This discussion has already drawn attention to the importance in this literature of relations between human beings and a superhuman race in human form, possessed of innate magical powers, who inhabit a parallel otherworld with ready access to the apparent world. This otherworld is often situated within hills or prehistoric tumuli, and its inhabitants are commonly termed the Túatha Dé Danann. They have an aristocratic or royal lifestyle and a small number of them were almost certainly pre-Christian native deities. Their relationship with people is very close to that of fairies and elves in early modern and modern Gaelic folklore, and they are themselves fairly clearly ancestral to at least some of those beings. Although their treatment of humans is often more benevolent and patronal than that of the later fairies, they are also very dangerous when provoked, as Art and Finn found out to their cost (together with many other heroes). Spells represent some of their main weapons in dealing with the human race, as also with superhuman enemies and with each other, and both fear and admiration of them run through all the major cycles of medieval Irish stories. The later Gaelic situation, in which serious misfortune is blamed more on non-human than human beings, is already prefigured in these fictional representations.
A very similar race of semi-divine beings in human form, sumptuously dressed and equipped and naturally adroit in magical arts, features prominently in medieval Welsh prose and poetry. It inhabits in particular a parallel otherworld called Annwn or Annwfn. In the early twentieth century, indeed, it was more or less orthodoxy among scholars of medieval romance that the fays that play such a major part in chivalric tales across Western Europe are descended directly from these Irish and Welsh figures.53 If that were indeed the case, then the latter would ultimately be ancestral to the later English and Lowland Scottish ‘royal fairies’ as well. It has, however, now been abandoned by most experts in the field, not because it has been disproved but because it seems impossible to prove, and so to be a sterile quest.54 This problem is of no consequence to the present study, which needs only to note that the later Welsh fear of fairies is like the Irish one presaged by the presence of these beings in the medieval imagination.
Another figure held in common by both medieval Celtic cultures is the murderous hag. A classic group of these appears in the Welsh romance Peredur fab Efrawg, and is often rendered into English as ‘the Nine Witches of Gloucester’. In the Welsh, however, the term for them, gwinodot, is a broader one for fearsome old women, and though they seem to have insight into the future they possess no other apparent magical powers. Instead they use conventional weapons with terrifying strength, and devastate whole districts until they are killed by Arthur and his band. Another of the same kind is disposed of by the same group of heroes in a different story, Culhwch ac Olwen, and, again, she uses physical strength to overcome, wound and cast out warriors who invade her cave, until Arthur himself slays her with the throw of a knife, so avoiding grappling with her.55 Once more, it is not clear how much these beings belong to the human race. They lingered in popular Welsh lore as the figure of the gwrach, a hideous old female being who haunts wild and lonely places and terrifies travellers: it is significant that this being never appears in an actual early modern witch trial, but belongs wholly to imagined situations.56
Two historians of early modern Welsh society and culture, Richard Suggett and Lisa Tallis, have recently assembled a great deal of material, dating from between the late fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, which is relevant to this investigation and plugs the gap between the medieval literature and the modern folklore in a way that does not at present seem possible for Gaelic Ireland.57 Belief in the evil eye, often involuntarily used, is well attested as is also one in the power of charms and prayers to ward it off. So also is a considerable degree of acceptance of the validity of cursing, usually performed before the Reformation by a priest and used against people who had hurt good parishioners. After the change of religion it became an individual act, commonly in the form of a prayer to the Christian God for retribution, taking the form of the death of the person concerned or the loss of her or his property. It was often a weapon of the socially weak against the strong, and so especially used by women. The respectable remedy against it was to pray for protection, often enlisting the help of saints and employing the water of holy wells, both of which continued to enjoy a greater popularity in Wales than in other parts of Protestant Britain. There was also, however, a flourishing culture of folk magic, much of it provided by service magicians, which could also be used to avert and remove ill fortune and ill wishing. In addition, a fear of fairies, as malicious and predatory beings, is recorded back to the sixteenth century. All these features would act to damp down animosity against witches.
This belief system was, however, also susceptible to remoulding by external influence: in technical scholarly terms, ‘acculturation’. Richard Suggett has shown how from the 1540s the new word wits, a direct borrowing of the English ‘witch’, was starting to make an impact, and with it a new sense of a specific enemy who harmed people deliberately and from malice. By 1600 it could be coupled with a further association, of a communal devil-worshipping sect dedicated to working evil. This figure became quite deeply embedded in Welsh society during the seventeenth century, especially in the more Anglicized southern counties, and began to play a part in the articulation of enmity and suspicion between neighbours. Wales was on its way to becoming a witch-hunting society, even as the fringe of Scottish Gaeldom, especially the eastern coastal strip, actually did by the seventeenth century. That Wales did not really become one may be attributed to the fact that the process of acculturation began too late and was too incomplete to have made sufficient impact before the time that educated opinion in Britain as a whole began to turn against witch trials. This may also be suggested as the reason why the main Gaelic hinterland of Scotland remained immune to them; while the Manx effectively experimented with the execution of alleged witches and then backed off from it, and were thereafter exposed to no further external pressure to change their minds again. It may therefore be concluded that there is now a sufficient accumulation of evidence, gathered from periods spanning the medieval, early modern and modern, to enable a confident proposal that Wales, Man and Gaelic Ireland and Scotland represented a set of societies that traditionally lacked a serious fear of witchcraft, in the manner of others found across the world, as discussed in the first chapter of this book. This lack was sufficient to enable them to resist the adoption of large-scale witch-hunting, and in many areas witch-hunting at all, even though for a time that became a characteristic of the English and Scottish states that dominated them. If accurate, this conclusion represents a striking example of the manner in which ancient and medieval tradition could, at a regional level, play a decisive part in preventing as well as encouraging the persecution of people suspected of witchcraft.
