Phi Alpha Theta Pacific Northwest Conference, 8–10 April 2021
Ryan P. Mealiffe, University of Washington, undergraduate student, “Familiar Ecology: The
Demonization of Spirit Knowledge in Early Modern England and its Ecological Ramifications”
Abstract: During the English witch trials of the mid-sixteenth century to 1735, more was on trial
than just the accused humans before the bar. Witch trials also threatened an entire mental
landscape, the beings that inhabited it, and their relationships with both the accused and the
general populace. This ecological ontology coalesced in the other party on trial: the intersectional
helpers known as familiar spirits. Spirits animated the natural world, intermingled with flora and
fauna, and impacted many aspects of everyday life, representing a keystone species in popular
conceptions of nature in early modern England. The assumption of malevolence present in witch
trials and the use of familiar spirits as evidence of witchcraft slowly warped these ambivalent
creatures from domestic helpers, companions, and sources of knowledge into malevolent,
demonic servants. Drawing from the fields of historical ecology, anthropology, and philosophy,
this paper focuses on the conception of the familiar spirits as intersectional beings,
environmental agents, and bearers of ecological knowledge, arguing that their demonization
marked a turning point in how many English men and women viewed their relationships with
other organisms and the environment they shared.
1
Familiar Ecology:
The Demonization of Spirit Knowledge in Early Modern England and its Ecological
Ramifications
Ryan P. Mealiffe
University of Washington, Seattle
Phi Alpha Theta, UW Chapter
History Undergraduate
March 8, 2020
2
Initiated with the trial of the Chelmsford witches in 1566 and concluding in the early 18
th
century, the English witch trials lasted over one hundred and fifty years, during which time
southeast England saw 785 indictments brought against a total of 474 accused witches. However,
more was on trial than the accused humans before the bar. Their professions and practices were
ruled illicit, their beliefs deemed anti-Christian, and their supernatural knowledge and power
judged as demonic and maleficent by both courts of law and by regular English men and women.
At stake were the ontologies of popular folklore and the supernatural beings that inhabited this
mental landscape. Linking the fates of accused witches to these broader ontological and
supernatural realms were familiar spirits, a hybridized and diverse group of supernatural beings
that straddled modern conceptions of what is natural and supernatural, human and animal, magic
and science. Companionate to human witches, familiars were a species in the broader genus of
spirits which constituted a keystone species in the conceptualized ecology of early modern
England. Over the course of the trials, magical practitioners, their familiar companions, and the
broader genus of spirits to which they belonged, once considered morally ambivalent, were
jointly condemned, resulting in a gradual but critical shift in English collective ecological
ontology starting in the 16
th
century and the eventual existential rejection of spirits and
witchcraft by the mid-18
th
century.
Although it is likely that the origin of the witch’s familiar lays in the elite magicians and
sorcerers of the Middle Ages, by the early modern period the idea that both cunning folk and
witches were assisted by a familiar spirit had entered the popular consciousness and constantly
recurred in pamphlet accounts.
1
Familiars might be called imps, demons, fairies, ghosts or spirits
and appeared in a variety of forms from animal to human, hybridized, mundane, and fantastic.
2
They were intersectional creatures, “hybrids, not totally animal, nor totally spirit, neither
3
completely old, nor entirely novel, creating, and created by the narratives of witchcraft that
emerged in England.”
3
Whether a familiar was described as a devil, fairy, ghost, or spirit, they
all belonged to a larger supernatural world filled with other beings similar to themselves.
The confessions of accused witches’ familiar encounters all follow a similar structure.
Magical practitioners commonly encountered their familiars while in a state of economic and
psychological stress and are offered supernatural aid by the spirit. The individual, agreeing to
make a pact with the spirit, provisioned the spirit with domestic comfort, food and drink, as well
as blood, although demon familiars additionally asked witches to renounce their Christian faith
and pledge their souls to the devil.
4
The pamphlet accounts detailing the trial of Essex witch
Elizabeth Francis in 1566 exemplify a secondary familiar encounter narrative: familiar
inheritance. Francis had been given a demon familiar called “Satan... in the likeness of a white
spotted cat, and [that her grandmother] taught her to feed the said cat with bread and milk.”
