Most accounts of the witches’ relationships with these helpers did not specify whether the animals concerned were casually swept up and employed for tasks, or whether they were particular individuals that served a witch regularly and repeatedly. Occasionally, however, it is clear that the latter situation obtained, and the creatures concerned were effectively maintained as pets. Some Australian tribes suspected members who kept cats or lizards in their homes of sending them out to injure neighbours while they slept.21 A woman from a Nigerian people, living in the North African port of Tripoli at the opening of the twentieth century, had a formidable reputation as a service magician, and had a snake, a hare and scorpions in her house, which she was said to send out against her enemies.22 Tribes in the Roro district of New Guinea believed that witches used snakes and crocodiles to murder people, and that the snakes were kept in pots in their homes: most deaths by snakebite were attributed to these animals.23 The anthropologists who recorded the stories about the animal assistants of witches generally used the early modern English term ‘familiar’ when speaking of these creatures.
In England itself, of course, the term had actually been applied to an evil spirit that had taken animal shape, and such entities also appeared in witchcraft traditions in the extra-European world. Worldwide, as has been said, most societies have believed that magicians gained or augmented their special powers by working with spirits, and those which assisted witches were usually thought to be malevolent in proportion. Often these took human shape, often in a diminutive size, and occasionally manifested as hybrids of human and beast. However, among certain peoples they were thought to appear as animals, and specifically as those species locally presumed to assist witches in a physical and natural form. The distribution of this belief may have extended much more widely, because researchers reporting on native cultures often failed to make clear whether the animal servants and allies of witches were real creatures or spirits; and indeed their informants may have been unsure. However, where it is made explicit that the beings concerned were conceived of as spirits, and independent of the witch’s own person instead of being projections of it, the reports congregate in two regions. One was a broad zone across Central and Southern Africa, from Zaire and Tanzania south to the Cape coast.24 The other was the island fringe of eastern Asia, in New Guinea and the Philippines.25 The belief is also, however, recorded among the Nez Perce of the north-western United States, who held that certain malevolent tutelary spirits, especially in the form of rattlesnakes, blue grouse and badgers, sought out susceptible human beings and assisted them in becoming witches.26
It was rare for anthropologists to make any detailed study of traditions regarding animal familiars among the societies they studied, but a few have emerged. Several tribes of Cape Province believed that their witches, who were always female, had a large bestiary of such beings, but above all a supernatural ‘storm bird’, which could become a handsome youth and make love to the witch. Other favourite forms were snake, baboon and wild-cat spirits, small hairy man-like creatures and reanimated human corpses. To these societies witchcraft was essentially an act of female vengeance directed against males, above all for marital infidelity.27 It is clear that they had a general idea that spirits were the usual agents of this revenge, and often appeared as animals, but in practice there was a very wide range of forms which the spirits were regarded as taking. These were apparently derived from individual perceptions or fantasies of witchcraft at work, which turned into parallel traditions co-existing under the same broad umbrella of belief: such an effect would explain the variety of shapes taken by the early modern English familiar. A similar pattern is found northward in Zimbabwe, where every witch was expected to have a number of familiars, most commonly in the forms of ant-bears, hyenas, owls and crocodiles. The nature of the relationship between these and the witches was thought to vary, from a functional and emotionless to a close and affectionate one.28 Again, a basic idea was recounted in different ways, not just by different tribal cultures but also by individuals within those.
