EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter VIII: Witch Trials

Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) Explained

Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584): the Kentish sceptic's attack on witch-hunting, its exposed conjurations and tricks, and Bruno's Spaccio.

8 min read 1,876 words Updated

The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in London in 1584 by the Kentish gentleman Reginald Scot, is the most important sceptical book on witchcraft written in Elizabethan England. Scot argued that the women accused of witchcraft were poor, old and usually innocent, that their confessions were products of melancholy, fear or coercion, and that the marvels attributed to witches were either impossible or fraud — and to prove the last point he printed the conjurations of ritual magicians and the secrets of stage conjurors. In the same year and the same city, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno published his satirical dialogue Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast).

Who Was Reginald Scot?§

Reginald Scot was born around 1538 into a Kentish gentry family connected with Scot's Hall near Smeeth. He is said to have studied at Hart Hall, Oxford, without taking a degree, and spent most of his life managing land in Kent. His first book, A Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden (1574), was a practical manual on hop growing — a reminder that Scot wrote as an observant country gentleman rather than as a theologian or physician. He served in local office and sat in the Parliament of 1589 for New Romney, and he died in 1599.

Kent gave him direct experience of witchcraft accusations. Scot refers to cases he knew or heard of in the county, and he was clearly provoked by the trials of the early 1580s, above all the St Osyth case in Essex in 1582, in which a zealous justice, Brian Darcy, extracted confessions from a group of village women and published an account of their examinations. Two of the accused were hanged. To Scot such proceedings showed the danger of credulous magistrates armed with a demonological theory and a frightened community.

The Argument of the Discoverie of Witchcraft§

The Discoverie is a long, discursive book divided into sixteen "books", followed by A Discourse upon Divels and Spirits. Its targets are named plainly. Scot answers Jean Bodin's De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), the Malleus Maleficarum of the Dominican inquisitors (discussed in Malleus Maleficarum), and a long line of Catholic and Protestant writers who accepted the reality of the witch's pact with the Devil.

Who the accused really were§

Scot's description of the typical accused witch is among the most quoted passages of the period: an old woman, lame, poor, sour-tempered and dependent on the charity of neighbours who resented her. Misfortune — a sick child, a dead cow, spoiled butter — was blamed on her after a quarrel. Some such women, Scot conceded, may even have believed in their own powers, but he put this down to melancholy, the black-bile imbalance that early modern medicine linked to delusion. Their confessions, extracted by leading questions, threats or worse, could not be trusted.

Spirits, pacts and Scripture§

Scot did not deny the existence of God, angels or devils, but he insisted that spirits are incorporeal. A spirit could not have sexual intercourse with a woman, transport her through the air or seal a bodily contract with her; the whole demonological apparatus of the pact, the sabbath and the incubus was therefore, in his view, impossible. He also argued from language. The Hebrew and Greek words translated "witch" in English Bibles, he claimed, meant poisoners, diviners or cozeners — real wrongdoers, but not people with supernatural power. The age of miracles, he added in standard Protestant fashion, had ceased; claims of new wonders were either popish superstition or trickery.

This position earned Scot the label of "Sadducee" — one who denied spirits — from opponents, and it has led modern readers to see him as an early rationalist. Historians now stress that his scepticism was thoroughly religious: he was defending God's sovereignty against the idea that a wretched old woman could command nature. Some scholars have suggested that his views on spirit owe something to radical Protestant currents such as the Family of Love, though the evidence for this remains debated.

Conjurations, Demons and Conjuring Tricks§

The most unusual feature of the Discoverie is how much of the magic it attacks it actually prints. Scot reasoned that the best way to destroy a false belief was to put its machinery on display and let readers judge for themselves.

Book XIII is a treatise on legerdemain. Scot explains, with diagrams, how a performer could make balls appear and vanish under cups, pass coins from hand to hand, and stage the illusion of a man's head being cut off and served on a platter. It is usually regarded as the first substantial account of conjuring tricks in English, and historians of stage magic still cite it as a founding text. His point was polemical: wonders that seemed supernatural to an untrained audience were nothing but skilled deception.

