Witches

Witch Lore

Regardless of what theory of witchcraft we choose to explain the phenomena of witchcraft to ourselves, we still find ourselves possessed of a vast body of lore about witches and witchy doings that has been passed down through the centuries. Notions about witches’ familiars, costume, equipment, spells, Sabbats, flights, and favorite haunts all transcend the divisiveness of theories and theorists and constitute a mythical encyclopedia of communally held knowledge—or perhaps we should call it a communal fantasy about the witch. Behind this fantasy are truths about ourselves, truths about human society, but the fantasy itself is fabulous, rich, humorous, absurd, and sometimes not a little horrific.

The familiar or “familiar spirit” was a common domestic animal given to the witch by the Devil—according to the Inquisitors—to do her malicious bidding.

This animal was really an imp in disguise, a low-ranking demon, meant to serve those who were in league with Satan (rather like the lover’s valet, footman, or chambermaid in an eighteenth-century opera). The familiar did small, bad deeds, leaped over fences the witch could not clear, secreted himself in places where the witch herself could not hide. No animal was immune from being thought a familiar. Dogs, cats, bees, mice, rabbits, bats—all were cited in witch trials. The familiars also had the most fanciful of names. Various British witch trials record a gray cat called Tittey, a black toad called Pigin, a black lamb called Tyffin, a black dog called Suckin, and a “red lion” called Lyerd. There were also assorted imps called Great Dick, Little Dick, Willet, Pluck, Catch, Holt, Jamara, Vinegar Tom, Pyewackett, Grizzel, and Greedigut. It was believed that the imp fed on human blood from the witch’s teats. In the seventeenth century, such teats (which might be little warts or polyps or wens) were the chief “proof” that a poor woman was a witch. The examination of any mortal body would, of course, reveal “witch’s teats,” so once the charge of witchcraft was made, the accused had little chance of proving her innocence. Why did the familiars so crave human blood? Seventeenth-century science gave this explanation: The little demons were “so mightily debauched” that their bodies were subject to the “continual deflux of particles,” and therefore they required “some nutriment to supply the place of the fugacious atoms”—which they did by sucking the blood of witches! The above description of the sucking propensities of familiars was actually published in a “scientific” treatise, circa 1681, by a certain Henry Hallywell, Master of Arts, Cambridge University. It is essential to remember that up until quite recently all university curricula, scientific as well as medical and literary, fell under the control of the Church, and were therefore made to serve its ideologies—a situation which could well recur. The story of the witches reminds us of this present danger. When all branches of society fall under the domination of certain fixed ideologies, the outsider is in constant danger of being scapegoated. During the centuries of the witch-craze, scientific, medical, and literary establishments all conspired to make the escape of an accused witch impossible. Not only was the witch literally imprisoned and fettered, but the belief-systems of her time supported that imprisonment in the name of science and other branches of knowledge. We may find it laughable today that learned and intelligent men could believe in such things as “witch’s teats” and “fugacious atoms,” but that is because we have lost sight of the context in which these “discoveries” were made. It was a world whose boundaries were set by Christian myth and Christian misogyny—and its latter-day denizens are with us still, pushing “creationism” and prayer in the schools, and trying to write reproductive compulsion into our Constitution. The world of the witch-hunts is nearer than we dream. While we may not accuse our domestic animals of being in league with Satan, we constantly accuse our fellow humans. The familiar may have been nothing more, in fact, than a debased version of the sacred animal known in so many different ancient cults. The cat sacred to the Egyptians may well be the mythic ancestor of the witch’s cat. What a sad decline from god to demon!