The earliest definite references to the animal familiar are usually thought to occur in two now well-known documents from the early sixteenth century. The first is a charge against a Yorkshire service magician in 1510, of keeping three beings like bumble bees under a stone and calling them out one by one to give each of them a drop of blood from his finger. This was intended to damn him as a Satanist after he had been arrested for genuine complicity in a scandalous attempt, involving local clergy and a former mayor of York, to find buried treasure by magical means. The accusation was made not by a churchman but a lay witness, a common man, and the accused utterly denied it. The court was not much interested in it, while convicting the magician and his accomplices on the treasure-hunting charge.58 The second case was heard in Somerset in 1530, in which suspicion was cast upon a woman for being a witch because, among other signs, a toad was seen in her house.59 This is not an absolutely foolproof testimony to belief in an animal familiar, as there is a slight chance that the toad was thought to be a genuine one, kept to milk its venom, but the likelihood is that it was indeed viewed as demonic. It is therefore probable that the keeping of demons in bestial form and a pet-like relationship was credited to magicians across England by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, at the latest. It is absolutely certain that by the first quarter of the century (at the latest) the ancient tradition of the magician’s servitor spirit had been combined in England with the equally venerable one of the evil spirit in animal form, to produce a genuinely popular belief that wicked magicians kept demons disguised as beasts, whom they fed on their own blood. Naturally enough, this idea went straight into English witch trials almost as soon as they were made possible by the parliamentary act of 1563, which criminalized magic and imposed the death penalty both for use of witchcraft to kill humans or livestock and for the invocation of evil spirits, for any purpose (and orthodox Elizabethan Christians would have regarded any spirit conjured by a magician as at least potentially evil). Moreover, the idea went as swiftly into the popular literature, which publicized trials and helped to form opinion with regard to what a witch should be. The very first of these pamphlets to survive, and perhaps to be published, concerned three women tried in Essex in 1566, who confessed to sharing a demon that variously took the form of a cat, a toad and a dog, and carried out their wishes.60 It is apparent from the accounts given that they elaborated their portrait of this being in successive confessions, which informed and encouraged each other; or else that their interrogators or the author of the pamphlet performed this work.61 One woman described how the demon, in cat form, was normally fed bread and milk, but that for each evil deed it committed for her, it required a drop of blood as sustenance, and each prick inflicted on her to draw the blood left a red mark. Another agreed that it had required the blood for most missions, but also was fed a chicken in reward for the killing of animals. It is clear that a basic set of ideas was being elaborated in different ways which derived from individual imaginations, sometimes converging and sometimes not; much as in the case of the stories from Cape Province and Zimbabwe.
In the same year a service magician from Dorset told a church court that he had learned how to break bewitchment from fairies, but how to trace stolen goods from a familiar spirit which he had called to him in a classic rite of ceremonial magic. It had appeared to him at times in the form of a dog, and had to be given a drop of his blood in order first to bind it to him. Once engaged, however, it only required the gift of a chicken, cat or dog in sacrifice once a year. He added that witches kept toads as familiars, and used them to harm people, while he only employed his powers for good.62 So, the same complex of beliefs was being articulated across southern England, in different contexts, in the years during which the trials for witchcraft were commencing. For a couple of decades it remained unstable: in 1579, for example, the sister of one of the Essex women tried in 1566 allegedly confessed that when she first acquired her familiar, in the form of a small, rough-coated white dog, she sealed the bargain not by giving it blood, but bread and milk alone. In the same year, an alleged confession of a witch in Berkshire made drops of blood the central recompense to familiars owned by different women, but milk and breadcrumbs were added as additional forms of regular sustenance.63 Even in the 1580s, although the blood-sucking motif persisted as a familiar’s reward, the demonic animal was fed more regular foodstuffs, such as beer, bread, cheese, cake and milk, as well. The Essex confessions are remarkable for their degree of domestication of the familiar, the creatures usually being kept like pets in pots or boxes in the home, lined with wool.64 Trial narratives of the 1580s also at times afford additional insights into how images of the animal familiar were built up in particular cases. One such is that of Joan Cason, in the northern Kent market town of Faversham. Those who witnessed against her claimed variously to have seen her familiar in the form of a rat, cat or toad, or heard it as a cricket, but when Joan herself came to confess she settled on a rat and humanized it and related it to her own life by giving it the face of her now dead master and lover.65 A sufficiently imaginative witness, once convinced that a person was a witch, could start to see animal devils everywhere: one boy from Burton-on-Trent in the northern Midlands, thinking himself bewitched by six women, identified their respective imps as taking the forms of a horse, dog, cat, fulmer petrel (a kind of seabird) and two different species of fish.66
In the course of the late 1570s and the 1580s, the expected act of giving blood to a familiar slowly became more regular in the reports, as an ongoing and sometimes even daily tribute to it, rather than a reward for specific acts or a rite to seal the initial making of the relationship.67 By 1580 the idea had appeared that the sucking was taken from the same part of the body each time, and that the act would leave a permanent mark, which, if found on a suspected witch’s body, could provide evidence in favour of the charges against her or (far more rarely) him.68 As has long been recognized among specialist scholars, this notion blended with the belief, by then widespread in Europe, that when making the initial pact with a witch, the Devil or a devil put a special mark, like a brand, on the person’s body. By 1600 British demonologists were expressing the concept as one of the proofs that could be used to determine guilt in a charge of witchcraft.69
