Familiar (Familiar Spirit)

In the trial records it is always a small thing. A white kitten warming itself at the hearth, a toad squatting under an upturned flowerpot, a polecat slipping in and out through a gap in the daub where the wattle had rotted. The familiar of British witch belief rarely arrived with horns or grandeur. It came at the size of something you might tread on in the dark, and that was rather the point. The work of damnation got done at floor level, among the household animals, where nobody thought to look.

A familiar was a spirit that took an animal’s body and bound itself to a single person. The word comes from the Latin familiaris, a household servant, one of the family, and the bargain it described was domestic before it was diabolical. The witch fed the spirit and the spirit obeyed the witch. What it ate was blood. The accounts hold steady on this strange point across decades of testimony: the familiar suckled from its keeper, drawing a few drops from a fingertip, a mole, a wart, some small swelling on the body. Where it fed often enough, it was said to raise a little teat of its own, a mark that searchers learned to hunt for on the bodies of the accused. Find the teat and you had found the witch. It was the surest evidence the courts believed they held, and it sent women to the gallows.

Most of the accused were poor old women with animals about the house.

The forms the familiar took were as ordinary as the lives around it. Cats above all, which is why the cat has never quite shaken the association. Agnes Waterhouse, hanged at Chelmsford in 1566 as the first woman executed for witchcraft in England, confessed to a cat named Satan that her sister had given her, and said she fed it her own blood. Beyond cats came dogs, toads, mice and rats, ferrets and polecats, hares, and small birds. Now and then something stranger surfaced in the record, an animal assembled wrong, like the creature one Essex woman named Vinegar Tom, said to have the body of a greyhound and the head of an ox. The bodies were borrowed and the bodies were poor, and the spirits inside them carried names that have outlasted everyone who feared them.

Where the familiar came from depended on who was telling it. In the demonological version, the devil bestowed the spirit as a token of the pact, the way a lord might grant a servant to a new tenant. In the homelier version it was inherited, handed down from a mother to a daughter or bequeathed by a dying witch to whoever would take it, passed along with the pots and the bedding. The cunning folk, the village healers and finders of lost goods, told a third story in which the helper was no demon at all but a thing of the fairy kind, met on a road or at a well, offering knowledge in exchange for loyalty. The kindly familiar and the wicked one were often the same creature seen from different sides. A spirit that cured a sick child for a fee was a fairy. The same spirit blamed for souring the beer next door was a demon.

The high-water mark of the belief came in the 1640s, when Matthew Hopkins, who styled himself Witchfinder General, swept through East Anglia turning local fear into a profession. His method leaned hard on familiars. At Manningtree in Essex an accused woman named Elizabeth Clarke was kept from sleep and watched for nights on end until, the watchers swore, her imps came to her. She named them as they were written down. Holt, a white kitten. Jarmara, a fat spaniel with no legs. Sack and Sugar, a black rabbit. Newes, a polecat. And Vinegar Tom, and a clutch of others belonging to women she accused in turn, Elemanzer and Pyewacket and Peckin the Crown and Greedigut. The names sound almost tender. They were enough to hang the people they belonged to.

What the familiar could do was bounded by what its keeper wanted done. It carried messages and curses, spoiled milk and butter, sickened cattle and pigs, lamed horses, and brought illness or death to a chosen enemy. For the cunning folk it found stolen property, named thieves, lifted other people’s spells, and whispered counsel about things no person could have known. Its power was access. It went where the witch could not and learned what the witch could not, and it asked very little in return.

That little, though, was also its limit. The familiar lived on blood and could not be kept without giving it, and the feeding left a track on the body that betrayed the very bond it was meant to seal. It served one master at a time and had to be handed on rather than simply abandoned, which is why it kept passing from hand to hand long after anyone wanted it. The fairy sort drove a hard bargain and held the keeper to it. None of these spirits were free, and neither were the people who kept them. The thing that made a witch powerful was the same thing that got her caught.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a familiar in witchcraft?

A familiar is a spirit, usually in the body of a small animal, that served a witch or cunning person in British and European folklore. It carried out its keeper’s commands, ran magical errands of help or harm, and was thought to feed on the witch’s blood. The word comes from the Latin familiaris, meaning a household servant.

What animals did familiars take the form of?

Familiars most often appeared as cats, which is why cats remain linked with witches, but they could also be dogs, toads, mice, rats, ferrets, polecats, hares, and small birds. Some trial accounts described grotesque composite creatures, such as the Essex familiar Vinegar Tom, said to have a greyhound’s body and an ox’s head. A familiar could occasionally take a human or fairy shape rather than an animal one.

How did a familiar feed, and what was the witch’s teat?

A familiar was believed to subsist by sucking a few drops of blood from its keeper, usually from a fingertip, a mole, or a wart. Repeated feeding was said to raise a small mark called a “teat,” and during the witch trials searchers examined accused women for these marks. A discovered teat was treated as near-certain proof that the woman kept a familiar and was therefore a witch.

Who was Pyewacket?

Pyewacket was one of the named familiars recorded in Matthew Hopkins’s 1647 pamphlet The Discovery of Witches. The name was among several imps an accused woman confessed to during the Manningtree witch trials in Essex, alongside others such as Elemanzer, Peckin the Crown, and Greedigut. Pyewacket has since become one of the most famous familiar names in English folklore.

Were familiars considered good or evil?

It depended on who kept the spirit and how the community viewed them. When a familiar aided a malevolent witch it was treated as a demon granted by the devil, but when it served a cunning person who healed and found lost goods it was often understood as a benevolent fairy. The same kind of spirit could be cast as either, depending on whether its work was seen as harm or help.

Related Entries

Witch, Imp, Wizard, Satan, Daemon, Brownie, Hobgoblin, Puck, Bogle, Fairy, Nagual, Fylgja, Fetch, Domovoi