It is clear that the distribution of beliefs regarding relationships between witches and animals across the world heavily overlapped in places, but the three main forms did so relatively rarely. Rather, like the map of societies that greatly feared witchcraft, that believed in it without great fear, and that did not believe in it, that of different traditions embodying those three relationships tended to form a patchwork across regions. After all, they were to an extent functionally exclusive: a witch who could transform into animal shape had less need to employ an animal, while one who had a ‘real’ animal as a servant had less need to retain a spirit in the guise of one, and so forth. However, there are some clearly recorded cases of peoples who articulated more than one of these traditions. The Amba of Western Uganda thought that witches both turned into leopards and used leopard familiars.29 The North American Navaho held that witches took animal form, but that each was also allied with some aspect in the natural world: the sun, owls, snakes, etc.30 In Zimbabwe Shona witches allegedly both rode hyenas and kept familiars, while those of the Gă of Ghana rode snakes, used them as agents or turned themselves into them.31 The Nalumin of New Guinea likewise thought that witches could either become animals or else befriend them, and this was also true of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico, and the Tonga-speakers of South Zambia.32
Rodney Needham, the social scientist quoted near the beginning of this book, listed possession of an animal familiar or the ability to assume animal shape as one of the factors that constitute the ‘steady image’ of the witch worldwide.33 It is easy to see why, although there are some areas of the globe – much of the Americas away from the central zone, for example – in which the association of witches and animals seems less strong, and some peoples in regions where the association does exist among whom it also seems weak or absent. Nevertheless, it is found so widely on the earth, among human societies with no contact with each other, as to represent one way in which humans who believed in witches thought easily and spontaneously about them. Even if ethnographic parallels for the English witch’s familiar are reduced to the most specific possible, of a regular relationship made between a witch and a spirit in animal form, who acts as an assistant and agent, they are found across a broad span of the planet which includes three different continents, although representing a minority of the societies that have believed in witchcraft, within each. The obvious question to be posed at this stage is how far the continent not yet considered in this survey, Europe, matches up to this pattern, and the answer is that it fits it perfectly. All three of the main divisions of belief in a connection between witches and animals are represented in the early modern trial records. The idea that witches could transform into animal shape is found across most of the Continent. In Poland people accused of witchcraft confessed to such transformations, cats and pigs being the preferred species.34 At the northern extreme of Norway, in most cases where women confessed to raising storms to sink boats, they claimed to have changed into sea mammals, fish or birds to do so.35 In much of Western Europe, including Lorraine, France and that Spanish-ruled area of Burgundy called Franche Comté, they were especially thought to turn into wolves, in which shape they could inflict especial harm; though other animal shapes were also recorded.36 In Italy they were believed to prefer to look like cats.37 Basque witches were reputed to be very eclectic in their choice of species, as were those of the Balkans, from Croatia southwards.38 These stories troubled early modern demonologists sufficiently for them to debate the implications at length, generally concluding that the apparent change had to be a demonic delusion.39 The belief that witches shifted shape into animals, especially dogs, cats and hares, was also strong in most parts of the British Isles.40 It is certainly an ancient one in Europe, being recorded in the Roman Empire, and in the British Isles from the twelfth century, as has also been noted.
The use of ‘real’ animals as aids to witches is a rarer feature of the trial testimony, but there is the traditio
n of wolf-riding in the western Alps that has been cited, and the much broader one of the animal steeds of the women who rode to join ‘Diana’ in the canon Episcopi. That of the spirit-familiar is also present, of course, though seemingly confined to England. The only case approaching a Continental parallel consists of the toads kept by witches in Basque tradition, as recorded on both sides of the Franco-Spanish frontier, in the early seventeenth century.41 The toads were allegedly each given to a witch when the latter made the original pact with Satan, and kept like pets, some being dressed by their owners in coloured clothes. This makes them sound demonic, but there is actually no apparent trace in these accounts of the animals being used as agents of witchcraft. From a passage that mentions them being ‘pastured’ by children at the sabbath, it sounds very much as if they were kept for the poison which could be secreted from their skin.
In a global perspective, therefore, it would have been strange either if some part of early modern Europe did not have a popular belief in an association between witchcraft and evil spirits disguised as animals, or if this belief had been held by most Europeans. To find that it was a fervently held tradition found in one part of the Continent, in this case among the English, is in fact exactly what an enquirer should expect in the worldwide context. Such a conclusion to the present enquiry, however, would be to shirk the problem of how this belief fitted into the unique European context of a blending of old ideas of witchcraft with a monopolistic and strongly dualistic religion. Nor would it answer the question of why England in particular had that form of the belief. To seek answers to these issues it is necessary to employ the second of the contracting foci of this book, the specifically European.