10
WITCHES AND ANIMALS
DURING THE LATER twentieth century, historians interested in early modern English witchcraft beliefs and witch trials became increasingly aware that these contained a feature which apparently set them apart from those of most of the Continent: a widespread tradition that witches were assisted in their evil deeds by demons in the form of animals.1 These beings usually formed a close attachment to individual witches and functioned as their allies or servants. They were most commonly described in contemporary sources as ‘spirits’, ‘imps’ or just ‘devils’, but quite often as ‘familiars’, and modern scholars have generally settled on the term ‘animal familiar’ to distinguish one. They were agents and instigators of witchcraft, whose intentions and actions were almost wholly malevolent, and although they most frequently took the form of dogs, cats and toads, they could also appear as ferrets, hares, hedgehogs, mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, weasels, polecats, snails, snakes, calves and different kinds of bird and insect. In other words, they usually chose the shapes of commonly found beasts which could easily escape notice, though occasionally more monstrous alternatives, formed
of blends of different kinds of natural creature or of animals with humans, were adopted. Some individual familiars could assume the appearance of a range of animals, as well as shape-shifting to that of a human.
The formation of their relationship with witches was the most frequently attested English version of the diabolic pact which represented a central feature of the pan-European construct of the demonic witch underlying the early modern trials. By extension, they were an equally important aspect of witchcraft beliefs in the English colonies in America. Most English cases of witchcraft made no reference to them, but they were still prominent in an important minority, and especially in published accounts of trials, which helped to shape the image of witches in the public mind, and later in the minds of historians. As sustained and large-scale research into the early modern trials began in the 1970s, it was noted that the English fondness for imagining animal familiars was as yet completely unexplained;2 but discussion of the matter did not really begin until the year 2000. What has resulted since could not really be termed a debate, because no clearly defined schools of thought, with steady adherents, have developed. Instead, a growing number of people have made contributions, but some have either suggested several possible explanations for the animal familiar at once, as alternatives, or else moved from one to another over time. Moreover, few of the historians concerned have directly addressed each other. None the less, a number of different ideas have emerged. One is that the animal familiar developed from the tradition of learned ceremonial magic, and its fondness, attested since its first appearance in ancient Egypt, for summoning spirits to serve the magician.3 Another is that it grew out of fairy tradition, especially from the figure of the household helper spirit, and from the claims often made by service magicians to have been taught their skills by the fairy folk.4 It is certainly true that fairies, as has been seen, played much the same role as helpers in some Scottish witch trials as the animal familiar in English equivalents (though they rarely acted as destructive agents of the witch in the way of the familiar). The person who has taken this association furthest has naturally been Emma Wilby, who has suggested that they represented alternative versions of the same being, and that both descended from a pre-Christian, animist, view of the world, connected to shamanistic practices.5
As more contributors entered the debate, so the proposed explanations multiplied. Another was that the animal familiar should be related to a whole broad range of folkloric phenomena, from Wilby’s shamanistic helper spirits to the animal mascots of pagan deities and followers of saints. All of these phenomena needed instead to be put under the general, and very widespread, folk motif of the ‘grateful animal’, of which the familiar was one aspect.6 It was also argued, in riposte to the derivation from fairy lore, that the animal familiar belonged instead firmly in a demonic framework, being derived from the satanic imps of the Middle Ages.7 Other interpretations were more multifaceted, such as that which termed the familiar the result of a combination of the tradition of the ceremonial magician’s servitor spirit with an increasing (and yet also therefore controversial) English fashion for real animal pets, and with the belief that witches were assisted by demons.8
It is unlikely that any major new primary sources for the early modern English belief in the witch’s animal familiar now remain to be discovered, and the discussion of its origins has thrown up so many possible explanations, some general and some specific, that it is equally unlikely that any more can be suggested. None the less, it is possible that the broader and deeper perspectives adopted for the present book may still add something to the discussion, and also something concerning the perceived relationship between witches and animals in a global and Continental European context. The structure of the whole work, of contracting concentric circles of vision, will be reproduced in miniature now in an attempt to achieve that outcome.