The 1566 account also exemplifies the peculiarly English “animal familiar.” Descriptions
of familiar spirits given by early modern English magical practitioners were quite ordinary with a
pervading sense of naturalism and only occasionally displaying fantastic traits or conforming to a
devilish stereotype. In most instances, familiars would visually resemble ordinary creatures,
including humans, and in England specifically, animals. Familiars were believed to shapeshift
and appeared in a variety of animal guises ranging from apes, stags, horses, lambs, ferrets, dogs,
cat, and mice to birds, bees, spiders, grasshoppers, snails, and frogs. To match their
commonplace appearance, animal familiars were given the same types of personal names given
to both fairies and pets, reflecting an affectionate and intimate relationship often found between
magical practitioners and their spirits.
5
The relationship between English witches, such as
Elizabeth Francis, and their animal familiars were notoriously close.
4
Joan Prentice, accused of witchcraft in Essex in 1589, and her ferret familiar display the
symbiotic working relationship and domestic intimacy that supposedly developed between many
magical practitioners and their familiars. Joan and her familiar shared an affectionate relationship
centered around the sucking of blood. When the spirit first appeared to Joan, she was terrified;
however, their relationship quickly improved and soon Joan was calling to her familiar in a
similar fashion as one summoning a beloved pet, asking, “Bid, Bid, Bid, come Bid, come Bid,
come suck.” On some occasions they even seemed to chat like an old married couple. One night,
the ferret asked “Joan, wilt thou go to bed,” and after she had done so, hopped onto her lap, and
sucked blood out of her left cheek.
6
A human kind of intimacy was present between a cunning
woman or witch and their familiar, and yet they also acted not unlike pets of the time.
Although whether English familiar spirits were illusory or real remains a hotly debated
topic in scholarship, the similarities between animal familiars in early modern witchcraft trials in
England and common pets of the day suggest that, at least, real animals could easily be mistaken
for a spirit, and vice versa. Some scholars, including Walker-Meikle, believe that many of the
alleged familiars appear to have been the pets of the accused, citing earlier medieval precedents
like the 1324 trial of Dame Alice Kytler from Kilkenny, Ireland, who was visited by an incubus
in the shape of a large furry cat, and one of the earliest cases of a cat familiar in an English witch
trial, Elizabeth Francis’s large white spotted cat familiar Satan.
The example of Renaissance magus Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) provides an
example of how real animals could be identified as familiars. Agrippa was very affectionate
toward his dog, Monsieur, who he allowed to eat beside him and sleep on his bed. Some of
Agrippa’s contemporaries, correlating his intimacy with Monsieur and his work on magic,
concluded that Monsieur was a familiar demon.
7
The rumors of witchcraft that followed Agrippa
5
during his lifetime became increasingly virulent after his death when it was rumored that, upon
Agrippa’s passing, “people noticed a black dog, which he called Monsieur coming out of the
room, which went into the Rhone, and was not seen again.”
8
Had Agrippa been a poor, old,
widowed English woman instead of an influential and wealthy German polymath, perhaps his
case would have differed little from those of Elizabeth Francis or Joan Prentice.
Even the diets and living conditions of animal familiars were indistinguishable from pets.
Accounts like that of Elizabeth Bennet in 1582, who fed her animal familiars from her milk
bowl, parallel fairy superstitions in many parts of Britain. Substances such as ale or milk could
be sacrificed to the fairies when poured on springs, trees, and rocks and housewives commonly
left bowls of bread, milk, or water in the kitchen overnight to appease domestic fairies.
9
And
both of these practices, in turn, reflect the diets of pets, as the standing fee for familiars and other
fairies – breed, milk, and ale – were commonplace foods for companion animals. Spirits and pets
were even provided similar living conditions. Irish legal texts refer to cats kept indoors by
women and allowed to sleep in special baskets or on a pillow on the bed, a practice common in
early modern England. Many animal familiars were kept in such baskets, including Elizabeth
Francis’s cat familiar, which had its own sleeping basket, and Essex witch Margery Sammon’s
toads “Tom” and “Robin.”