The European Context
All over the world, traditional peoples have frequently visualized evil spirits as taking the visible form of fierce, menacing and predatory animals, or of hybrids of those with human shapes. The peoples of ancient Europe and the Near East were no exception, as any glance at the demons represented in Assyrian art in museums, or the underworld monsters in that of the Egyptians, will confirm. The Roman tendency to identify the demonic strix as owl-like is another manifestation of this. The habit carried over naturally into Christianity, so that its Satan and his minor devils were habitually portrayed in word or image as possessing visual traits from a range of repulsive creatures. The tradition was established by the fourth century, when Athanasius’s Life of St Anthony recounts how its hero was beset by a demonic mob which swarmed round him disguised as lions, bears, leopards, bulls, vipers, cobras and wolves.42 These images carried over into the high Middle Ages, to inform portraits of Christian heretics meeting to worship Satan and his minions. One of the earliest such groups to be identified and suppressed, at Orléans in 1022, was described a couple of generations later as worshipping the Devil as he manifested in one animal form or another. By the twelfth century this was a commonplace of accounts of heretical rites, the favourite shape ascribed to the demon who presided over them – either Satan or a subordinate – being that of a cat.43 This trope persisted through out the later medieval period as a routine aspect of accusations of heresy, in the British Isles as elsewhere: those against Alice Kyteler in Ireland in the 1320s included having an attendant devil who appeared variously as a cat, shaggy black dog or black man.44 Unsurprisingly, along with so many other standard features of medieval stereotypes of heresy, it was a trope carried over into the construction of the new image of the satanic witch religion in the early fifteenth century. In the earliest dated manifestation of that, the account by Hans Fründ of the Valais trials of 1428, Satan was said to appear to the witches at their meetings in the form of a black animal, such as a bear or ram.45 The Errores gazariorum agreed that the animal chosen was black, but thought a cat to be his most favoured species.46 This idea was found also in the earliest recorded trials associated with the new image of witchcraft. The woman executed at Todi in 1428 allegedly confessed that she had joined the revels of witches riding on Lucifer, who took the form of a goat or fly.47 A man tried in the Pays de Vaud in 1438 claimed after torture that witches rode to the sabbath on a (presumably demonic) black bull or colt, to venerate the Devil himself, who moved between the shapes of a man, a cat and a lizard.48 The idea that those travelling to the sabbath rode animals, which seem for practical reasons to have been disguised demons, is also found in another famous early text to describe the new stereotype of witchcraft, Martin le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames, written in 1440–42. That describes the steeds as having the form of black cats or dogs.49 The riding of a demonic animal was from near the beginning an alternative and lesser form of locomotion to the anointed stick for getting witches to their meetings. These early trials in the western Alps also contained the idea that witches were assigned a personal devil as a helper after swearing allegiance to the supreme one, or even made the original pact with such a minor demon; and these too could take the shape of beasts. They had individual names, those described at hearings in the diocese of Lausanne during the 1440s, 1450s and 1460s being called Mamiet, Figuret, Perrot, Raphiel, Usart or Rabiel, and described as appearing as black cats and dogs, foxes or birds.50 As considered in a previous chapter, riding on animals, which in at least some cases were thought to be transformed demons, remained one of the standard ways in which witches were supposed to get to the sabbath during the major period of early modern trials. During that period some Continental demonologists considered the rationale behind the taste of demons for shape-shifting. Nicholas Remy, in Lorraine, thought that there were practical reasons: as dogs, they could attend on witches without automatically arousing suspicion; as horses they could carry them to the sabbath; as cats they could get into houses to work evil for their human allies; as wolves they could kill livestock for them; and they enjoyed appearing at sabbaths as goats because their rank smell added to the diabolic atmosphere.51 Pierre de Lancre, near Bordeaux, was more theological, suggesting that confessing witches described the Devil as taking so many forms that he was clearly a compulsive shape-shifter, as part of his general hatred of order and stability. De Lancre confirmed that the animals ridden to satanic rites could not be real beasts but were transformed devils, as they usually flew through the sky while the species concerned were not designed by nature to do.52
It may therefore be suggested that the idea of attendant demons, which had special relationships with individual witches and took animal shape, was actually built into the new stereotype of satanic witchcraft from the very beginning. As the sabbath was central to most Continental European concepts of witchcraft during the early modern period, however, and most witchcraft was thought to be transacted there, the main purpose of the servitor demonic animal was to transport the witch thither. In England, where the sabbath was not central to images of witchcraft, the relationship ended up as being conceived differently, and how this happened must be the final stage of enquiry in this chapter.
