THE REAL MR HYDE

“The notorious Wizard of West Bow, practitioner of devilish arts, summoner of demons and notorious fornicator”

As the 16th century ticked over into the 17th, the world was a place of suspicion and fear. The Age of Enlightenment had yet to dawn and just like the rest of the British Isles, Scotland was a place where the good feared God and cowered at the unseen wickedness that dwelt in the shadows, hoping to tempt the weak or greedy. It was a place where magic might just be real and witch trials convinced some people that witchcraft lurked in the most unexpected places, its practitioners scheming to snare even decent souls and drag them into the grip of evil and all the way down to hell itself. In the first half of the 17th century one man came to embody immorality, evil and the blackest magic imaginable to the residents of Edinburgh. He was Major Thomas Weir, the notorious Wizard of West Bow, practitioner of devilish arts, summoner of demons and notorious fornicator with his own sister and beasts alike. Major Thomas Weir died for his supposed crimes, but was he truly an emissary of the devil, or might he have been a mentally ill man who lost his life to a tragic miscarriage of justice? Perhaps there was a third possibility and Major Weir was actually the heartless brother who subjected his own sister to unimaginable torments for decades, driving her mad.

Thomas Weir