10
Even familiar inheritance parallels the gifting of a pet, a common
mode of acquiring a pet in the early modern period.
11
Pets inhabited a very close personal space, being held in their owners’ arms or lying by
their feet, an association that would not go unnoticed if a woman was suspected of witchcraft.
And, at least for dog owners, being bitten was likely part of owning them, a bad habit that could
produce injuries easily interpreted as a witches’ mark – the location where a familiar sucked the
witch’s blood.
12
This fact was made even more likely given the kinds of animals taken in by the
6
lower classes, which were unlikely to be the groomed, passive lap animals of the aristocracy. For
example, the aristocracy had expensive, imported Syrian cat breeds with brown and black stripes
as pets, while the native grey, striped cats, which show up both in medieval iconography and
witch trial records, were cheaper and relatively abundant. Comparing petkeeping and the
relationship between women and their pets in the early modern period to the relationship
between Joan Prentice and her ferret familiar, it is clear that they share many similarities. The
keeping of pets outside of the aristocracy became common during the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries and
almost certainly provided models for familiars.
13
Yet, even vermin and other animals simply in the general proximity of a woman, the
domestic sphere, and especially a suspected witch could easily end up being interpreted as a
familiar. The practice of “watching” prisoners in mid-seventeenth century trials resulted in the
interpretation of a passing rodent as the suspected witch’s familiar.
14
Cunning women
periodically used live animals in their healing magic, such as frogs and spiders, which could be
either ingested or put onto afflicted parts. Some cunning women even transferred sicknesses
from a patient onto an animal, themselves, or inanimate objects.
15
Frogs in particular were
abundant in many parts of England and are found in archaeological assemblages from the
period.
16
Collecting and keeping frogs for patients would have been fairly easy in rural England.
The keeping of live frogs and other animals in containers such as baskets would not, then, seem
out of the ordinary given a cunning person’s profession and could explain why frogs, often kept
in such containers, appear in witch trial records.
In their relationship with magical practitioners, familiars adopted the practices of keeping
and tending for a pet that had solidified by the beginning of the early modern period, but often
occupied a working, intimate position rather than a subordinate one. They communicated, co-
7
evolved, cohabitated, and worked with their human partners. Familiars, therefore, represent a
kind of supernatural companion species. Familiars and their magical practitioners, in their long-
term companionship, engage at the extremes of natureculture and significant otherness, relating
to not just a different species, but a different kind of being altogether.
17
The familiar, like
animals, were part of the household and the community and were equally persecuted as accused
“witches.” Just as some people have dogs, and the dog has their human, the magical practitioner
has a familiar and the familiar has a magical practitioner, a human companion. The pact
relationship made with a familiar, then, was reciprocal, symbiotic, and contractual – a working
relationship, the moral nature of which reflected the moral disposition of the magical
practitioner, often ambivalent or even benevolent in general and definitively malevolent in
witchcraft accounts. Familiar assistance came in the form of the skillset necessary to become a
magical practitioner – healing, finding lost goods, identifying thieves, divining, and even
conversing with the dead and spirits.
18
Through this companionship with the familiar, the
magical practitioner gained the agency, power, and knowledge of the spirit, while the spirit was
afforded domestic intimacy, food, drink, and on occasion blood.
When considered this way, the acts of the magical practitioner were supposedly as much
a result of human agency as familiar agency. Depending on their moral (or amoral) disposition, a
familiar could heal, injure, sicken, or kill crops, animals, and humans. They could divine the
future, act as mediators between the living and the dead, identify criminals and witches, and were
skilled in matters of love. Malevolent spirits could make men impotent, sabotage the fields and
domestic activities like the churning of butter or the fermentation of beer. In some cases, they
might even cause pestilences, famines, bad weather, and shipwrecks. Familiar spirits held
unparalleled knowledge about the world, medicine, astrology, fairyland, and the supernatural.
