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In Shakespeare's time, most people believed in witches, the devil, evil spirits and magic. In both England and Scotland, women (and men) suspected of being witches were arrested and interrogated. They were often tortured into confessing. In England, witches were usually hanged. Witchcraft was a secular crime between 1563 and 1736, and almost all trials took place in this period. However, statistics show that the witch hunt in Scotland was one of the most severe in all of Protestant Europe. Out of a population of around one million, around 4,000 witches were formally accused. Around 2,500 may have been executed. The article also describes recent debates about the witch hunt and the belief in witches. Suggestions for future research are concluded.

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The first witches, however, were not so good that they had to be burned at the stake. On the contrary, some of them were regarded as goddesses. It was with the Protestant Reformation that the great change in attitudes towards witches began. Beginning in the early 16th Century, Protestantism began to replace Catholicism in Europe. The Catholic Church showed no weakness, criticised and even fought back with violence. Not only did the close friends of the two religions become pagans in each other's eyes, but the lives of ordinary people were hard to bear: They had to be constantly on guard against being persecuted by pagans or being persecuted as pagans; they also had to contend with hail, floods and frost during the Little Ice Age (1300-1870). Then there was rat and caterpillar plague, the Black Death, reduced grain production, famine, sudden animal deaths, high rates of obstructed labour, infant and child deaths.

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Shakespeare's mother, Mary, was born at the height of religious struggle and social change. In her life she experienced four conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism and from Protestantism to Catholicism. She witnessed first-hand the denunciations, arrests, torture and burning of the Curia as it changed its face. The Catholic church she attended as a child had all its stained glass smashed. Her first and second children and a younger daughter did not survive. The plague spread, and she had to keep the children in the famine team. Since then, her husband had been involved in the wool black market, almost bankrupt, and the family was strapped for cash, struggling to survive.In the midst of a major crisis of faith and existential pressure, it is not surprising that there was a strong whiff of collective persecution paranoia in the atmosphere. At that time, both Catholic and Protestant powers tacitly embarked on a search for scapegoats. A witch is the most convincing scapegoat they've ever found. The crime of witchcraft is also the same as the crime of heresy and the crime of treason.

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In 1612, an eight-year-old girl bought a medical needle from a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper was too lazy to watch out, so the girl took two steps forward and fell down with a stroke. The girl's mother was accused of being a witch. Even during the interrogation, the door was searched, two related families, 20 poor people, none of them were spared. All of them were imprisoned, 16 of them women, 9 of them hanged. According to the most conservative estimates, about 600,000 people died in European witch hunts between 1450 and 1750. 85% of them were women. This is why the hunt for witches has also been described as a kind of "gender slaughter". The writing of the witch must be in line with the Church's propaganda in order to give the witch hunt sufficient legitimacy. As a result of the classical culture of misogyny, texts in which witches were described as "satanic agents" were the result.

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The demonisation of witches in the text was a huge dilution of the evil in the light of day. Tens of thousands of innocent women were imprisoned as witches and subjected to unimaginable tortures. Many died from physical torture and mental breakdown during forced confessions before being sent to the stake. In Scotland alone, James VI, the witch hunter, almost caused an epidemic of witchcraft. Some 4,000 "witches" were put to death between 1590 and 1662. The witch-hunting business made many local people a fortune: 40 shillings for 20 carloads of peat fuel; four barrels of lard, 26 shillings; fir and cask, 16 shillings; 24 feet of neck rope, four shillings... That was the price in 1596; by 1636, 10 carloads of charcoal had risen to £3. Witches also had to pay for their own burning, such as the cost of a lard soaked hemp dress, or burn

slowly.The witches are the tragic prophets of Macbeth, and they are the God of the whole of the play. They see the whole play from God's perspective as prophets. In their few appearances, they hint at the final tragic outcome for Macbeth and for us. They understand the weakness of human nature and tease the careerists who gain and lose power. Each of the witch's prophecies is a reflection of Macbeth's unconscious. The Witch is actually visualising Macbeth's inner desires. The witch is a withered image of no man and no woman. This may indicate that in Macbeth's subconscious there is indeed a reversal of right and wrong, confusing the blurred lines of black and white.

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Shakespeare's witches are not of the type plucked out of the Inquisition's Value Added Tax: ugly, evil, infant-eating, super-powered. In fact they weren't even witches at all, they had beards and their gender was ambiguous. Swimming in the wilderness, separate from humanity, they are more like casual witnesses and prophets of a certain character tragedy in which humanity has become entangled. Of their five prophecies, three were true: Macbeth will be King of Scotland; Macbeth will not be harmed by any animal born of his mother; Macbeth will not be defeated until the Battle of Dunsnarn Heights - his inflated ego will be. The other two: Macbeth must beware of MacDuff. The child of Banquo, Macbeth's old comrade, will become king - and this corresponds to Macbeth's deepest fear.

