pets - Familiar Spirits

Halloween is nearly upon us! And in the spirit of the season, today’s spooktacular Story from the Museum Floor by Stephanie, who works in the Museum Shop and with the Visitor Team at the Whitworth, explores the involvement of witches’ animals, or ‘familiars’ in the English Witch Trials of the seventeenth century.

Part One traces the evidence for the cat as the diabolical accomplice to witches and cunning folk… Then join us next time, on Halloween week when Stephanie turns her attention in a canine direction to ‘a thing like unto a black dog’…

For more about animals and nature, have a look at the Curator’s blog.

The Nature of the Familiar and its Origins.

Have a walk around Manchester Museum this Halloween and you’ll spot many an animal that was thought to be a possible guise for a witch’s ‘familiar‘ or had some sort of superstition attached. The figure of the familiar is one which is etched into our minds whenever we think of witches; whether we realise it as children or not. However, the being, often in animal form, accompanying the witch as she, or he, goes about their work is not merely a pet. The familiar, a spirit of a morally ambiguous or downright evil nature, was a prominent feature of beliefs about witchcraft in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was also found in Scotland. Even the accusation that someone might have a familiar could cause them some trouble.

Familiars did not exclusively appear as animals, they might also take a more human-like form or that of strange hybrid creatures, but they most often appeared as animals that people might encounter in their daily lives in rural communities – sometimes domestic animals and others that might be classed as vermin. The animal form a familiar assumed could vary; birds, cats, dogs, hares, ferrets, moles, rats, toads, even horses were possible guises. Witches might also assume the guise of an animal themselves.

There are various theories as to the possible origins of familiars, with some citing medieval sorcerers and their summoning of spirits as one inspiration. Others have suggested that some stories were inspired by pets kept by the accused and anxieties about the propriety of doting on animals. Further theories have pointed to earlier beliefs about the devil and the forms in which he might appear.

Witches were not the only people who were believed to work with animals and spirits. Cunning folk were men and women who used magic to heal people and cattle, help someone to recover lost property, cure cases of bewitchment, help people in matters of love and many other things that might be causes of anxiety in daily life. They sometimes consulted spirits in order to achieve these ends and occasionally utilised animals in their cures. If their clients or neighbours took a disliking to them, cunning folk could be accused of being witches. These people and their clients were usually quite poor and may have believed in and held on to old superstitions about different kinds of fairies and spirits. They might also have retained some elements of Catholicism.

Witchcraft and the Law – Punishable by Death

In England in 1563, a statute was passed stating that charms, the conjuration of spirits and the use of witchcraft to harm or kill others were felonies. Bewitching someone to death was punishable by death. In 1604 another Witchcraft Act stated that associating with and keeping wicked spirits was a felony, placing more emphasis on familiars, although a belief that the nature of the relationship between a witch and her familiar was diabolic had already been present.

Cunning folk didn’t necessarily see themselves as witches but both ecclesiastical authorities and the secular courts that took control of witch trials were more inclined to view the use of spirits and charms as witchcraft, especially if it was thought that harm had been done to a person or their property. In more privileged circles, the familiar was believed to be one of the means through which a witch might harm or kill a person or their property.

It is worth noting that most people who were accused of witchcraft in England were not executed. However, stories about familiars and the discovery of a ‘witch’s mark’ on the body of the accused – a strange blemish or growth from which the familiar was said to suckle blood – could be damning evidence of a diabolic pact.

Due to the sheer breadth of information we have on familiars from pamphlets discussing witch trials, in this series of blog posts I will focus on just a few prominent forms of familiars that appeared in English witch trials – dogs and toads, but first, the cat…

Halloween decorations are dominated by sleek black cats, believed by some to cause bad luck, although sometimes said to be lucky in England and Scotland. However, familiars taking feline form in the witch trials were not exclusively black.