In the ensuing decades it took an especially influential form: that the mark took the shape of a special teat to suckle the familiar, often concealed in or near the genitals. The spread of these ideas seems to have been fitful and patchy, with initial regional variations. It is tempting to regard the south-east as their main point of generation and diffusion, but less easy to prove. Certainly the concept of the special teat or teats was prominent there by the early seventeenth century. It provided crucial evidence in a celebrated trial at Edmonton, just north of London, in 1621, and was a central feature of England’s biggest witch-hunt, the major series of East Anglian trials in 1645–7, propelled by the team of witch-finders led by Matthew Hopkins.70 However, the body of a woman accused of witchcraft at Warboys, on the edge of the Huntingdonshire fenland, in 1593, was noted as having a teat on it after she was hanged, and it was implied that this was proof of her guilt.71 When the women were accused by the boy from Burton-on-Trent in 1597, local justices ordered a picked group of other women to search the suspects for ‘marks’, and those homed in on ‘teats’ and ‘warts’ as damning examples.72 Bedfordshire women tried in 1613 were convicted of suckling imps from teats on their thighs, and suspects in Northamptonshire were automatically searched for such marks in the previous year.73 The importance of them was therefore grasped early in the North and East Midlands. By contrast, during the famous trial at Lancaster in 1612 which was the largest in the nation until that date, it is clear that the notion that each witch received a personal attendant demon in animal form, which sometimes sucked blood from its human ally, was firmly established in that area, but not that of searching the accused for a visible spot left by the action. Instead, the blood-sucking had retained its earlier Tudor status as a speci
al act intended to seal the original compact between familiar and witch: once that was made, as in early Elizabethan Essex, the demonic animals were fed such food as humans enjoyed.74 By 1621 in neighbouring Yorkshire, however, it was considered imperative to inspect suspects ‘for marks upon their bodies’.75 This procedure became routine in that county during subsequent decades, and was central to the next big trial at Lancaster in 1634.76 By the mid-seventeenth century it was seemingly a regular procedure across most of the nation, and features prominently in the last English trial definitely to result in an execution, in Devon in 1682, and the last to result in a conviction, in Hertfordshire in 1712.77 None the less, some confusion remained regarding the significance of suckling a familiar. Even in the Hopkins cases, which were part of a concentrated and programmatic campaign, some people still thought that the blood was taken as a drop at the original making of the relationship, and some that it was a regular tribute. Nor is it clear from these confessions whether regular suckling was thought to be for sustenance or as reward for services, and whether other food needed to be given to familiars as well.
These seventeenth-century trials afford further insights into the ways in which the people involved, or those presenting their views in pamphlets, struggled with the concept of the animal familiar. At times this idea blended with the essentially different one that a witch could change shape into an animal or send out her or his spirit in animal form: at King’s Lynn in 1616 it was recorded that a woman there had sent one of her imps in the appearance of a toad to invade the house of a man whom she disliked. A servant caught it and put it into the fire, where it took an unnatural fifteen minutes to burn, in which time the alleged witch was screaming in pain. The woman was also accused of attacking victims herself disguised as a cat or a ‘great water dog’.78 The alleged witch from Edmonton confessed to suckling the Devil in the shape of a large black dog or a small white one, but was anxious to insist that the white ferrets seen about her house were nothing other than real animals.79 One interrogated at Framlingham in Suffolk during the Hopkins trials can be seen struggling to satisfy her questioners (and, given Hopkins’s methods, her torturers) by referring to what sounds like real experience, before giving in to the theological imperatives demanded by them. She was recorded as saying first that ‘about a year since, she felt a thing like a small cat come over her legs, which scratched her mightily. After that she rubbed and killed two things like butterflies in her secret parts.’ At this point, however, she allegedly succumbed and provided what was urged upon her by stating that ‘Another time when spinning, a polecat skipped into her lap and promised that if she would deny Christ and God, he would bring her victuals.’80 Another woman questioned at the same town during the same witch-hunt seemingly added vivid and idiosyncratic corroborative detail to get her statement accepted and the process ended, saying that she ‘had seven imps like flies, dores [beetles], spiders, mice etc, and having but five teats, they fought like pigs with a sow’.81 A young girl in Northumberland in 1645, accusing somebody of having sent a spirit against her, claimed that it had appeared variously as a dragon, bear, horse and cow, and while in these forms had somehow managed to wield a club, staff, sword and dagger upon her (the same girl also declared that she had been visited by angels, in the form of birds the size of turkeys, with human faces). Clearly the individual imagination (or visionary facility) ran riot at times among witnesses as well as those under interrogation.82 In view of all this, it must be significant that the idea of the animal familiar none the less does not seem to have put down deep roots in popular folklore, because by the nineteenth century it had mostly contracted into East Anglia, to become a distinctive regional tradition there. That of the mark left by suckling largely evaporated once it was no longer of value as legal evidence after the law against witchcraft was repealed in 1736. By contrast, a belief in witches themselves, and in their ability to shift shape into animals, remained a vibrant aspect of popular culture all over England and Wales until the twentieth century.83