19
8
The entire genus of spirits, or fairies, held an almost omnipresent place in the ecology of
the early modern world. The category of animism best defines the ontology of the common
people, in which the harsh and unyielding physical world was also an enchanted realm teeming
with invisible supernatural entities – of which familiars were merely a notable variety.
20
These
entities constantly influenced the natural world and the lives of men. They could answer prayers,
guide a housewife’s spinning hand or a husband’s plow-arm, charm crops in the fields or the
animals in the barns, bringing good luck and gold, or famine and disease.
21
Thus, any mishaps
which occurred around the homestead could be attributed to fairy displeasure. In this way,
relationships between fairies and English households have much in common with the Rincón
Zapotec, who emphasize reciprocity with supernatural actors and maintenance of social relations
with those same supernatural forces to help the household successfully sustain itself.
22
And
spirits were not a homogenous group, having various “species” with various names including
elves, faunes, puckrels, brownies, siths, Robin Goodfellows, good people, good neighbors, or
subterraneans.
23
With their extensive knowledge of the natural world, fairies could manipulate the rate of
natural processes, attract desirable animals, and repel undesirable vermin and predators
24
Fairies
were believed to cause and cure most diseases and thus possess unparalleled skills in human
health with an extensive knowledge about the use of herbs, plants, stones, minerals, creatures,
beasts, and astrology.
25
In these ways and more, fairies were believed to be able to use their
supernatural powers to influence almost any aspect of the natural world, including the lives of
humans. Consequentially, people were anxious to be in their favor.
This diverse genus of beings was associated with the natural landscape, particularly hills
and subterranean caves that concealed the great halls of elfhame. Fairies danced in the woods,
9
skies, and waters, in mines and stars, and even lived in domestic settings where brownies would
help clean houses and potentially leave silver in shoes in exchange for bread and milk.
26
As
animist beliefs hold, such spirits were a part of every crack and crevasse of the universe, they
populated the “middle” realm of earth as well as the subterranean and astral planes and had a part
in almost every aspect of ecology. From the failure of a crop to the putting-out system and the
spawning of “fairy rings” of mushrooms, these relationships constituted a kind of spiritual
ecology, one that would have been familiar to many English men and women.
But familiars did not just live among animals, they also interacted with them. Animals
were essentially indistinguishable from animal familiars, were victims of maleficium themselves,
were herded and repelled by spirits, and acted as integral parts in the magic and healing of the
magical practitioner and her familiar. They were also guardians against malicious spirits. One
function of a woman’s pet beyond companionship, especially for dogs, was to guard against the
fairies while she was in labor. In Old Irish law, if someone killed a woman’s pet dog, they had to
compensate for the pet by hiring a priest to read scripture at her bedside.
27
These laws stemmed
from a widespread belief that, without the guardianship of the pet, fairies would exchange the
healthy child for an inferior replica known as a “changeling” (sickly or deformed children) in the
womb, spiriting away the real child to fairyland.
28
Particular spirits might assume the form of a
pet, similarly fulfilling the function of companionship and protecting the “owner” and others
against maleficent fairies and their magic, or in the case of witch’s familiars, subverting this
second function. Animal familiars, then, were not just at the intersection of natural and
supernatural, but at a twilight zone between human, animal, and spirit. They are evidence of a
permeable boundary between humans and animals and echo a debate over the nature of animals
and animal-human relations.
29
10
Perhaps the most revealing example of human-animal-spirit interaction is the case of
Saint Guinefort, a greyhound mistakenly killed after protecting its master’s baby from a snake.
Local women who worshipped the animal saint would bring their changeling children to the
place of the greyhound’s death to force the fairies to take back their sick changeling children and
return the real, healthy children. Abandoned by their mothers as part of the ritual, the children
were left as prey to passing wolves or “the devil in disguise.” The place of the saint’s death
became a site of interspecies interaction, a geographical location and ecological niche where an
animal mediated between humans and fairies, between the middle and lower realms, between
“natural” and “supernatural” environmental agents. The medieval and early modern world was
enchanted, “in that natural and supernatural worlds (and niches) coexist, equally and
simultaneously.”