The Global Context
From the earliest systematic scholarly studies of early modern English witchcraft beliefs down to the recent work just surveyed, parallels have been drawn between the tradition of the animal familiar and associations between witches and animals in the extra-European world.9 None of these parallels have, however, been pursued in any sustained or relatively comprehensive fashion, and the size of the ethnographic database assembled for the present book now permits such an exercise. It reveals three different ways in which witches have been associated with animals around the globe, which often overlap but are also commonly distinct from each other: that witches turn themselves into animal form; that they employ real animals to accomplish their deeds; and that they make use of spirit servants which take animal form. These will now be considered in turn.
The belief that witches can shift their shape into that of beasts has been recorded in every inhabited continent of the world, being particularly common in some regions. One of these is the Americas, and especially Central America.10 Another is a swathe of Central Africa, from Sierra Leone to Tanzania and Mozambique.11 A third is South Asia, consisting of India, Nepal, Burma and Thailand, with an extension eastwards through Indonesia and New Guinea into Melanesia.12 In some cases, found in each of these regions, it was thought that any animal form could be employed. More often specific species were named, though these varied widely between cultures, and could be either wild or domestic. They often tended to be of kinds associated with the night, when witchcraft was supposed to be most active, or to be dangerous and predatory by nature, to suit the working of harm, or to provide witches with powers of flight or rapid movement, to enable them to range across wide distances or accomplish their work speedily. Where witchcraft was thought to be a communal matter, worked by groups who met together secretly for ghastly rites, the animal shape could provide a convenient means of transport to the meeting place. Among certain peoples the bestial connection could explain some of the characteristics attributed to witches: for example, the propensity credited to witch societies across much of Central Africa, to dig up and eat human corpses, may have derived from their affinity with hyenas. Sometimes the witch’s own body was thought to transform into an animal, but more often that body was expected to lie asleep at night while their spirit went forth and took animal form. This belief is so widespread among societies that have never been considered to possess shamans, that it may be coupled with the fact that most classical, Siberian, shamans were not thought themselves to take on animal shape, to render shape-shifting in itself valueless as an indicator of shamanistic beliefs and practices. A further accompanying belief, found across the range in which witches were believed to shift shape, was that to kill or injure a witch in altered form would inflict the same damage on the witch’s normal body; such an act was, in story, one of the most common ways in which witchcraft could be countered.
Some peoples set the idea that witches could take animal shape among more complex systems of the belief. The Kuranko of Sierra Leone thought that witches, whom they called suwagenu and believed were always women, had this power and used it to work their malicious harm on other humans: the death penalty was imposed for those convicted of it. They also, however, believed that certain men called yelemaphent-iginu had the same power, and were respected for it even when they used it to destroy the crops and livestock of enemies; some even boasted of it.13 A range of such patterning can be found across the whole Central American zone in which shape-shifting was a common concept. In one nation of the region, Mexico, the Tzotzil thought that everybody had a soul that took animal form which differed according to rank – the rich and powerful had jaguars, the poor rabbits – but only magicians could consciously activate that soul and use it for practical effects. Witches, moreover, had a second animal soul, of another species, and combined the two to work their evil deeds.14 The Tzeltal, more simply, believed that everybody was born with a detachable animal soul and that magicians could learn to use it, but healers chose to do so for good, and witches for bad, purposes.15 The Tlaxcalan spoke of two types of magician who could shift shape into an animal one. The first was the na
huatl or nakual, who could be of either sex and could use the ability to work harm or to play harmless tricks, acquiring it by tuition. The best could impersonate up to five kinds of animal, and they were not much hated or feared, as metal charms could ward them off. Hatred and fear were reserved for the tlahuelpuchis, people, mostly female, who took animal form, especially that of birds, to inflict damage on other humans, especially by sucking the blood of babies. They were utterly evil and their powers were innate.16
The second kind of traditional relationship between witches and animals, that which involved a supposedly real animal, could take various different related forms. One was that the witch used an animal as a steed in order to travel to meetings or to inflict harm. The beast concerned was usually one that was itself a danger to humans, their livestock or their crops, such as a tiger, alligator, hyena or baboon, and this belief was found scattered across most of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India.17 More widespread was the idea that witches employed specific kinds of animal to accompany and assist them in working their deeds, and often as agents to carry out their wishes. This was recorded across most of Africa and south-east Asia, extending eastwards to New Guinea, and also in the south-western USA. The animals involved here were usually nocturnal, and often one specific species was employed, such as the owl, hyena or snake.18 Among some peoples witches were said to work with a more eclectic range. In the Sudan the Azande spoke of bats, wild cats and owls, and the Mandari of cats, owls and hares, while the Dinka included dark-skinned snakes, owls, nightjars, scorpions, toads, frogs and wild cats.19 The Lubara of Uganda associated witches with jackals, leopards, wild cats, bats, owls, snakes, frogs and toads.20
The Witch Page 39