It is time to sum up, and most contributors to the recent debates seem to emerge with honour from such a process.84 A comparison with beliefs in non-European societies certainly does establish the English animal familiar in a recurrent worldwide pattern. As a tradition it is indeed ultimately rooted in ancient animist ideas, though only in the attenuated and remote sense that it derives ultimately both from the servitor spirits of ceremonial magicians and the very widespread human disposition to give evil spirits in particular bestial characteristics. There is no good evidence in the sources that it was especially a popular tradition, detached and remote from the ideological systems of people in general. This conclusion is reinforced both by its apparent absence from medieval records and its later disappearance from modern folklore across most of England and Wales, but is based also on the close association between demons and animal disguises in mainstream medieval Christian culture. Those who have emphasized the demonological origin of the familiar deserve credit here, as they do when considering that the raw imaginative materials from which the animal familiar was constructed were all present in the stereotype of the conspiracy of organized demonic witchcraft from its fifteenth-century beginning. Those who have looked for an origin point in the servitor spirits of ceremonial magic score with the point that one direct root of the English concept lies in the evolving idea, widespread by the 1500s, that magicians compacted with their servitors with drops of their own blood. None of these considerations, however, fully explains why the English (and Welsh) ended up with their particular, and unusual, concept of the witch’s familiar. It may be, after all, that the reason relates to an attitude they had developed to pet animals, which set them apart from other Europeans and from the Scots; but there seems to be a lack of solid comparative evidence on which to base such a conclusion. In the last analysis the problem may actually not be susceptible to resolution, save by the observation that across the world different peoples have evolved different belief systems concerning magic and witchcraft which seem to have no obvious relationship with their political, social, economic and gender structures. In the case of Britain, the early modern English and Scots drew on a common stock of late medieval and older European ideas about demons, and came up with strikingly different variations upon it, which diverged further with time. This may be simply what human beings do, as one aspect of identity formation.
CONCLUSION
IT WAS REMARKED at the opening of this book that there are at least four different definitions of a witch operating in the contemporary Western world, and it is worth emphasizing what an extraordinary power they possess in combination, and what a remarkable range of meaning and emotion they encompass. The witch figure now occupies a spectrum from functioning as the ultimate tragic victim to functioning as the ultimate embodiment of evil. The definition of a witch as anybody who practises magic, or claims to do so, and of witchcraft as any kind of magic, was developed, and sustained for many centuries as a means of smearing magic in general with the taint of evil and antisocial associations. It functions more now, however, as a means of rehabilitating magic, and thus also often of promoting alternative forms of therapy, especially in healing. In doing so it blends the traditional figures of the witch and the service magician, sometimes distinguishing them by additions such as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ or ‘white’ and ‘black’ witches but often serving to absolve the word ‘witch’ of any automatic negative associations. The modern concept of witchcraft as a pagan nature religion, standing for a wild and green spirituality of feminism, environmentalism, humanitarianism and personal liberation and self-realization, itself based in nineteenth-century scholarship, has produced a constellation of successful, viable and (to my mind) thoroughly worthwhile religious traditions. That which has characterized the early modern European witch trials as essentially a war waged by men against women has drawn on the undoubted fact that the witch figure remains one of the very few embodiments of independent female power that traditional Western culture has bequeath
ed to the present.
All of these usages of the word have operated in effect as strategies of redemption of it, from the fear and hatred evoked by the fourth, and perhaps most fundamental, employment of it, to mean a person who uses magic to harm others. By focusing entirely on that usage, the book has – as must by now be readily apparent – not been designed to restore that fear and hatred but to annihilate them, by providing a better understanding of the roots of belief in such a figure and how they developed in a European context. A global survey of similar beliefs has found those to be well represented in all inhabited continents of the world, and indeed among the majority of human societies; though not among all of them. In various places they have provoked witch-hunting of an intensity and deadliness matching or even exceeding that found in Europe. This remains a very live issue in the present world, and one that may well be worsening. A worldwide perspective, indeed, makes Europe look fairly typical in its attitudes to witchcraft, with two resounding exceptions: that Europeans alone turned witches into practitioners of an evil anti-religion, and Europeans alone represent a complex of peoples who have traditionally feared and hunted witches, and subsequently and spontaneously ceased officially to believe in them. In fact, both developments came relatively late in their history and are probably best viewed as parts of a single process of modernization, driven by a spirit of scientific experimentation. The construction of the image of the satanic witch religion, and the trials which resulted, represented a new and extreme application of high medieval Christian theology, designed both to defend society against a serious new threat and to purify it religiously and morally to an extent never achieved before. Its abandonment occurred when the reality of the threat was not satisfactorily demonstrated and the drive for purification failed to produce any convincing improvements. Instead, Europeans developed another, much more radical, final solution to the threat of witchcraft, by defusing belief in it.
The Witch Page 41