Familiar spirit

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"The Love Potion" by Evelyn de Morgan: a witch with a black cat familiar at her feet

In Christian English superstition, a familiar spirit, imp, or familiar (from Middle English familiar, related to family) is an animal-shaped spirit who serves for witchery, a demon, or other magician-related subjects.

Familiars serve their owners as domestic servants, farmhands, spies, and companions, and may help bewitch enemies. Familiars are also said to inspire artists and writers (see Tutelary spirit, Power Animal and compare Muse).

Familiars are considered an identifying characteristic of early modern English witchcraft, and serve as one feature setting it apart from European witchcraft. For the western hemisphere, see Nagual.

Contents

[edit] Familiars in European mythology

Familiars are most common in western European mythology, with some scholars arguing that familiars are only present in the traditions of Great Britain and France. In these areas three categories of familiars are believed to exist:[1]

[edit] Historiography on the Witch's Familiar

Scholarship on the familiars has changed and improved in depth and respectability since it was covered in the demonological contexts of early modern Europe. The study of the familiars has evolved from an obscure topic in folkloric journals to popular books and journals that incorporate a historical discipline with multi-disciplinary approaches like anthropology, history, and women’s studies. James Sharpe, in his article on the witch’s familiar in The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: the Western Tradition, states: "Folklorists began their investigations in the 19th Century [and] found that familiars figured prominently in ideas about witchcraft."[2] In the 1800s, folklorists fired the imagination of scholars who would, in decades to come, write descriptive volumes on witches and familiars.

One example of the growth and development of familiar scholarship can be found in the scholarly publication Folklore, which has consistently contributed articles on traditional beliefs in England and early modern Europe. In the first decades of the 1900s, the familiar was only superficially mentioned as "niggets", which were "creepy-crawly things that witches kept all over them".[3]

Margaret Murray, the mother of familiar scholarship, has taken what was a field comprised, at best, of gossip and hearsay into a legitimate branch of study in early-modern Europe. Her work delves into variations of the familiar found in witchcraft practices. Many of the sources she employs are trial records and demonological texts from early to modern England. These include the 1556 Essex Witchcraft Trials of the Witches of Hatfield Perevil, the 1582 Trial of the Witches of St. Osyth, and the 1645 Essex Trials with Matthew Hopkins acting as a Witch-finder.[4] In 1921, Murray published The Witch Cult in Western Europe, a book that was quite remarkable in the depth and analysis of the culture and folklore that surrounded witchcraft and theories concerning the witch-cult. Her information concerning the familiar comes from witchcraft trials in Essex in the 1500s and 1600s.[5] Margaret A. Murray made megalithic contributions to the corpus of scholarship on the familiar and has continued to be cited in recent scholarship, a testament to the timelessness of her work.[citation needed]

There has not been a contribution to familiar scholarship in eighty years which has equaled Murray's work.[citation needed] Recent scholarship has become more multi-disciplinary, integrating feminist-historical and world-historical approaches. A major work emerging from this 'Atlantic Trend (?)' is Deborah Willis' Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. In her chapter [Un]neighborly Nurture, she links the witch's relationship with the familiar to a bizarre and misplaced corruption of motherhood and maternal power.[6]

[edit] Witch trials

Most data regarding familiars comes from the transcripts of English and Scottish 'witch' trials held during the 16th-17th centuries. The court system that labeled and tried witches was known as the Essex. The Essex trial of Agnes Sampson of Nether Keith in 1590 presents prosecution testimony regarding a divinatory familiar. This case is fundamentally political, trying Sampson for high treason, and accusing Sampson for employing witchcraft against King James VI. The posecution asserts Sampson called familiar spirits and resolved her doubtful matter. Another Essex trial is that of Hellen Clark tried in 1645, in which Hellen was compelled to state that The Devil appeared as a 'familiar' in the form of a dog.[7]

The English court cases reflect a strong relationship between state accusations of witchcraft against those who practiced ancient indigenous traditions, including the familiar animal/spirit.

In some cases familiars replace children in the favor of their mothers. See witchcraft and children.

[edit] Prince Rupert's dog

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Prince Rupert and his "familiar" dog in a pamphlet titled "The Cruel Practices of Prince Rupert" (1643).

During the English Civil War, the Royalist general Prince Rupert was in the habit of taking his large poodle dog named Boye, into battle with him. Throughout the war the dog was greatly feared among the Parliamentarian forces and credited with supernatural powers, evidently considered a kind of familiar. At the end of the war the dog was shot, allegedly with a silver bullet.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ M. A. Murray, Divination by Witches’ Familiars. Man. Vol. 18 June 1918. 1-3.
  2. ^ Sharpe, James; Rickard M Golden (2006). Familiars in the Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: the Western Tradition. ABC-CLIO. 
  3. ^ Times, The (1916). "Superstition in Essex: A Witch and Her Niggets". Folklore 27: 3. 
  4. ^ Murray, Margaret (July 1918). "Witches' Familiars in England". Man 18: 101. doi:10.2307/2787283. 
  5. ^ Murray, Margaret A. (1921). The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Clarendon Press. 
  6. ^ Willis, Deborah (1995). Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Modern England. Cornell U.. 
  7. ^ M. A. Murray, “Witches familiars in England.” Man, Vol. 18 July 1918 1-3.
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