A literary connection

The three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth mention their familiars as they are about to depart from each other’s company in Act 1, Scene 1;‘Graymalkin’ refers to a grey cat, while ‘Paddock’ refers to a toad familiar. Macbeth was probably written during the reign of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, who wrote Daemonologie, first published in 1597. This was a treatise which, amongst other things, argued that witches were very real, that the devil could appear to them in various forms and discussed the kinds of magic they used. This emphasis on evidence was intended to make sure that the ‘right’ people were tried and executed as witches. James himself became involved in a number of witch trials when he believed there was reason to doubt the accusation of witchcraft.

Three Witches and a cat called Sathan

In 1566, three women stood accused of witchcraft in Chelmsford, Essex. Their names were Elizabeth Francis, Agnes Waterhouse and Joan Waterhouse. Agnes Waterhouse was about to become the first recorded case of a person executed for witchcraft in England. At the heart of the trial was a story about ‘Sathan’ or Satan, the feline familiar of Elizabeth and then Agnes. He was the devil in animal form. Elizabeth said that she inherited the spirit, which first appeared ‘in the likeness of a whyte spotted catte’, from her grandmother. His first act of service for Elizabeth was to provide her with some sheep when she asked to be rich, although the sheep soon disappeared.

Sathan was quite vocal. He supposedly spoke to Elizabeth and advised her on how to attract a suitor and abort a pregnancy when the suitor refused to marry her. He killed the suitor in revenge for not marrying Elizabeth. Sathan was also said to have killed Elizabeth’s infant daughter and lamed her husband at her request when she was later unhappily married. Sathan’s payment for such services was food, such as bread and milk, and some of Elizabeth’s blood, which was suckled from a witch’s mark on her body. He was later traded to Agnes Waterhouse in exchange for a cake.

The Black Cat – A Familiar Story

Tales of a black cat familiar appeared in a pamphlet in 1579, discussing a trial in Windsor. This familiar, ‘Gille’, belonged to Mother Devell and was fed, like Sathan, with blood and milk. ‘Bunne’, another familiar, assuming the likeness of a black cat, appeared in this trial and was said to have tried to have persuaded its mistress to escape rather than confess her crimes. Elizabeth Stile, who was not liked by her neighbours, was said to have a familiar called Phillip, who took the form of a rat. Clearly demonic cats did not seem to mind working with equally demonic beings that might normally serve as prey items!

Why Cats?

So, why did the devil, or devils, and familiars sometimes appear as cats? It’s hard to say exactly why certain animal forms were thought to be more favoured by such spirits than others but it’s likely that some of it was down both human and animal behaviours. Cats have not been domesticated nearly as long as dogs have and seem to retain a fair amount of wild instincts, such as their strong hunting instinct. In dogs this instinct could easily be channelled into hunting for sport, due to their nature as pack animals, meaning that hunting breeds were prized amongst the nobility for whom hunting was a favourite pastime. The dog, as a pack animal, could be more easily trained to perform a variety of tasks for humans and seemed to bend more easily to our will.

Cats have not been as selectively bred or regulated by humans to the same extent as dogs. Their nature has often been perceived as aloof and mysterious in the West. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the behaviour of cats, such as their nightly activities and tendency to do as they please could have been interpreted as being sinister in a world that was still very religious and did not have the scientific and medical resources available to us today. However, that is not to say that cats were not celebrated at all. Some stories had cats aiding heroes, such as the cat in the story of Dick Whittington, although some of these cats also seemed to be supernaturally intelligent.

Although the strong hunting instinct of cats was utilised to control vermin, cats themselves could be regarded as a risk to human health; in the seventeenth century, some physicians thought that a cat’s breath could have a poisonous effect on the lungs. Stray cats and dogs were killed during the Great Plague of London in 1665 in an effort to control the spread of disease. With people unable to fully explain how the plague spread, it is easy to see how some animals were wrongly blamed for the disease.

Stephanie Studders

Familiar Spirits

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