Elspeth Buchan

Elspeth Buchan (1738-1791) was the founder of a Scottish religious sect known as the Buchanites.

She was the daughter of John Simpson, proprietor of an inn near Banff.

Having quarreled with her husband Robert Buchan, a potter of Greenock, she settled with her children in Glasgow - a quite daring and unconventional act for a woman to take in the society of the time.

With the Church of Scotland still inspired by the outspokenly mysoginist teachings of John Knox, organized religion of the time offered women no possibility of a leading role. However, Buchan - deeply impressed by a sermon preached by Hugh White , minister of the Relief church at Irvine - persuaded White and others that she was a saint with a special mission. Specifically, that in fact she was the woman described in Book of Revelation, chapter 12, and White - the man-child in the same.

White was condemned by the presbytery. The sect, which ultimately numbered forty-six adherents - but which clearly got public attention completely disproportionate to their modest size - was expelled by the magistrates in 1784 and settled in a farm, consisting of one room and a loft, known as New Cample in Dumfriesshire.

Mrs Buchan claimed prophetic inspiration and the ability to confer the Holy Spirit upon her followers by breathing upon them. They believed that the millennium was near, and that they would not die, but be Translation (LDS Church)
translated. It appears that they lived on funds provided by the richer members.

As with regard to many controversial sects at various times and places, they were rumoured by the surrounding society to practice "a community of wives" or "orgies in the woods", but there is no conclusive proof of that.

The poet Robert Burns, in a letter dated August 1784, describes the sect as "idle and immoral".

In 1785 White and Mrs Buchan published a "Divine Dictionary", but the sect broke up on the death of its founder, in spite of White's attempts to prove that she was only in a trance. Even White was eventually undeceived.

Andrew Innes, the last survivor, died in 1848.

Bibliography

J. Train, "The Buchanites from First to Last" (Edinburgh, 1846).

References

*1911