-induced
yogic meditation ‘has its key dynamic in a narrowed focus of attention’.81 The
type of ‘fixed attention’ Castillo discusses is that which involves ‘holding the
attention of the participating self on a certain object’, whether that be ‘a visual
image; an image in the mind; a particular sound… or any external object’. 82 As
Castillo and others have explained, such monotonous focus allows the brain to
‘block cognition of external reality and allow a mental image to dominate the
conscious awareness of the individual’.83 Turning to the literature on the seers
we find many descriptions that indicate the use of this trance-inducing
technique. In the widely reported case of a servant who, while digging on a hill,
received a vision of ‘an armie of English-men leading of horses’ for instance, it is
reported how the man ‘look[ed] very attentively at the middle of a very high hill’
which he ‘gazed att so stedfastly’.84 In this particular case it would appear that
the seer in question unintentionally induced trance by cultivating a monotonous
focus, probably assisted by the rhythmic process of digging. What this
demonstrates, in clear support of the medical and psychiatric discussions set out
in the previous chapter, is that normative experiences of trance similar perhaps
to modern-day experiences of ‘highway hypnosis’ were also experienced in early
modern Scotland.
Whilst we have not isolated a large enough number of likely instances of
trance to endorse the view that this was a widely experienced phenomenon in
early modern Scotland, our findings certainly do not refute such a possibility.
What we have managed to discern unquestionably is the fact that trances do
tend to lie behind early modern reports of supernatural experiences.
Descriptions of flight have proven a particularly strong example of this, being
80 Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.91.

81 Castillo, ‘Trance, Functional Psychosis, and Culture’, p.12.
82 Ibid. p.12.
83 Ibid. p.13.
84 Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.92.
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highly suggestive of those fundamental trance symptoms: derealization,

depersonalization and distortion of time perception. We have also observed how
in those cases where trance is not explicitly mentioned or descriptions of
supernatural experiences are not so forthcoming of trance symptoms, being able
to discern likely trance-inducements such as sleep states can strengthen a
diagnosis of what appears to be a likely trance experience. As a result of the
approach taken in this chapter, we have been able to isolate a number of
different trance experiences: catatonic trance, trances involving unconsciously
controlled behavior (sleepwalking), fantasy-driven trances occurring in
hypnagogic states and even normative, everyday, trances. Such evidence allows
us to endorse the present-day shift in medical and psychiatric discussions of
trance, which now emphasize the range in both the type and depth of trance that
can be experienced.
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III: Were they in control?
Having isolated a number of instances where trance seems to have been

at the core of a person’s supernatural experience, we can turn now to question
whether any degree of control was exercised over these trances. In asking this
question we should hopefully be able to reach a more individualized
understanding of the way trance was experienced in early modern Scotland. It is
certainly the case that many of the trances we unearthed in the previous chapter
were experienced involuntarily, the primary examples being Margaret Wallace
and Jean Crie whose trances were brought on by illness and fasting respectively.
Whilst this chapter may very well unearth examples of individuals who were
able to intentionally induce trance, we should not discount the possibility that a
level of control was had even in those cases where trance seems to have been
involuntarily induced. In these cases we will pay close attention to the particular
visions that were had while in trances, attempting to discern whether these were
shaped or conditioned in any way that might indicate a degree of control. Finally,
it is the hope of this chapter that in examining what level of control was had over
early modern trances we might also be able to understand the extent to which
these people would be considered pathological by modern medical standards.
Whilst many of the occurrences of trance this investigation has unearthed
appear to have been experienced involuntarily, there are a few cases where an
impressive level of control over trance can be discerned. A key example of this is
Janet Boyman, an individual of particular importance to this dissertation owing
to her position amongst the seely wights, a Scottish shamanic cult whose human
members reportedly entered into trances. 85 While Janet’s confession of having
been ‘subject to fairies’ certainly implies, as Julian Goodare asserts, that ‘she had
experienced travelling in spirit with the fairies - probably involuntarily, but
evidently in trance’, there is no further accessible evidence that will allow for an
additional examination of Boyman’s trance-induced visionary night flights.86
85 Goodare, ‘The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland’; Julian Goodare, 'Seely
Wights, Fairies and Nature Spirits in Scotland', in Éva Pócs (ed.), Body, Soul,
Spirits and Supernatural Communication (forthcoming).
86 Goodare, ‘The Cult of the Seely Wights in Scotland’, p.206.
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There is nevertheless a myriad of evidence that will allow us to assert that Janet
Boyman intentionally induced trance in order to be visited by spirits. In one part
of her trial it is reported for instance how she would:
… past thairwith to ane well under Arthours Saitt thatt rynnis southwert, quhilk
ye call ane elrich well and thair maid incantatioun and invocatioun of the evill
spreitis quhome ye callit upoun for to come to yow and declair quhat wald
becum of that man and thair come thaireftir first ane grit blast lyke a quhirll
wind and thaireftir thair come the schaip of ane man…87
Whilst we do not get any hint that Janet Boyman used dance, music or drum
beating, the standard trance inducing methods employed by ritualistic shamans,
her choice of Arthur’s Seat is potentially revealing; in this quiet and wide-open
space, we could suggest the possibility that Boyman would sit and focus herself
in a meditative state before calling upon the spirits in service of her clients.88
Additionally, as Julian Goodare has shown in a forthcoming paper, there appears
to be some sort of ‘formula’ to Boyman’s self-proclaimed ‘craft’, one which
involved patterned behaviors including verbal formulae, specific times and even
a ritual action: ‘thair maid your prayaris ye haldand evir the thowne of your
rycht hand lukkin in your neith’ (‘There you made your prayers, while holding
the thumb of your right hand inside your fist’).89 Similar to Janet Boyman’s
invocation of the spirits through what appears to be intentionally induced
trances is Andrew Man’s ability to ‘rasit’ Christsonday and the Quene of Elphen
‘be the speking of the word Benedicite’.90 Andrew Man’s genuine belief that ‘this
word Benedicite rasit the Dewill, and Maikpeblis laid him againe’, would indicate
that much like Janet Boyman, Andrew Man was using a personally developed
technique that would induce trance.91 It is important however that we do not
overstate this level of control since it certainly had its limitations. Janet Boyman
87 National Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.

