The Wicker Man

25/05/2026

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  
Much of modern Scottish religious history emphasises the divisions in the country between what became two distinct faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, with the former rejecting the latter at the time of the Reformation. This would lead to numerous complications for state, church and nation, and can be simplified by saying that it led to Mary Queen of Scots having her head chopped off.
To go into the intricate details of why this was so would be to ignore The Wicker Man altogether, but all we need to extract from it is that Mary was the Catholic who many thought was the rightful heir to the throne, rather than the protestant Elizabeth. Elizabeth won the day, and for centuries, a royal marrying a Catholic would have meant eschewing the crown. Britain was a protestant country, and though there may be differences between Scottish Protestantism and its variations, like Presbyterianism and Free Presbyterianism,  and English Anglicanism, they have all represented the state.
Which leads us to Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror film. Christian policeman, Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), is investigating a tip-off that a girl has gone missing on a small island, and the lord of Summerisle (Christopher Lee) says Howie’s religion had its chance. Howie’s True God didn’t come up with the goods, as the locals lived off a restricted diet in impoverished circumstances. Lord Summerisle’s family offered a combination of benevolence, agricultural know-how and paganism to improve the locals’ lot. Before long, the ministers fled the island, never to return. All Howie sees is licentious behaviour and superstition, which isn’t so very different, some might say, from what he practices on the mainland, but without the licentiousness. Yes, the locals on the island allow for promiscuity, public nudity and phallic education in the classroom, but they also look a lot happier than those in Howie’s community, which we see at the beginning of the film, worshipping the Lord God our Saviour. Summerisle suggests that the proof of the theological pudding lies in the eating, and Protestantism has proved thin gruel.
Yet this is where Anthony Shaffer’s fine script throws in the anomalous early on. For an island that crows about its fecundity, why is all the food Howie is served at the local hotel tinned? It might just be the locals believing this arrogant outsider deserves no better, as Hardy offers us a Polanski-esque insert shot of a sad-looking dish. Yet Howie’s disgust meets with a question, one that will be answered much later on as curiosity really will kill the cat. He discovers that the reason he is eating terrible food is central to why he is on the island looking for the missing Rowan Morrison. She hasn’t gone missing at all, but her apparent disappearance has been a trap to lure him onto Summerisle and feed him to the wicker man of the title: a giant straw effigy, where he will share his death with various sacrificed animals. It is a pagan ritual, and while many who are inclined now to think of the word Celtic are less likely to bring to mind the ancient Celts that were present in Scotland long before either Catholics or Protestants, but instead the football team. The latter may be central to  bringing out not just football rivalry but religious factionalism too, with Glasgow Celtic associated with Catholicism; Glasgow Rangers with Protestantism. But while the Celts practised pagan rituals,  Celtic offer the ritual of a football game with no need for human sacrifice, no matter the often violent exchanges between these rival teams.
Whatever the benefits or otherwise of paganism, one of the risks is a relatively indiscriminate sacrifice, where there is neither someone who has already died for our sins (as in Jesus Christ), nor a rational court of law defining whether someone deserves to be executed for a given offence. There may, in many instances, be miscarriages of justice and cooked-up cases, but the principle of rational law will hold, however bastardised. Even the most corrupt of courts in the modern world would be unlikely to insist that someone should go to the electric chair because the crops have failed.