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Many critics believe that the witches are one of the highlights of Macbeth, and that their predictions dominate the plot, leading Macbeth down a path of no return with ambiguous words, and ultimately killing him. This portrayal of the role of witches in the play has much to do with James's earlier witch hunts.Compared to other European kings of his time, James I's hatred of witches was quite remarkable. It started with his marriage. In August 1589, the 22-year-old King James VI of Scotland sent a special envoy to Copenhagen to marry the 14-year-old Princess Anne, sister of the Danish King Christian IV (reigned 1588-1648). At the end of October, Anne was escorted to Scotland by a Danish naval fleet to be reunited with her husband, but a storm hit and the fleet was blown to the Norwegian coast. Learning of this, James led a fleet of 300 men to meet his wife, and the couple had a formal wedding in Oslo, Norway, and then travelled together to Denmark, where they lived for several months in the port city of Elsinore (the setting for "Hamulay") and then in Copenhagen. Jammus' curiosity about witchcraft was sparked by the widespread witch hunts in the Trier region of the Holy Roman Empire. In April 1590, the Jamse fleet sailed back to Scotland, but was again hit by a storm and the fleet had to stay in Norway for shelter, returning to Scotland on 1 May. In Denmark, the commander of the fleet escorting Queen Anne suspected that the storm had been caused by a witch whose husband was the mayor of Elcinor, whom he had humiliated. As a result of the admiral's accusations, a witch trial began in Copenhagen in July 1590. Six men were convicted, all of whom confessed to having sent the devil aboard Queen Anne's ship; two of them were burned at the stake, on a pile of firewood in the famous Kronborg Castle in Elsinore.

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The judges of the time had a number of tried and tested ways of proving whether a defendant was a real witch, based on their experience. These were known as the "witch criteria", and are briefly described below. Look for the "devil's mark" - it was believed at the time that the devil would leave a mark on the sorcerer, and that this devil's mark, because it had been touched by the devil, would sting painlessly and not bleed. Therefore, it is necessary to remove all hair from the suspect's body, strip the body to check for such devil's marks - such as bulges, spots, calluses, scars or birthmarks, and if found, poke the suspect with a needle or knife to see if it hurts. For example, a woman called Ruher, who was accused of being a witch, was found to have five devil marks on her left shoulder. Another woman called Adriana, 60, was identified as a witch because she was found to have a spot in the middle of her back, under her shoulder, where a needle had been inserted one finger deep without a drop of blood or pain. After the witch trials, the property of the women branded as "witches" belonged to the torturers, which was a good way for them to raise money so that they could spare no innocent woman. Human blood was turned into gold and silver coins, and condemned women were burned alive or boiled to death.

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Between 1590 and 1662, five witch hunts terrorised the local population. The longest of these took place between 1628 and 1631.

As a result, the Scottish government executed 2,500 people, mostly women, accused of being witches or practising witchcraft.

In 1591, King James I received a shocking confession from an accused witch. He subsequently sanctioned several witch trials. On Halloween night 1590, more than 200 witches travelled by boat to a church in North Berwick in response to a call to worship the devil.By the late 17th century, religious pluralism was beginning to be accepted by many people in Scotland, which meant that witch hunts became less important to the nation.

Although less common after 1662, witchcraft still occurred in Europe, but never to the extent that it affected the local population in Scotland in the mid-1600s.

Several small monuments have been erected to honour the victims of the witch trials that took place in Scotland during the 16th and 17th centuries. Some have called for larger monuments to commemorate and honour the period four centuries ago when thousands of women were subjected to great upheaval and torment.

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King James I believed that on the night that the witches met in the church of North Berwick, they had been told by the devil to plot the destruction of King James I and to remove him from the throne.James I and his advisors believed that a witchcraft conspiracy was threatening his reign as King of Scotland, causing much unrest among the locals and the king himself.Six years after hearing of the witches' plot to remove him from the throne, King James I published his book: Demonologies. In this book, James I explained how the Devil worked on Earth and how he made pacts with people to become witches and do what he wanted.

Ultimately, whether it is the witches in Macbeth who cause a reversal of the natural order of things, or whether it is simply Macbeth's inherent evil that is stirred up, is left to the audience's imagination. Either way, the play confirms and introduces new elements to the stereotypes of witches, including their spells, their familiarity and their inherent evil. Macbeth instils fear in those who see the witches. They are not just an alliance of evil, but a conspiracy against the state. The latter argument was very palatable in England at the time, as the play was performed just months after one of the most notorious conspiracies in history, the Gunpowder Plot. In the space of three years, England plunged from the 'Golden Age' of the Holy Mary to one of the darkest and most dangerous periods in its history.