initiation ceremony into the Horseman's Word was "a dramatic and memorable event". Its use of heightened language and ceremony created an atmosphere that made the event meaningful for its participants. The precise nature of the ceremony and the oaths used, differed according to the various groups, although all had a clear basis in Freemasonry. Severe punishments were specified for any breach of the oath. The Horseman's Word borrowed much from the Miller's Word initiation ceremony where bread and whisky were given as pseudo sacraments and the inductee was blindfolded. The Word's members did however add their own designs in the form of passwords, oaths, and the ordeals chosen as part of the initiation ceremony. Among the Horseman's Word group in Angus, initiation ceremonies typically took place at night, preferably at the time of the full moon, in an isolated barn, byre, stable, or steading. An individual known as the High Horseman would be seated in this space, holding a cloven goat's hoof in his hand; he would preside over the ceremony. The apprentice was then stripped to the waist and blindfolded, and spun around by his fellows in order to disorient him before being brought into the ceremonial space and made to stand before the High Horseman. The High Horseman asked a series of set questions of his fellows at which they responded with a series of set answers. Turning to the initiate, who is made to kneel and has his blindfold removed, the High Horseman then commanded the newcomer to provide vows to keep to the group's secrets. This achieved, all those assembled then recited the Horseman's Creed, which reminded them of the punishments that should befall them should they break their vows. Following the ceremony, a ceilidh was held in which toasts were made and the assembled horsemen drank from whisky that the apprentice had been required to bring with him. The diabolist elements of the initiation ceremonies of both the Millers' Word and Horseman's Word might have been a deliberate parody of Presbyterianism, a form of Protestant Christianity that was then dominant in much of Scotland. Similarly, its embrace of drunkenness, jokes, songs, and toasts may have served as a deliberate mockery of the area's conventional morality. The historian Ronald Hutton suggested that these diabolical elements may have derived in part from folk stories of the witches' sabbath, which could have been absorbed either directly from Scottish