Yet Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, Robert Callaso in the Ruins of Kasch, and Shirley Jackson in ‘The Lottery’, all explore, in different ways, an arbitrary aspect to sacrifice, which might be another way of saying its necessity. Just because modern cultures insist on a rational discourse over punishment, this doesn’t mean it has removed the unconscious need for a scapegoat. Indeed, some might say better a system based on absurd rules, than a causally logical one. If the point and purpose isn’t culpability, but the structure of blame, then it can seem like earlier cultures are more in touch with their instincts than modern ones, no matter the unfair abuse a footballer may receive for missing a penalty or an open goal. As Girard says, “Our contemporary world revives primitive violence without rediscovering the absence of knowledge that endowed former societies with a relative innocence and prevented them from being unlivable.’’ (‘Retribution’)
This would be to make a huge point, but if we shrink it to The Wicker Man, we can see that Howie might seem more deluded than the locals. He rationally explains that they will have to seek an even bigger sacrifice next year if the crops fail once more, and might have to offer up Lord Summerisle himself. Yet Howie would probably be wrong about this: one of the reasons he is the chosen victim is because of his avowed virginity, and Lord Summerisle hardly looks like a man who has foregone any such available pleasure. In Howie’s world, he is an innocent, but he should also remember that in his world, Jesus himself died on the cross, both blameless and a virgin. Within their system of governance and belief, the islanders have created an impeccable system of reasoning, however divorced it must surely be from reality. If we believe Howie is wrong in thinking that Summerisle will be deposited in next year’s Wicker Man, he will surely be right that the crops won’t be impacted upon one way or the other by his death. They may be heathens, as he insists, but this is the difference between internal reasoning and empirical evidence. Were they to sacrifice Summerisle the following year, it would go against this internal logic and risk destroying the community itself. If the crops fail once more, it would be terrible, but they will have to rely on tinned beans and potatoes. If they do turn against Lord Summerisle, it might create chaos and perhaps indiscriminate violence. Killing Howie doesn’t at all do this, and everybody is in a happy celebration as he burns. There is no anger, no sense of revenge or retribution. Within their faith, it is a pragmatic solution to a problem, just as in Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, a person accepts that if they draw the short straw, they will be the one condemned to die for the greater social good. Howie’s death has nothing to do with guilt and justice. It is about holding the community together.
In The Ruins of Kasch, Calasso, going on to address Girard’s distinction between Oedipus Rex and the Gospels, says, “sacrifice has completed its transformation into a trial. It is now for the law to establish the choice of victim. But the only trial that is wholly effective, insofar as it frees itself from the sacred, is the trial in which the innocent is convicted.’’ The Wicker Man might seem like the low-budget horror film it happens to be, but if it has proved so memorable, it rests at least partly on its exploration of sacrifice as horrific, from one perspective and perfectly sensible from another. Howie can use as much reason as he likes, but what he cannot quite see is that for all the faith he possesses as he rails against the locals while they set fire to the effigy, it is pointless next to theirs. This is chiefly and simply because they have power over him as he is tied up and now about to die, but if Calasso is right, the depth of the sacrificial goes far further back than Christ and modern law. “Here it is shown how the law always has been, and will always be, overwhelmed by something previous and more powerful.” Howie invokes Christ and says that they will never get away with it, that the law will catch up with them. But these are relatively modern claims going against much older ones, and his death seems inexorable. Both Jesus and the law are weak against this ancient force.
When Howie first arrives on the island, he acts with all the authority of a Christian and a lawman, oblivious to older traditions, and he will die not only because of his innocence (as a person who has committed no crime and who is a virgin), but also for his ignorance and arrogance. When he investigates the rites and rituals of paganism, he does so as Howie tries to find out if he can put a stop to this mumbo jumbo that might cost Rowan Morrison her life. His position is understandable as the good Christian and forthright law officer he is, but rather than seeing these as ancient approaches to understanding a people’s relationship with their land, he single-mindedly and single-handedly reckons he can save Rowan when he is sure she is alive, and now needs saved. He does admittedly aim to go back to the mainland to recruit more officers for the task, but the plane won’t start, and he must try to rescue her alone, as if believing that his faith in God and the three stripes on his uniform can counter the force of an entire community. When in the library in the midst of his bibliographic inquiries, he says, “Dear God in Heaven, even these people cannot be that mad’’, it is the words of the righteous, but when a woman looks across as he says this, she might be wondering who the mad person may be. Voicing your thoughts out loud to yourself is hardly a sign of mental health. At the same time, she probably knows that he is soon to be the sacrificial victim. They are mad enough to burn Howie, but not mad enough to burn Rowan Morrison.
Interestingly, Calasso discusses two kinds of substitution: “one says a stands for b […] the other says: a stands for b but in the same way that a fragment of granite stands for the mountain from which it has been separated.” (The Ruins of Kasch) Another way of looking at this is to think of two terms: metonomy and synecdoche. The former describes resemblance; the latter, a significant part of the whole. A set of wheels or a motor is a synecdoche that signifies the car; Hollywood or Westminster are metonymies, alluding to the film industry and the British government. How does this work in the context of sacrifice and The Wicker Man? We could say that the community finds a metonymic sacrifice over a synecdochal one. When Howie looks at the book on pagan ritual, he reads that in good times, when the harvests were fruitful, the locals would sacrifice animals, but in bad times, it would be a human being.  The animal would be a metonymic sacrifice, but sometimes the circumstances would demand a more literal embodiment. Nevertheless, this could still be associational, and this is the difference between ‘The Lottery’ and The Wicker Man. While Jackson’s story insists someone each year must be given to the Gods from the community (a synecdoche), the elaborate plot in The Wicker Man says that an outsider will work equally well (a metonym). It allows the community to remain strong even if its crops have been weak.