88 Peters and Price-Williams, ‘Towards an Experiential Analysis of Shamanism’,
p.399.
89 Goodare, 'Seely Wights, Fairies and Nature Spirits in Scotland’, p.11; National
Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.

90 Spalding Misc., i, p.120.
91 Spalding Misc., i, p.124.
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for instance could not call upon the spirits on any day of her pleasing, responding
for instance to the desperate plea of one of her clients that she could ‘do [her
husband] na guid at that tyme Because it was past halow evin’.92
Common to both Janet Boyman and Andrew Man is the length of time they
seem to have been experiencing trance-induced visions: Janet Boyman ‘confessit
that ye haif sene twentie tymes the evill blast’ [the whirlwind blast that
proceeded the appearance of the spirits she communicated with]; and Andrew
Man reportedly being first visited by the ‘Quene of Elphen’ when he was ‘bot a
young boy’ and since then for ‘about thrette yeris’.93 Perhaps pertinent to
Andrew Man’s case is the present-day research into the ability of young children
to use dissociative techniques such as trance to conjure up an ‘ideal companion’
for themselves.94 This companion is created to offer the child ‘unconditional love,
approval, support, and advise in a world that otherwise was unstable,
unsupportive and cruel’.95 Perhaps this is what the Queen of Elphame was to the
‘young boy’ Andrew Man; she appeared to him in his ‘motheris hous’, as a woman
that ‘promesit to the, that thow suld knaw all thingis, and suld help and cuir all
sort of seikness’.96 Interestingly, the Queen of Elphame seems to have been
something of a supporting figure in Alison Pearson’s life as well, Pearson talking
of the ‘kynd freindis’ she had at the Court of Elphame and her ‘gude acquentance
of the Quene of Elphane’.97 It has been psychologically proven that children who
use dissociative techniques, often as self-preservation from stress or trauma,
continue this tendency into their adult life, making them more prone to falling
into spontaneous or intentionally induced trances. 98 This propensity to
experience trance is not necessarily pathological but can become so under the
strain of further stress or trauma.99 Perhaps Andrew Man and Alison Pearson are
good examples of the way in which an innate ability to experience trance and the
92 National Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.

