In February 2025, the Witches of Scotland tartan was officially registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans. Designed to memorialise those persecuted under Scotland’s Witchcraft Act of 1563, which remained in force until 1736, it carries a history that was once written into the lives and deaths of thousands of people.

A Note on Tartans and the Scottish Register of Tartans

A tartan is a woven pattern of intersecting bands of colour, traditionally associated with Scottish clans and families, each with its own distinctive design. Today, tartans also represent communities, causes and shared histories, with designs recorded in the Scottish Register of Tartans.

Unlike a clan tartan, the Witches of Scotland tartan belongs to no single family. Anyone can wear it, carrying a shared history of persecution and remembrance.

The Witch Hunts

The persecution of people accused of witchcraft spread across parts of Europe and beyond, particularly between the 15th and 18th centuries. Scotland’s Witchcraft Act was in force from 1563 to 1736. The Salem witch trials, often remembered in the same context, took place much later, in 1692, in Massachusetts. Thousands of people across different places and periods were accused, prosecuted and punished, with women making up the majority in many regions.

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The Witches of Scotland Tartan

This tartan was created as a living memorial. Something that could once have cost a person their life is now carried openly, in cloth, upon the body.

The black and grey colours represent the darkness of that period and the ashes of those burned.

Red and pink recall the legal tape that bound the court papers.

A section of 173 black threads marks the 173 years during which the Act remained in force, from 1563 to 1736.

Three white threads represent the Witches of Scotland campaign’s three aims: a pardon, an apology and a memorial.

What is unsettling about the need for such a memorial is the pattern it reveals: someone is perceived as a threat because of their difference, and a community, driven by fear, comes together to find a reason to punish them. On the surface, it appears to be a persecution of certain ways of living, of knowing and of being that are perceived as threats to authority.

But something deeply messy begins to stir within us when we learn that our own knowing cannot be trusted. We are taught to look outside ourselves for permission to feel, to decide, to live. We become obsessed with finding the right answer before learning to listen to the question arising within us. We look for instructions, labels, explanations, assurances — an instruction manual for life itself. We become increasingly informed, yet sometimes less able to tell what is true for us. We may know what a plant is said to do, what a way of eating promises, what an expert recommends, what a trend tells us we should want. But can we recognise what we need at a particular point in our lives, in response to what is happening within our own bodies?

If Not Instinct, Then What?

This is where instinct matters. Not as a reason to override the knowledge accumulated by others, nor as an infallible voice that must never be questioned. Instinct is a relationship with the signals we receive and the life we are living at any given moment. The body responds to its surroundings, to what we eat, to the people we meet, to the work we do, to what we endure and what we desire. Its signals are not always easy to interpret. Fear can speak loudly; familiarity can disguise itself as safety; a strong desire can lead us away from what we need. We have to learn the difference. And that learning requires something no instruction manual can give us on its own: participation in our own lives.

The Plant Kingdom: By the Books and Beyond the Books

In an age of information, perhaps it is time to look beyond the books, too.

Perhaps this is one reason I am drawn to herbs. We can begin with what has been recorded about a plant: its properties, traditional uses, preparation and place within a system of knowledge. This matters. The knowledge of generations matters. The tools and discoveries of the modern world matter, too. But our relationship with a plant cannot end with what we have read about it. We must also encounter it. Notice its taste, its scent, how we approach it, what draws our attention and what we learn through repeated experience. We bring knowledge to the encounter, but we must also bring ourselves. Neither replaces the other. Together, they offer a richer ground from which to understand an

The Body: By the Books and Beyond the Books

We have drawn skeletal structures in our science practical files. Some of us have dissected bodies. Some have cared for bodies; others have trained them, shaped them and pushed their limits. This is one phase of learning: understanding the structures, the systems, the rules. Then comes another phase — not necessarily breaking the rules, but learning where they end and where our own participation begins. There is no universal formula for the best way to live. We can build on what we have been taught while learning to shape a life that is responsive to the particular body we inhabit and the circumstances we live through.

Every body carries its own history. Our experiences shape how we respond to the world, what we notice, what we avoid and what we come to recognise. At some point, the dance has to be improvised in response to what is unfolding within us. I do not deny the significance of being taught, being guided, being challenged and being offered tools we could not have found alone. Modern medicine can be necessary, and science can reveal what our senses cannot. Seeking help is not a failure of self-trust. The question is whether we can receive what the world offers without handing over our own responsibility to listen, discern and participate. We do not need to shut the world out or raise slogans of retaliation to return to ourselves. We need to learn to meet it without disappearing from the conversation or hiding behind walls. The Wonderland is no longer somewhere we have to slip away to find. It is something we can begin creating right under our feet.

And perhaps that is the real work of returning to the wisdom embedded in the body — not as a rejection of everything outside it, but as a way of bringing all the pieces together into a more complete whole.

What we inherit, what we learn, what we sense, what we question, what we experience. Each has a place. When we stop treating ourselves as passive recipients of answers and begin taking part in the process of living, something shifts. We become more than people trying to follow the right instructions. We begin to develop the capacity to respond to life as it unfolds before us.

The Person Behind the Label

To categorise is to draw a boundary around a person, to give them a name through which they can be understood — or misunderstood. Witch, wizard, shaman, sorcerer, enchantress, conjurer, pagan, Wiccan, magus; boksi in Nepali, μάγος in Greek, strega in Italian, mchawi in Swahili, sanguma in Tok Pisin. Different words, carried across different cultures and histories.

But people are much more than a single word that defines them, aren’t they? What happens when the word becomes all we are willing to see? When a label becomes a verdict, and the person behind it is no longer afforded the dignity of being known?

Not every act of naming is an act of persecution. Names can help us communicate, preserve knowledge and recognise shared experiences. The danger begins when we mistake the category for the whole person, or use it to decide what that person deserves.

The witch hunts remind us how far this can go. The tartan is a reminder of what happens when a society decides that certain people, certain ways of being, or certain kinds of knowledge cannot be allowed to exist. An apology matters. A memorial matters. Remembering matters. But remembrance also asks something of the living: what are we still dismissing, silencing or surrendering without examination? Where have we learnt to distrust ourselves? Where have we mistaken obedience for wisdom?

Perhaps we cannot recover what was lost by those who were persecuted. But we can pay attention to what we do with our own lives now. We can learn to listen without assuming we already know, to seek help without handing over our entire authority, and to use the gifts of the modern world without allowing them to estrange us from the life we are here to live.

If not instinct, then what? And if we have spent generations teaching people not to trust themselves, what would an apology look like in practice? Perhaps it begins when we make room again for the body to speak, for the senses to participate, for knowledge to meet experience, and for each of us to discover — through the living of our own lives — what it means to find our way.

Perhaps the apology we need to hear is not only one delivered by an institution for the wrongs of the past. Perhaps it is also the one we owe ourselves for the ways we have learnt to dismiss our own knowing. Not to turn away from the world, but to return to it more fully — with the knowledge we have inherited, the tools we have developed, the bodies we inhabit and the instinct we are still learning to hear.