Thus, The Wicker Man adopts the scapegoat as an outsider (metonymy) rather than an insider (synecdoche), even if the plot hinges on the assumption that an insider rather than an outsider will be sacrificed. Howie may go to the island as the one determined ideally to save an insider from harm, but this is where he has been misled. He isn’t there to save an insider, but to be sacrificed as an outsider. Everything that the locals have been doing is predicated on leading him to the wicker man of the title. Though there are various versions of the film, in some it offers a scene at the beginning with Howie in church, and he quotes Christ saying “this is my body, broken for you” as we witness ritualised Christianity. By the end of the film, he too will be sacrificed, but not for the faith he practises, but one he abhors.
If pagan beliefs have little place in modern Scotland, then even Christianity isn’t so strong. Just over half the population have no active faith. Yet those who do mainly agree with Howie and would believe in Jesus Christ, our saviour. 38.8% see themselves as Christians, 20.4% as Church of Scotland; 13.4% belong to the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike on Summerisle, the priests and vicars haven’t yet scarpered.
But we should remember, however, that the term food desert was first coined in the context of Scotland, by Steve Cummins and Sally Macintyre, while a recent report tells us that more broadly in the UK, many “living in the countryside struggle to access affordable and healthy food including fresh fruit and vegetables.” (Guardian) It is a food desert that leads to Howie’s death, and whatever reservations we may have about religion in Scotland, to the divisions that caused Mary Queen of Scotland literally to lose her head, and many a football fan figuratively to lose theirs, who of us would want to bring back the ancient pagan ritual of human sacrifice to try and solve the shortage of fruit and veg? Let us not pretend, however, that underlying our resentments and our prejudices aren’t ancient feelings and mores that haven’t quite gone away, and that The Wicker Man very effectively brings to the surface.
 
 
 
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Wicker Man

Much of modern Scottish religious history emphasises the divisions in the country between what became two distinct faiths, Protestantism and Catholicism, with the former rejecting the latter at the time of the Reformation. This would lead to numerous complications for state, church and nation, and can be simplified by saying that it led to Mary Queen of Scots having her head chopped off.
To go into the intricate details of why this was so would be to ignore The Wicker Man altogether, but all we need to extract from it is that Mary was the Catholic who many thought was the rightful heir to the throne, rather than the protestant Elizabeth. Elizabeth won the day, and for centuries, a royal marrying a Catholic would have meant eschewing the crown. Britain was a protestant country, and though there may be differences between Scottish Protestantism and its variations, like Presbyterianism and Free Presbyterianism,  and English Anglicanism, they have all represented the state.
Which leads us to Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror film. Christian policeman, Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), is investigating a tip-off that a girl has gone missing on a small island, and the lord of Summerisle (Christopher Lee) says Howie’s religion had its chance. Howie’s True God didn’t come up with the goods, as the locals lived off a restricted diet in impoverished circumstances. Lord Summerisle’s family offered a combination of benevolence, agricultural know-how and paganism to improve the locals’ lot. Before long, the ministers fled the island, never to return. All Howie sees is licentious behaviour and superstition, which isn’t so very different, some might say, from what he practices on the mainland, but without the licentiousness. Yes, the locals on the island allow for promiscuity, public nudity and phallic education in the classroom, but they also look a lot happier than those in Howie’s community, which we see at the beginning of the film, worshipping the Lord God our Saviour. Summerisle suggests that the proof of the theological pudding lies in the eating, and Protestantism has proved thin gruel.