30
During the almost two centuries of witch trials in England, the magical practitioners on
trial and their familiars were effectively “demonized” by their neighbors, elite prosecutors, and
themselves.
31
A cunning woman stepping into the “reductionist glare” of the law courts would
have had “little chance of escaping the charge of covenanting with Satan.” Even if she did not
consider herself to be in a relationship with a fairy, which could be a familiar, which could itself
be a devil, which could be the Devil, it would not have been all that difficult for an angry
community or a zealous prosecutor to persuade her that it was so.
32
The accusations of witchcraft
brought against these cunning women “demonized the remedies that they peddled as magic and
superstition, illicit natural knowledge acquired by contract with forces beyond their control.”
33
The legal demonization halted when Parliament broke with past precedent, passing the witchcraft
act of 1735, which repealed the earlier witchcraft acts and changing the charge of witchcraft
from treason to fraud. Rather than characterize familiars as malevolent beings, the legislation
11
rejected the existential possibility of spirits altogether, malevolent or benevolent. And by the late
17
th
century, a stark realism can be detected in the attitudes of the aristocracy towards familiar
beliefs. Dr. Harvey, physician to Charles I, claimed that ‘being at the Newmarket, he called on a
reputed witch, and ingratiated himself by pretending to be a wizard, persuading her to introduce
her imp, which she did by calling a toad from under a chest and giving it milk.” After sending
her away, Harvey seized the animal, cutting it open with a dissecting knife, demonstrating it to
be “nothing but a plain natural toad.”
34
The gradual dissipation of legal recognition of familiars denotes an ontological shift that
ultimately resulted in a wide elimination of stories of non-malevolent animal sages, guides, and
protectors from English folklore, since these too closely resembled familiars. Animals and pets,
easily and often misinterpreted as animal familiars, also lost of much of their spiritual
significance, which may have opening the way for their increased exploitation.
35
Ordinary
English men and women would have begun to think about natural phenomena and systems, once
believed to be the handiwork of spirits, in different terms. The witch trials changed the English
ecological ontology by pushing spirits to the fringes of the environment and altogether removing
the niches, eco-spiritual systems, sacred spaces, and animist ontology that had been mentally
constructed since pre-Christian times. Never again would spirits feature so heavily in the
ecological conception of the English landscape.
12
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Sax, Boria. “The Magic of Animals: English Witch Trials in the Perspective of Folklore.”
Anthrozoös 22: 317–32, 2009.
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University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. New
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Wilby, Emma. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early
Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Chicago: Sussex Academic Press, 2005.
13
1
James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 71-72.
2
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 3.
3
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”, 11.
4
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 92-96.
5
Ibid, 63.
6
Ibid, 82-83.
7
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 61.
8
Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Witch Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” 318-319.
9
Ibid, 109-111.
10
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 4, 13; Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 109.
11
James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, 71.
12
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 47, 58.
13
Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Witch Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” 327-328.
14
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”, 5.
15
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 32-41.
16
Aleksander Pluskowski, ed., Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies,” 2.
17
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness
18
Ibid, 60-80.
19
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 21.
20
Emma Wilby develops the analogy between indigenous shamanistic belief systems and practices and familiar
beliefs and practices. That European familiar beliefs were folkloric nature and grounded in an animist belief system
synchronous with Christianity is assumed here based on Wilby’s ethnographic argument. For more information, see
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 50-146.
21
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 8.
22
Roberto González, “The Conceptual Bases of Zapotec Farming and Foodways,” 16.
23
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 16.
24
Sophie Page & Brigitte Resl, ed., “Good Creation and Demonic Illusions: The Medieval Universe of Creatures” In
A Cultural History of Animals. Vol. 2, “In the Medieval Age,” 53-54.
25
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 21.
26
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 18-19.
27
Kathleen Walker-Meikle, Medieval Pets, 26-27.
28
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 151.
29
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”, 2-3.
30
Agustín Fuentes, "NATURALCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN BALI,” 608.
31
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 123.
32
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 119-120.
33
Helen Parish, “Paltrie Vermin, Cats, Mise, Toads, and Weasils”, 10.
34
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, 170-171.
35
Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: English Witch Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” 317.
