THREE hundred and fifty years is not a terribly long time. Back in yon day, we burned alleged witches at the stake, and more details of this quirky behaviour have emerged in a book recently unearthed in an archive down in yonder Londonshire.

It lists names and charges, such as renouncing baptism and riding the devil as if he were a donkey or fairground attraction.

I don’t want to sound controversial, but I believe these charges to have been poppycock.

And I’ll be quite candid with you here: I am against burning people at the stake, in most instances.

I’m also fascinated by crowd mentality and groupthink, believing with Seneca that the mob were never good advisers.

Regarding the 17th century mob that was Scotland, how could such horrendous things happen in a country later much admired for carrying out orders faithfully for the British Empire and agreeing, with rare generosity of heart, that other people were better suited to running its affairs?

I find myself uncannily qualified to pronounce upon such matters for, not only did I write my plumbing and allied trades course dissertation on the mass psychology of fascism (vide Wilhelm Reich), but I was also nearly burned at the stake.

You clamour for more details about the latter but show no interest in the former. Very well, here’s the dope.

For some reason, my mother and I – a mere infant unschooled – were in a horrible East Lothian town, where she left me outside a shop while she bartered within.

I’ve never told anyone this before but, horrifyingly enough, it was nearly my end.

Two older boys came along and asked if I was a Protestant or a Catholic.

Unable to say the former word, I said “Kafflick”, and they dragged me away up a hill saying they were going to be burn me alive.

I can still recall my terror and their laughter as, eventually, they let me go. Thus small-town Scotland in the 1960s and, possibly, today.

From the same period, taken to church for the first time, I fled in terror from the gloomy, cavernous surroundings and the dread sound of the doom-laden organ.

Mother found me hiding behind coats on a rack, with my wee feet sticking out at the bottom.

Had that occurred in the 17th century – and there was little to differentiate it, barring the nylon shirts and Old Spice of the congregation – I’d have been hauled before the beaks and my mother burned at the stake for rearing Satan (“His name’s not Satan, it’s Stan”).

Already, indeed, I’d committed evil by stealing the gas money and trying to spend it at the sweetie shop (where I was shopped; thus began my early interest in etymology).

I should add that I was never baptised, something that gave me the fear when young but now makes me feel, well, blessed.

You will find no horns upon my heid, nor a tail on my bahookie.

Indeed, for all the theft and blasphemy, I resembled more an angel when wee, with my platinum blond hair and that annoying halo thing above my heid (though I once scored a goal with it from a corner).

Today, meanwhile, we should all get down on our knees and thank the Lord that the church no longer has a stranglehold on our lives.

For it was the pious who burned people at the stake: a sort of stake piety.

If you think I’m talking mince, consider also that, even acting on orders from high, communities would be insular and cut-off back in those days, and groupthink would be a much more direct and raw phenomenon than it is in today’s virtual-style reality.

Everywhere was an island, and these remain the last places today where communal ruthlessness, cunning and unscrupulous self-preservation can take hold like flames at the stake.

Witches were often the victims of local disputes, with their accusers motivated by revenge or envy as much as superstition.

Witches were wise women, learned in herbal medicine, who nowadays would have opened wee shops or consultancies at which they’d advise punters to sprinkle crushed lovage on their sausage rolls.

Weird social phenomena such as Nazism and the burning of witches are difficult to explain, for persecution is complex.

But their root lies in the suppression of individual rationality and the development of a hive mind.

The solution, expressed archaically, is simple: your own master ever bee.