British Perspectives
The concept of the demonic animal made a considerable impact on both the early modern British kingdoms, but in different ways. Highly educated Scots imbibed the idea of witches riding on such beasts, so that Alexander Montgomerie could make witches travel on pigs, dogs, stags and monkeys in the poem of around 1580, discussed before, in which he satirized fairies as satanic. This idea does not, however, seem to feature much in records of actual trials. By the late seventeenth century some Scots were starting to acquire the English concept of the animal familiar. When a group of Presbyterian rebels assassinated Archbishop Sharpe of St Andrews in 1679, a bumble bee flew out of his tobacco box; one of his killers called it his familiar, but then had to explain the meaning of this to some of the others.53 Again, the idea does not seem to have surfaced in actual trials during the short period that remained until they died out. Scotland embraced the notion of demonic animals enthusiastically in a different form. When the online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft is searched under the heading ‘animal devils’, forty-four different cases show up. All, however, refer to S
atan himself, or much more rarely his demonic minions as well, appearing to humans in animal form, both to seduce them into witchcraft initially and to return to do their bidding.54 None seems to have settled into a domestic or nurturing relationship with a witch as was believed to happen in England. None the less, the number of them serves as a reminder that the standard relationship imagined between a witch and a spirit guide in early modern Scotland was with the Devil, or one of his demonic minions, in human or bestial shape. Encounters with fairy-like beings were rarer, and the clearest contrast between the Scottish and English concepts of the dealings of witches with spirits is not between a fairy and an animal familiar, but between a more intermittent and a more intimate partnership with a demon in animal form.
Turning away from Scotland, the English-style animal familiar is, unsurprisingly, recorded in the parts of the British Isles under English control and influence. Belief in it manifested among Protestant settlers in Ireland during the seventeenth century, and in an Elizabethan Welsh tract and an Elizabethan Welsh trial.55 England itself was, however, the stronghold of the tradition, although there too Satan and his minions often manifested in human form instead or as well. Moreover, its concept of the animal familiar seems on present evidence to be an innovation of the Tudor period, because there is no certain reference to it in any known medieval source. A mid-fourteenth-century chronicle commences with a horrific story of how Eleanor, queen of Henry II, had murdered her husband’s famous mistress Fair Rosamund, almost two centuries before, by paying a sorceress to use a pair of toads to suck the wretched girl’s blood out through her breasts.56 There is no sign, however, that these were other than genuine animals. Conversely, when individuals were accused for political reasons of consorting with the Devil or a devil, the latter was often said to have manifested to them in animal form, because (as said) medieval demons frequently did. Such a charge was Christian business as usual, whether it was levied against the Earl of Cornwall in the thirteenth century, a man accused of Lollard heresy in 1409, or the rebel leader Jack Cade in 1450.57 The apparent complete absence of the early modern English witch’s familiar from late medieval records, which are reasonably good for trials for magic at all levels of society, may argue against the idea that it was a long-established folk tradition.
The Witch Page 40