93 National Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67;
Spalding Misc., i, p.119, p.124.
95 Ibid. p.347.
96 Spalding Misc., i, p.119
98 Seligman and Kirmayer ‘Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience’,
p.50.
99 Ibid, p.51.
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choice to employ it as a long-term strategy for managing emotional stress or

psychological trauma, can either remain healthy or become psychotic.100
Whilst it might, as Seligman and Kirmayer point out, seem ‘paradoxical to
talk of the conscious use of dissociation’, recent attention has been paid in
neurobiological studies to the healthy ability of some people to either volitionally
or automatically relinquish ordinary states of control and experience
dissociative states like trance.101 Supporting this and of particular relevance to
our study of Andrew Man and Alison Pearson’s likely experiences of trance is
Wilson and Barber’s work on fantasy-prone persons and Luhrmann’s
investigation into the cognitive consequences of prayer, which revealed how
mental imagery cultivation allowed people to ‘experience God as a being who can
talk back’.102 In her work Luhrmann further emphasized how there was a
‘learning dimension’ to this ability to ‘treat what the mind imagines as more real
than the world one knows’, a dimension which makes the experience very
different to that of trauma-induced psychosis.103 It would certainly seem that
Andrew Man had this ability, conjuring up the Queen of Elphame and his ‘engell’
Christsonday whenever he wished and having many a pleasant experience while
in ‘cumpanie with thame’.104 What we could perhaps hypothesize from this is
that following an enjoyable childhood propensity for trance-induced fantasizing,
Andrew Man learnt over time how to exert a greater degree of control over when
he entered into trances. The same cannot however be said for Alison Pearson.
Whilst Pearson’s visionary experiences were initially welcome, allowing her to
find ‘guid friendis’ at the fairy court, a healing companion in the form of William
Sympson and something of a rescuer in the Queen of Elphame, there seems to be
a point in her narrative when these experiences cease to be pleasurable and lose
any degree of control.105 Not only does Pearson eventually have ‘na will to visseit
100 Castillo, ‘Trance, Functional Psychosis, and Culture’, p.13, p.17.

101 Ibid, p.13.
102 Wilson and Barber, ‘Fantasy-Prone Personality’, pp.371-2; Tanya M.
Lurhmann, Howard Nusbaum and Ronald Thisted, ‘”Lord Teach Us to Pray”:

Prayer Practice Affects Cognitive Processing’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 13
(2013), p.174.
103 Luhrmann, Nusbaum and Thisted, ‘”Lord Teach us to Pray”’, p.172.
104 Spalding Misc., i, p.120, p121.
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thame’, she ends up feeling ‘tormentit with thame’ and is left without the power
of her left side after one of their visits.106 In accounting for this transition we
might combine the psychoanalytical interpretations that Diane Purkiss would no
doubt employ with the medical knowledge we have gained into how initially
non-pathological experiences of trance, if deployed too frequently in response to
psychological trauma, can damage neural circuits and subsequently make
chronic psychosis more likely.107 The difference between Andrew Man and
Alison Pearson’s likely experiences of trance further underlines the fact that
trance was experienced in a number of ways whilst also critically showing us
that a person’s experience of trance did not necessarily remain static over time.
Further supporting this conclusion is the manner in which a number of
seers seem to have learnt to exert nearly complete control over what had likely
begun as spontaneous experiences of trance. Whilst the cases we looked at in
Chapter Two seem to be indicative of normative everyday trances that were
unintentionally experienced, in other descriptions we find examples of seers
making intentional use of fixed attention to induce trance. We see in one case for
instance how a man ‘used ordinarily by looking to the fire, to foretell what
strangers would come to his house’. 108 In an even clearer indication of
intentionally induced trance, we see in some reports how seers would use a
‘science…called slinnenacd’: ‘looking into [a] bone they will tell if whoredome be
committed in the Ouners house; what money the Master of the sheed had, [and]
if any will die out of that house for that moneth’.109 These seers had perhaps
realized the potential in cultivating a fixed attention and were using objects to
further harness their ability to enter into trances and consequently receive
visions which could be of some help to the community. Further supporting this
interpretation is the fact that the majority of our authors believed there to be
something of a hierarchy of seers. This is strongly indicated in a story that Martin
Martin reports, when he describes how ‘the novice mentioned above, is now a
106 Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, II , p.162, p.163.

