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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Visions of isobel Gowdie

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
What Does Isobel Gowdie's Name Mean?

The things that you learn from your students.

A group of us were reading and discussing our way through the transcripts of “17th” century Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie's trial dittays when my then-apprentice asked a stunning question: “What does Gowdie's name mean?”

In 300 years of witchcraft scholarship, apparently no one had ever thought to ask before.

Isobel Gowdie (GOE-dee: rhymes with Cody, not howdy) is arguably the most influential witch in history. Her series of detailed confessions shaped Margaret Murray's idea of what the Craft looked like—covens of 13, quarter- and cross-quarter-days—and from there the rest is Wiccan history.

Naming practices in early modern Lowland Scotland were strikingly different from those of Sassenach-land to the south. Women did not assume their husbands' surnames at marriage; they kept their own family names all their lives. So whatever “Gowdie” means, we can be reasonably certain that it was the name that Isobel was born with.

The majority of surnames at the time were patronymics. Your name identified you as either the son (Mac- or Mc-) or daughter (Nic- or Nc-) of your father. The son and daughter of a man named Donald would then have been, respectively, X MacDonald and Y NicDonald.

(Nicneven—a traditional name of the witches' Goddess—means “daughter of Fury [Nemhain]" in Scots Gaelic.)

In this way—as in contemporary Iceland—a woman, her husband, and their son and daughter could potentially all have had different surnames.

Gowdie's surname, obviously, is not of this type. Throughout Europe, the patronymic was the most common form of surname, followed by occupation names (Taylor, Baker, Smith) and nicknames usually identifying some outstanding characteristic of the eponymous ancestor.

This last is how the Gowdie family got its surname. In Lallans—Lowland Scots—it means “Goldie.”

Isobel must have had an ancestor who was strikingly blonde.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

One sees it again and again in the popular stories and in the trial materials: the hexing witch.

She made my cow go dry. She made my ale go sour. She stole my field's fertility.

“Propaganda,” say Wiccans. “Scapegoating,” says secular scholarship. “Decadence,” says Murray: “a fertility cult become a sterility cult.”

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Let me add, Francesca, that I entirely agree with you about *Aradia*: it's Leland's crazy-quilt masterwork, a little gem. 100+ yea
  • Francesca De Grandis
    Francesca De Grandis says #
    Yes. Yes, yes. Btw, I like that you call it a crazy quilt, bc I have always called it a potpourri of miscellany. Great minds think
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    "Liberty" is certainly one of the by-names of the Goddess of Witches, and as for "Freedom"...well, that goes back to the same root
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    "Liberty" is certainly one of the by-names of the Goddess of Witches, and as for "Freedom"...well, that goes back to the same root
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    "Liberty" is certainly one of the by-names of the Goddess of Witches, and as for "Freedom"...well, that goes back to the same root

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