Book XV goes further. Here Scot reproduces conjurations, charms and "experiments" of the kind found in manuscript grimoires: methods for calling spirits into a crystal, binding them with names and circles, and summoning figures such as Oberion. He also printed, in English, a catalogue of demons — their names, shapes, offices and the legions they command — translated from the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum that the physician Johann Weyer had appended to his own anti-persecution work (see Pseudomonarchia Daemonum). The catalogue is closely related to the list later known as the Ars Goetia. Scot presented all this as an exhibit of folly, not as a manual; the site's catalogue describes the magical material in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (magical texts).

An unintended grimoire§

The result was a paradox that has fascinated historians of magic. A book written to discredit conjuration became one of the most accessible printed sources for it. The third edition of 1665 made this plainer still: an anonymous editor added nine new chapters to Book XV and a second book to the Discourse, full of material on astral spirits and the conjuring of the dead. Later compilers of English magical manuscripts drew on Scot, and he remains a standard reference in the history of the Solomonic tradition.

Reception: King James and the Witchcraft Debate§

The Discoverie provoked sharp replies. In the preface to his Daemonologie (1597), King James VI of Scotland named Scot as one of two authors who had dared to deny witchcraft in print, and he wrote the book partly to refute him. A story that James, on becoming king of England in 1603, ordered copies of the Discoverie to be burned is often repeated, but it rests on later report rather than firm contemporary evidence. In 1604 Parliament passed a new and harsher English witchcraft statute, which remained in force until the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

Scot nevertheless found readers and heirs. Literary scholars have long noted that Shakespeare's fairy lore and some details of witchcraft in the plays reflect material he could have found in Scot. Seventeenth-century sceptics such as Thomas Ady and John Webster used his arguments against the witch-hunters of the 1640s and against apologists for spirit belief such as Joseph Glanvill. The Discoverie was reprinted in 1651 and 1665, and by the eighteenth century, when educated opinion had largely turned against prosecution, Scot was remembered as a pioneer — sometimes too simply, as a modern rationalist born out of time.

Modern historians read him more carefully. Scot did not end witch trials in England; prosecutions continued for a century after him and peaked during the Civil War. But he set out, with unusual vigour and in English, nearly every argument later used against the persecution of witches: the social profile of the accused, the unreliability of confessions, the theological difficulty of corporeal spirits and the role of fraud and illusion. For the wider European picture see The European Witch Trials.

The Same Year in London: Bruno's Spaccio§

While Scot's book was appearing, Giordano Bruno was living in London as a guest of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. Between 1584 and 1585 he published there a series of Italian dialogues, several bearing false imprints. One of them, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, imagines Jupiter resolving to reform the heavens: the constellations, which stand for vices, are expelled and replaced by virtues such as Truth, Prudence and Law.

The Spaccio is a satire on pedantry, idleness and religious hypocrisy, and its praise of the religion of ancient Egypt, drawn from the Hermetic Asclepius, later became central to Frances Yates's argument that Bruno was a Hermetic magus (see Frances Yates and Giordano Bruno). The book was raised during Bruno's Inquisition trial, which ended with his execution in Rome in 1600; his life is described in Giordano Bruno. Scot and Bruno had little in common beyond the year, but together they show how many voices in 1580s London were questioning inherited religious authority from very different directions.

Frequently asked questions§

What was Reginald Scot's main argument?§

Scot argued that people accused of witchcraft were mostly poor, elderly women who had no supernatural power. Their confessions came from melancholy, fear or pressure, spirits could not make bodily pacts, and apparent wonders were impossible or produced by trickery.

Why does the Discoverie of Witchcraft contain magic spells?§

Scot printed conjurations, charms and a catalogue of demons in order to expose them as absurd or fraudulent. The strategy backfired in one sense: the book became a convenient printed source for later magicians, particularly in its expanded 1665 edition.

Did King James burn Reginald Scot's book?§

James attacked Scot by name in his Daemonologie of 1597. The claim that he ordered copies burned after 1603 is frequently repeated but is not securely documented, so it should be treated as tradition rather than established fact.

What is Bruno's Spaccio de la bestia trionfante?§

It is an Italian philosophical dialogue printed in London in 1584 in which Jupiter expels the vices, pictured as constellations, from heaven and replaces them with virtues. It is a satire on religious and intellectual corruption and was later read as evidence of Bruno's Hermetic interests.

Sources and further reading§