107 Castillo, ‘Trance, Functional Psychosis, and Culture’, pp.13-14.
108 Garden’s Letters to John Aubrey; letter 7t, in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory,
p.150.
109 Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth, in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.88.
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skillful seer’.110 What seems to allow the individual to upgrade from the status of
novice to ‘skillful seer’ is, as Kirk indicates to us, an ability to better master the
fix of ones gaze: where the ‘hardy therefore fix their look, that they may see the
longer’, the ‘timorous only see glances, their eyes alwayes twinkling’.111 We can
conjecture from this that similarly to the way in which Janet Boyman and
Andrew Man learnt over time to intentionally enter into trances through
personalized processes, a handful of seers learnt how to intentionally cultivate a
fixed attention in order to experience trance-induced visions.
Whilst cases demonstrating conscious trance inducement reflect more the
exception than the rule, the majority of the trance-induced visions we have
surveyed contained enough coherence, lucidity and self-determination for us to
suggest that trances did not just happen to the individuals in question. The
plainest manifestation of the agency individuals had within their trances is the
near uniform search for healing abilities and answers about the future that are
prominent in most reports. We see this in those trial records where trance is
explicitly mentioned: Jean Crie, who involuntarily experienced trance, was
transported to ‘Heaven and Hell, and hath attained to great skill of all diseases,
and of things to come, so that there is great resort of the people to her’; Margaret
Wallace, who again involuntarily experienced trance, managed to use the skills
she had learnt as a result to both cure a baby and allow a man to walk again; and
finally, John Feane, who, as we earlier ascertained, most likely involuntarily fell
into trances just before falling to sleep, came back from Satan’s ‘conventiounes’
with the skill to predict when and by what means people would die.112 Another
very good example is that of Bessie Dunlop, who managed to use her trance-
induced visionary experiences, regardless of whether she induced them or not,
as a means by which she could access useful information; she would enter into
her trances with a pre-prepared list of questions for her spirit guide Thom Reid,
as illustrated in the following passage:
110 Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.322.

111 Hunter, Occult Laboratory, p.91.
112 John Hunter (ed.), The Diocese and Presbytery of Dunkeld, 1660-1689, (London,
1918), vol.1., p.266; Pitcairn (ed.), Criminal Trials in Scotland… Embracing the
Entire Reigns of James IV. And V. Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI (Edinburgh,
1833), III, pp.510-512; Pitcairn (ed.), Trials, i, III, pp.212-213.
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…quhen sundrie persounes cam to hir to seik help for thair befit, thair kow or
yow [ewe], or for ane barne [baby] that was tane away with ane evill blast of
wind, or els-grippit, sche gait [went] and sperit at Thome [Reid], Quhat mycht
help thame?113
This would certainly indicate to us that even in those cases where trance was
perhaps not voluntarily induced, control could be exerted over the content of
trance-induced visions. These vision quests were highly conditioned by both
cultural beliefs and societal needs, supporting what Julian Goodare and Margaret
Dudley discussed in ‘Outside In or Inside Out’ about how experiences of sleep
paralysis will vary in different cultural contexts, with people interpreting the
presence in the room (the symptom common to all sleep paralysis experiences)
as ‘aliens today, witches or demons in the early modern period’.114 Given that
early modern minds were impregnated with fairy lore from a young age and
anxieties about disease and the future were prevalent, it should come as no
surprise that during experiences of trance we find early modern people receiving
insights into the future and healing advise from fairy men like Thom Reid. We
can once again conclude from this that trance did not just happen to early
modern people, but that many managed to wrestle a degree of control within
their trances.
Having conducting this investigation into the levels of control exerted
over likely cases of trance we are able to further endorse the conclusion reached
in the previous chapter, namely, that trance was experienced in a number of
different ways in early modern Scotland. At the extreme end of the spectrum we
have unearthed some likely examples of individuals who were able to exercise
total control over their trances, using this to their benefit by gaining clients and
reputation as in the case of Janet Boyman and a handful of seers. We have
additionally seen how trance could be volitionally or automatically experienced
as a result of what Barber and Wilson describe as fantasy-proneness. Such types
of trance were for the most part healthy and controlled, with the exception of

114 Dudley and Goodare, ‘Outside In Or Inside Out’, p.124.
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Alison Pearson whose transition over time to more unwelcome and essentially
psychotic experiences of trance demonstrated to us how an individual’s
experience of trance might not necessarily remain static over time. Finally, we
have even been able to demonstrate in the greater number of cases where
intentional trance inducement could not be discerned, how a degree of control
was still exerted over the visions that were had within trances, often with a view
to serving community needs. This last point strongly supports Seligman and
Kirmayer’s belief that ‘every complex human experience emerges from an
interaction of individual biology and psychology with social context’.115 To the
extent therefore that most of the trances we have isolated seem to have served a
purpose, whether that be providing an individual with work or allowing fantasy
escapism, we can strongly endorse the present-day medical shift away from the
pathological bias formerly attached to all forms of dissociation.
115Seligman and Kirmayer, ‘Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience’,

pp.54-55.
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Conclusion
In assessing reports of supernatural experiences through the lens of