Yet this is where Anthony Shaffer’s fine script throws in the anomalous early on. For an island that crows about its fecundity, why is all the food Howie is served at the local hotel tinned? It might just be the locals believing this arrogant outsider deserves no better, as Hardy offers us a Polanski-esque insert shot of a sad-looking dish. Yet Howie’s disgust meets with a question, one that will be answered much later on as curiosity really will kill the cat. He discovers that the reason he is eating terrible food is central to why he is on the island looking for the missing Rowan Morrison. She hasn’t gone missing at all, but her apparent disappearance has been a trap to lure him onto Summerisle and feed him to the wicker man of the title: a giant straw effigy, where he will share his death with various sacrificed animals. It is a pagan ritual, and while many who are inclined now to think of the word Celtic are less likely to bring to mind the ancient Celts that were present in Scotland long before either Catholics or Protestants, but instead the football team. The latter may be central to  bringing out not just football rivalry but religious factionalism too, with Glasgow Celtic associated with Catholicism; Glasgow Rangers with Protestantism. But while the Celts practised pagan rituals,  Celtic offer the ritual of a football game with no need for human sacrifice, no matter the often violent exchanges between these rival teams.
Whatever the benefits or otherwise of paganism, one of the risks is a relatively indiscriminate sacrifice, where there is neither someone who has already died for our sins (as in Jesus Christ), nor a rational court of law defining whether someone deserves to be executed for a given offence. There may, in many instances, be miscarriages of justice and cooked-up cases, but the principle of rational law will hold, however bastardised. Even the most corrupt of courts in the modern world would be unlikely to insist that someone should go to the electric chair because the crops have failed.
Yet Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred, Robert Callaso in the Ruins of Kasch, and Shirley Jackson in ‘The Lottery’, all explore, in different ways, an arbitrary aspect to sacrifice, which might be another way of saying its necessity. Just because modern cultures insist on a rational discourse over punishment, this doesn’t mean it has removed the unconscious need for a scapegoat. Indeed, some might say better a system based on absurd rules, than a causally logical one. If the point and purpose isn’t culpability, but the structure of blame, then it can seem like earlier cultures are more in touch with their instincts than modern ones, no matter the unfair abuse a footballer may receive for missing a penalty or an open goal. As Girard says, “Our contemporary world revives primitive violence without rediscovering the absence of knowledge that endowed former societies with a relative innocence and prevented them from being unlivable.’’ (‘Retribution’)
This would be to make a huge point, but if we shrink it to The Wicker Man, we can see that Howie might seem more deluded than the locals. He rationally explains that they will have to seek an even bigger sacrifice next year if the crops fail once more, and might have to offer up Lord Summerisle himself. Yet Howie would probably be wrong about this: one of the reasons he is the chosen victim is because of his avowed virginity, and Lord Summerisle hardly looks like a man who has foregone any such available pleasure. In Howie’s world, he is an innocent, but he should also remember that in his world, Jesus himself died on the cross, both blameless and a virgin. Within their system of governance and belief, the islanders have created an impeccable system of reasoning, however divorced it must surely be from reality. If we believe Howie is wrong in thinking that Summerisle will be deposited in next year’s Wicker Man, he will surely be right that the crops won’t be impacted upon one way or the other by his death. They may be heathens, as he insists, but this is the difference between internal reasoning and empirical evidence. Were they to sacrifice Summerisle the following year, it would go against this internal logic and risk destroying the community itself. If the crops fail once more, it would be terrible, but they will have to rely on tinned beans and potatoes. If they do turn against Lord Summerisle, it might create chaos and perhaps indiscriminate violence. Killing Howie doesn’t at all do this, and everybody is in a happy celebration as he burns. There is no anger, no sense of revenge or retribution. Within their faith, it is a pragmatic solution to a problem, just as in Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, a person accepts that if they draw the short straw, they will be the one condemned to die for the greater social good. Howie’s death has nothing to do with guilt and justice. It is about holding the community together.
In The Ruins of Kasch, Calasso, going on to address Girard’s distinction between Oedipus Rex and the Gospels, says, “sacrifice has completed its transformation into a trial. It is now for the law to establish the choice of victim. But the only trial that is wholly effective, insofar as it frees itself from the sacred, is the trial in which the innocent is convicted.’’ The Wicker Man might seem like the low-budget horror film it happens to be, but if it has proved so memorable, it rests at least partly on its exploration of sacrifice as horrific, from one perspective and perfectly sensible from another. Howie can use as much reason as he likes, but what he cannot quite see is that for all the faith he possesses as he rails against the locals while they set fire to the effigy, it is pointless next to theirs. This is chiefly and simply because they have power over him as he is tied up and now about to die, but if Calasso is right, the depth of the sacrificial goes far further back than Christ and modern law. “Here it is shown how the law always has been, and will always be, overwhelmed by something previous and more powerful.” Howie invokes Christ and says that they will never get away with it, that the law will catch up with them. But these are relatively modern claims going against much older ones, and his death seems inexorable. Both Jesus and the law are weak against this ancient force.
