We’ve never run into an actual broomstick-riding, pointy-hat-wearing, cauldron-stirring witch, but there are plenty of other kinds of witchcraft, and plenty of other kinds of witches. You’ve got your bokor, your shaman, your houngan—the list goes on. What they all have in common is a kind of ritual magic that uses real-world items infused with some kind of magical power. The European witch is usually assumed to be in league with the devil, but in other traditions, witches can be born into their power or make alliances with other supernatural forces.
Often witches are said to have familiars, animals that are bound to them by magical or demonic means. Most often in European witchcraft, the famliar is a cat, but it can also be a toad, an owl, a weasel, or a dog. There are even stories of horses and spiders acting as familiars. In shamanic traditions, the familiar is replaced by the totem animal, which provides some of its qualities to the shaman’s—or the tribe’s—magic.
Witches who weren’t in league with the devil operated in the realm of what’s known as folk magic, a kind of gray area between flying a broomstick and traditional practices like midwifery and soothsaying. The local “wise woman” or “wise man” who knew just a little bit more than everyone else about the weather, or herb lore, or medicine was, as likely as not, a practitioner of folk magic. This goes for Europe, but also Africa, South America, and most of the rest of the world. Folk magic is everywhere, and its practitioners are mostly harmless. Some of them, however, put their abilities to darker uses. They might give you the evil eye, in which the concentrated power of the witch’s gaze could cause sickness or misfortune. They might hold a grudge against you and cast a spell on your livestock, or your crops, or your children.
When that happened, it was time to fight back. Remedies for magic vary pretty widely across the world, but they also boil down to common elements. Herbs are powerfully protective against many forms of magic and evil intent. (We’ve put together a list of them at the back of the book, cobbled together from Dad’s journals and our own research.) And, as we’ve mentioned before, there are verbal charms—like “kiss my ass”—that are held to interfere with hostile magic.
There are also more involved methods for protecting your home and loved ones. One of the more interesting ones is the witch bottle, which is a glass or stoneware bottle filled with—well, you don’t want to know what they’re filled with. Almost always some nails or pins and needles, maybe a little rosemary, maybe a little wine, but add to that all the various possibilities for gross bodily fluids that you can think of, and there you have the traditional witch bottle. The idea is that you put all of this stuff together in the bottle—or have a friendly witch do it—and then you bury the bottle, either under your hearth or in a corner of the house. Then, if a hostile witch comes along and puts some bad magic on you or your house, the magic is trapped in the bottle.
There are two ways to make sure that the magic doesn’t get out. In one tradition, you just leave the bottle there. People in England are still discovering witch bottles that have been underground for five hundred years. According to another version, you dug the bottle up every so often and broke it, which would break the magic. Sometimes it would also break the witch.
On this side of the Atlantic, folk magic is pretty well exemplified by what’s known as hoodoo. You’ve heard a million different versions of the old blues song “Got My Mojo Workin’,” right? Sure, you have. Well, that “mojo” is a kind of little bag, also known as gris-gris—you’ll remember those from our last trip to Lawrence—made of cloth or leather and stuffed with various items that together have a magical effect. Protective mojos might be carried on your person or concealed inside your house. Mojos intended to charm or hex someone else could be placed either in their home or at a crossroads, where the innate magic of the location would do the rest of the work.
You want to draw money? You’ll need a Mercury dime, a John the Conqueror root, some sugar, a magnet, and maybe a bit of some kind of oil put together by your local root worker, all in a green flannel bag. Want to drive away evil or break a jinx? That’ll take a rat bone, a broken bit of chain, some cinquefoil, and a miniature skull—in a red flannel bag. Maybe you want to put a jinx on someone who stole your woman or owes you money. To get that job done, take some goofer dust, crossroads dirt, spiderwebs, crushed insects, and maybe a powdered snake head. Grind it all together and sprinkle it on the ground in a crossing or wavy pattern where your enemy is sure to step. Spit on it to activate it, and as soon as the intended victim steps on or over it, he’ll be afflicted until either you lift the jinx or he figures out some way to get out from under it.
Or do you want to get right down to business and kill someone? For that, you’ll need some graveyard dirt, sulfur, some of your enemy’s hair or bodily fluid, and nine each of pins, needles, and nails. Put it all in a bottle and bury it under your victim’s doorstep, and then sit back and watch the fun. Another method is to put graveyard dirt into the victim’s shoe and then drop a pinch of it at every crossroads between his house and the graveyard where you “bought” the dirt.
How does it work? We don’t know. It does, though, and we’ve seen enough to say that with some confidence. We’ve seen hoodoo necklaces on old women. We’ve seen haunted dolls animated by the magic of dead witches. We’ve seen mojo bags buried in the dead of night at crossroads.
And yeah, we’ve seen black dogs. We keep forgetting to explain the black dogs.
Although witches usually use bats or cats or weasels as familiars, the association of black dogs and unholy practices goes back a long way. An old English legend tells of the Black Shuck, which appeared from time to time in Anglia and always brought death and misfortune. One of its appearances, in 1577, was chronicled by a local man of the cloth, Abraham Fleming, who wrote an account of the visitation called “A Straunge and Terrible Wunder.” The Black Shuck, after wreaking havoc at another area church, burst in on Reverend Fleming’s service. Here’s how he described the scene:
This black dog, or the divel in such a likenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) runing all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a moment where they kneeled, they strangely dyed.
Black dogs were also said to haunt the sites of executions for witchcraft, and various demonic canines populate the annals of European folklore. In most cases, they’re either demons taking the form of dogs—that’s your classic hellhound that Robert Johnson sang about after he went down to the crossroads—or they’re inexplicable supernatural presences. That’s the legend Arthur Conan Doyle is borrowing in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
It’s not just England that associates black dogs with the supernatural, either. In Japan, black dogs were once sacrificed to bring rain. A medieval European superstition held that the first person buried in a churchyard would have to guard all of the souls that followed, so usually a black dog was killed and buried first, and one of the most famous—or notorious, depending on your perspective—magicians of medieval Europe, Cornelius Agrippa, owned a large black dog said to be his familiar. The blood of a black dog was once considered a talisman of good fortune in parts of Asia. And right here in the U.S. of A., there are stories of black dogs that run alongside motorists on what used to be Route 66, sometimes biting through their tires to cause accidents.
These various black dogs could be different kinds of manifestations. Spirits can take all kinds of forms, and shapeshifters might account for some of the sightings. We don’t think they can all be explained that way, though. Some of them, at least, are demonic—which means that now it’s time to talk about demons.