present-day medical, psychiatric and anthropological studies of trance, we have
managed to show that trance was a facilitator for many such experiences and
also understand the diverse ways that trance could be experienced in early
modern Scotland. Navigating its way through the divergent disciplinary
discussions of trance and concluding with a list of its salient symptoms and
typical inducements this dissertation was able, in Chapter Two, to discern the
following types of early modern trance experience: catatonic trance, fantasy-
driven trances occurring in hypnagogic states, trances involving behaviors
outside of one’s conscious control (sleepwalking) and even normative, everyday,
trances, caused by intense absorption.
Taking this investigation further in Chapter Three, we were able to build
up a more individualized picture of how trance was experienced in early modern
Scotland by examining the extent to which people could exert control over their
trances. This brought attention to a number of individuals who seemed to have
had conscious control over when they experienced trance whilst also proving
how even in the majority of cases where such a level of control could not be
discerned, trances did not just happen to individuals, who were at the very least
able to exert a degree of control within their trances by shaping what they saw in
their visions. In further demonstrating that trance was not only experienced
pleasurably in a number of cases, but that it also served important functions in
early modern Scotland, providing individuals with a means to service their
community or indulge in fantasy escapism, Chapter Three was also able to
strongly endorse the present-day medical shift away from the pathological bias
formerly attached to all forms of dissociation. Wilson and Barber’s investigation
into ‘fantasy proneness’ and Luhrmann’s study of imagination fuelled prayer was
critical in allowing this conclusion, encouraging us to reevaluate early modern
supernatural experiences in light of their evidence concerning the innate and
healthy ability of certain people to experience fantasies ‘as real as real’ by
intentionally altering their minds.116 In contrast to this, we were able to
36
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additionally observe how Alison Pearson’s initially healthy experience of trance

descended into more unwelcome, essentially psychotic forms of trance,
demonstrating to us that someone’s experience of trance need not necessarily
remain static over the course of their life.
In preempting the question of what retrospectively diagnosing early
modern individuals with trance can actually do for historical understandings, I
would first make the point that it gives us a better understanding of why people
believed their supernatural experiences were real. Using medical, psychiatric
and anthropological studies to help us understand the intensity of the trance
symptoms that a number of early modern people exhibited means it is no longer
tenable to disregard their experiences as superstitious nonsense or even confine
ourselves to psychoanalytical interpretations. Additionally, the fact that this
dissertation has drawn attention to a number of ways in which trance served an
important function in early modern Scottish life, should in itself demonstrate the
necessity of understanding who was undergoing the phenomenon and what their
particular experience or use of it was. Finally, whilst the application of
retrospective diagnosis to early modern supernatural phenomena has been
criticized for patronizing such experiences with our supposedly superior medical
and psychiatric explanations, this dissertation has hoped to demonstrate how
such an approach can in fact bring us closer to the early modern people we
study.117 Whereas cultural historians have tended to use witch trial records to
gain an understanding of widely held beliefs in the early modern world for
instance, the approach taken in this dissertation has forced a more intense
attention on the personal experiences of individuals. In recognizing trance
symptoms in the cases of Andrew Man and Alison Pearson for instance, we were
able to gain an intimate insight into their mental worlds, acknowledging in the
former case how a childhood propensity for dissociation led to a life of vivid
fantasizing whereas in the latter, an excess of mental anguish over trauma
encouraged what was an initially healthy use of trance to descend into a form of
psychosis. This is not to say however that a psychiatric or neurobiological
approach is superior to a cultural one, rather a bid to support Edward Bever’s
117 Wesbter, ‘(Re)possession of Dispossession’, p.108.
37
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assertion that such approaches deserve ‘a place at the table’.118 Indeed the
cultural neuroscience approach Bever and others encourage has been
particularly germane to this investigation given that trance is a phenomenon that
is conditioned by social and cultural context just as much as by neurobiological
processes.
Whilst this investigation has successfully unearthed a number of trance
experiences in early modern Scotland, in order to more confidently conclude that
this was a widely experienced phenomenon we would need to employ more
early modern sources. Had space permitted it for example, this dissertation
would also have included a study of orthodox Christian visionaries. Margo Todd
and Louise Yeoman’s brief assessments of the tendencies of early modern
Scottish prophetic visionaries to fall into what certainly seem to be trances –
‘falling dead’, or becoming either ‘speechlesse’ or ‘dumb’ – would surely
contribute to this investigation.119 If employed in a comparative study such
evidence might also engender a better understanding of how relationships
between cultural worldviews, localized community beliefs and personal
anxieties shaped people’s experiences of trance differently. In melding together
fairy lore with her mental anguish, Alison Pearson’s trance would for example
have been experienced very differently to that of a Christian visionary, this also
being the reason that her life ended at the stake. In laying the groundwork for
such future research, this dissertation has shown how far from patronizing or
dismissing early modern supernatural phenomena, the present-day medical,
psychiatric and anthropological studies of trance encourage us to acknowledge
the degree to which the ‘invisible polity’ would have been experienced as a very
real place, its spiritual populace acting as virtually tangible friends or tormenters
to many people in early modern Scotland. Historians have been too quick to
dismiss this possibility in their estimations of early modern supernatural
phenomena.
118Bever, ‘Culture Warrior’, p.113.

119Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New
Haven, 2002), pp.393-400; Louise Yeoman ‘Away with the fairies’, in Lizanne
Henderson (ed.), Fantastical Imaginations: the Supernatural in Scottish History
and Culture (Edinburgh, 2009).
38
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DSM-5 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and

Maitland Misc Miscellany of the Maitland Club, 4 vols. (1833-47).

Pitcairn (ed.), Trials Criminal Trials in Scotland, 1488-1624, 3 vols. (ed.)

Spalding Misc Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 5 vols. (1844-52).

It may be supposed not repugnant to Reason or

In early modern Scotland, as in the rest of early modern Europe, there

Europe: Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life (Basingstoke, 2008), p.xx.

the core of such experiences.3 Systematizing these various ad hoc investigations

Witchcraft’, Preternature, 4 (2015), pp.203-210; Edward Bever, ‘Culture Warrior:

Cultural Neuroscience: Narrative, Metaphor and Mechanism’, Culture, Medicine

interpretations applied by Diane Purkiss and Lyndal Roper. 7 Whilst the

7 Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories

Aberdeen, (ed.), John Stuart (Aberdeen, 1846), p.306.

Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

12 Larry G. Peters and Douglass Price-Williams, ‘Towards an Experiential

15 Michael Wasser, ‘The Mechanical World-View and the Decline of Witch-Beliefs

I. The Medical, Psychiatric and Anthropological Literature on Trance

Since the preliminary intention of this dissertation is to ascertain whether

16 Seligman and Kirmayer, ‘Dissociative Experience and Cultural Neuroscience’.

19 DSM-5, p.302; Johnna Medina, ‘“Other Specified” and “Unspecified”

‘Possession Trance, Epilepsy, and Primary Psychosis: the Challenges in Diagnosis

Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 5 (2004), pp.63-88.

external environment.24 Such absorption can be stimulated by engagement with

… hallucinogens, opiates, and other drugs; extensive running or other motor

31 Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber, ‘The Fantasy-Prone Personality:

transmitted nervous system liabilities… or other trauma to the central nervous

35 Michael James Winkleman, ‘Shamans and other “Magico-Religious” Healers: A

1918), vol.1. p. 266.

Zetland M.DC.II-M.DC.XLIV’, in Maitland Misc., i, pp.187-191.

40 Stanley Krippner, ‘Trance and the Trickster: Hypnosis as a Liminal

The American Historical Review, 1 (2001), pp.343-386.

II. Spotting Trance in Early Modern Scotland

Equipped with a thorough medical, psychiatric and anthropological

48 Trance n., Dictionary of the Scots Language,

Festivity (Glasgow, 1996), p.5, p.12.

flight, indicating to us that John Feane was experiencing intense derealization

Trials, iii, II, p.604.

spirit. Without the neurobiological understanding of catatonic trance states

descriptions and slips of fantastical detail permeates the confessions of Andrew

and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe, p.197.

these individuals were experiencing was a heightened and extended version of

66 Ekrich, ‘Sleep We Have Lost’.

William Dunbar (Oxford, 1979), lines 1-4, p.150.

70 Wilson and Barber, ‘The Fantasy-Prone Personality’, p.376, p.353.

74 Spalding Misc., i, pp.121-122.

Wakefulness in Somnambulism: A Spectral Analysis Study’, Journal of

‘Somnambulism: Clinical Aspects and Pathophysiological Hypotheses’, The

control. All of these experiences exhibit the fundamental trance symptoms of

Western Islands of Scotland (c.1695), in Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.56.

80 Hunter, The Occult Laboratory, p.91.

highly suggestive of those fundamental trance symptoms: derealization,

III: Were they in control?

Having isolated a number of instances where trance seems to have been

87 National Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.

Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.

92 National Records of Scotland, indictment of Janet Boyman, 1572, JC26/1/67.