When Howie first arrives on the island, he acts with all the authority of a Christian and a lawman, oblivious to older traditions, and he will die not only because of his innocence (as a person who has committed no crime and who is a virgin), but also for his ignorance and arrogance. When he investigates the rites and rituals of paganism, he does so as Howie tries to find out if he can put a stop to this mumbo jumbo that might cost Rowan Morrison her life. His position is understandable as the good Christian and forthright law officer he is, but rather than seeing these as ancient approaches to understanding a people’s relationship with their land, he single-mindedly and single-handedly reckons he can save Rowan when he is sure she is alive, and now needs saved. He does admittedly aim to go back to the mainland to recruit more officers for the task, but the plane won’t start, and he must try to rescue her alone, as if believing that his faith in God and the three stripes on his uniform can counter the force of an entire community. When in the library in the midst of his bibliographic inquiries, he says, “Dear God in Heaven, even these people cannot be that mad’’, it is the words of the righteous, but when a woman looks across as he says this, she might be wondering who the mad person may be. Voicing your thoughts out loud to yourself is hardly a sign of mental health. At the same time, she probably knows that he is soon to be the sacrificial victim. They are mad enough to burn Howie, but not mad enough to burn Rowan Morrison.
Interestingly, Calasso discusses two kinds of substitution: “one says a stands for b […] the other says: a stands for b but in the same way that a fragment of granite stands for the mountain from which it has been separated.” (The Ruins of Kasch) Another way of looking at this is to think of two terms: metonomy and synecdoche. The former describes resemblance; the latter, a significant part of the whole. A set of wheels or a motor is a synecdoche that signifies the car; Hollywood or Westminster are metonymies, alluding to the film industry and the British government. How does this work in the context of sacrifice and The Wicker Man? We could say that the community finds a metonymic sacrifice over a synecdochal one. When Howie looks at the book on pagan ritual, he reads that in good times, when the harvests were fruitful, the locals would sacrifice animals, but in bad times, it would be a human being.  The animal would be a metonymic sacrifice, but sometimes the circumstances would demand a more literal embodiment. Nevertheless, this could still be associational, and this is the difference between ‘The Lottery’ and The Wicker Man. While Jackson’s story insists someone each year must be given to the Gods from the community (a synecdoche), the elaborate plot in The Wicker Man says that an outsider will work equally well (a metonym). It allows the community to remain strong even if its crops have been weak.
Thus, The Wicker Man adopts the scapegoat as an outsider (metonymy) rather than an insider (synecdoche), even if the plot hinges on the assumption that an insider rather than an outsider will be sacrificed. Howie may go to the island as the one determined ideally to save an insider from harm, but this is where he has been misled. He isn’t there to save an insider, but to be sacrificed as an outsider. Everything that the locals have been doing is predicated on leading him to the wicker man of the title. Though there are various versions of the film, in some it offers a scene at the beginning with Howie in church, and he quotes Christ saying “this is my body, broken for you” as we witness ritualised Christianity. By the end of the film, he too will be sacrificed, but not for the faith he practises, but one he abhors.
If pagan beliefs have little place in modern Scotland, then even Christianity isn’t so strong. Just over half the population have no active faith. Yet those who do mainly agree with Howie and would believe in Jesus Christ, our saviour. 38.8% see themselves as Christians, 20.4% as Church of Scotland; 13.4% belong to the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike on Summerisle, the priests and vicars haven’t yet scarpered.
But we should remember, however, that the term food desert was first coined in the context of Scotland, by Steve Cummins and Sally Macintyre, while a recent report tells us that more broadly in the UK, many “living in the countryside struggle to access affordable and healthy food including fresh fruit and vegetables.” (Guardian) It is a food desert that leads to Howie’s death, and whatever reservations we may have about religion in Scotland, to the divisions that caused Mary Queen of Scotland literally to lose her head, and many a football fan figuratively to lose theirs, who of us would want to bring back the ancient pagan ritual of human sacrifice to try and solve the shortage of fruit and veg? Let us not pretend, however, that underlying our resentments and our prejudices aren’t ancient feelings and mores that haven’t quite gone away, and that The Wicker Man very effectively brings to the surface.
 
 
 
 

© Tony McKibbin