The Familiar: The definition of the word
familiar according to
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary is:
an intimate associate, COMPANION; to be frequently seen with; a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person.
John Richard Stephens explains in his book,
The Enchanted Cat how people twisted the concept of association with cats into something demonic and evil:
When people think of witches, they often think of cats. The association of cats with witchcraft began with the Catholic church's persecution of religious groups, some of whom worshipped the cat. In the 12th century this persecution spread to splinter groups of the church itself, such as the Cathars, whom the church accused of worshipping the Devil in the form of a cat. This led to stories of Satan's appearing at Black Masses as a cat.
The witch trials started in the 13th century. People began to believe that witches had the ability to turn into an animal, usually a hare or a cat, in order to transport themselves to a sabbat (a midnight meeting) presided over by the Devil.
The idea of familiar spirits soon developed. These were imps or minor demons who took the form of any small animal, from a hedgehog to a toad. A familiar acted as an intermediary for the witch, carrying out her orders so that she wouldn't have to be at the scene of the crime when the evil deed was done.
A witch's cat came to be called a grimalkin. The Scottish goddess of witches was called Mither o' the Mawkins, a mawkin or malkin being either a cat or a hare. Originally a gremalkin was a gray cat. Later the term came to refer to the "pussies" or "catkins" on a pussy willow, as well as to the witch's cat.
The Black Death devastated Europe from 1346 to 1349. This and other plagues were blamed on witchcraft, and the witch trials became intense at this time. Pope Innocent VIII issued a decree in 1484 denouncing all cats and anyone who owned one. He commanded that, whenever a witch was burned, her cats must be burned with her. Inquistor Nicholas Remy echoed this a century later when he said that all cats were demons. During this period priests presided over festivals where cats were burned by the hundreds.
With acute labor shortages caused by the plagues, landowners turned to less labor-intensive activities, such as sheep farming. For the poor, food and jobs became scarce. As economic problems grew, the witch trials offered an excuse to get rid of "economically useless" old women. Women such as these, isolated from society, had turned to their cats for friendship.
In Europe and Britain over 200,000 supposed witches were executed. Handbooks for magistrates in the 1600s insisted that possession of a familiar - a cat - was the primary evidence of witchcraft. In New England there were over 2,000 cat-related witch trials. Millions of cats were destroyed, and the species was brought to the point of extinction.
Though some males were executed and many young women, as a rule the older women, either poverty-stricken widows or spinsters, were the ones most often seized and accused of witchcraft. The science of medicine was archaic and midwivery was usually the only means of help for the ill and dying. These women relied heavily on herbal homeopathy. Not understanding the power of the various herbal healing, most people identified these women as using magical sorcery. Poor, lonely and social outcasts, the women and the cats they befriended were the ideal targets of persecution. Under duress of excruitating torture, the women would "confess" to their crimes of witchcraft and evil deeds. Whatever superstition filled an accuser's imagination, a witch and her familiar could do and had done; the more farfetched the "testimony" was, the better it was believed.
Due to the witch's propensity for shape shifting, her image and that of her cat often merge, so that the two are indistinguishable. Witches and cats are also two separate beings, in so far as they are separate the black cat is the witch's familiar.
The cat's blackness, unearthly wailings and natural nocturnal habits having intimately associated it with witches, the horror of the activities for which it is blamed is almost boundless. People feared the darkness and void of the moonless night. Their imagination tended to fill it with all that they found most frightening and most repulsive. This became incarnated in the witch and her cat. Much doubt has, of course, been thrown on the evidence given at the sixteenth century witch trials and to be found in contemporary writings on the subject of witchcraft and black magic generally. But the chief concern of these pages is entirely dealing with people's
beliefs, whether or not the claims made were objectively true is not of importance here. There is no doubt whatever that what they expressed in their claims is what people believed.
All witches had their feline spirits which accompanied them on their nightly flights. Such women, it is said, grew an "unnatural nipple" with which they suckled their familiars. Witch trials often produced "evidence" of a "witch's teat" on the body of the supposed witch - which could have been very possibly a birthmark or growth. Regardless, any bodily imperfection on the suspect was immediately pronounced as evidence of a witch's teat.
Witches obtained their supernatural powers through making a pact with the Devil. In addition to their ability to become invisible, to fly and to raise storms at sea, witches could, by incantation, summon the Devil and evil spirits of all shapes and kinds, and the necromancers raised the dead.
In Spain, necromancy was taught in deep caverns, the most famous of which were found in Toledo and Seville. The witch would stand in a churchyard, using a wand to trace around herself a circle which she filled with crosses, anchors and magical words. A necromantic bell would sometimes be used to evoke the dead. An eighteenth century manuscript contains an illustration of such a bell, showing the name
Adonai inscribed on one side of the handle and on the other side the name
Jesus. Inscriptions to be found all over the bell include the word
Tetragrammaton, the date of birth of the person who is to use it, and the names of the seven planets. According to the instructions, the bell must be wrapped in green taffeta until the necromancer is ready to use it. She then puts the bell in the middle of a grave and leaves it there for seven days, after which she will be able to evoke the dead at will. The Witch of Endor was one of the most famous necromancers, for she is said to have raised the Prophet Samuel from his tomb.
Witches and sorcerers would forgather in cemeteries. They needed dead men's bones for their charms. They increased their supernatural powers by feasting on the corpses they had disinterred.
Witches could bring all kinds of misfortune on people, for a highly valued gift they received from the Devil was the power of revenge. They could lay waste to the countryside, injuring cattle and ruining crops. They could cause affliction or death by breathing on people or by the use of magical words in spells. Possessing the evil eye, they could kill with a glance or transform people into animals or into stone. They could stir up quarrels amongst friends and blight people's lives with their philtres (which were made of ingredients such as the heart of a dove, the kidney of a hare, and the womb of a swallow, reduced to powder and mixed with the witch's blood). They could provoke epidemics, cause impotence and miscarriages, prevent conception, and dry up milk of nursing mothers. They could bring agony and death on their enemies by the use of waxen images, whose hearts they pierced and exposed to heat until they slowly melted away. As the loyal servant of the witch, the cat familiar took an active part in the perpetration of these nefarious deeds. Many witches were hanged on being convicted of sending a cat to work on people who had offended them.
Hungarians believed that most cats became witches between the ages of seven and twelve years. It was possible to deliver the cat from the witch by making an incision on its skin in the form of a cross.
The heart of the witches' existence as a corporate society lay in their frequent gatherings, known as Sabbats. These assemblies were a degenerate form of religious rites previously performed by priestesses of the moon goddess. The covens met on mountaintops, at crossroads or in caves, under the presidency of the Devil.
Some say that the Sabbat was held four times a year, coinciding with the Christian festivals. Others maintain that witches met much more frequently, forgathering whenever they were so commanded by the Devil. Sorcerers and witches had a little blue mark imprinted on hidden parts of their bodies. An uncomfortable tingling in this spot warned them when their attendance at the Sabbat was required.
Much information about the ritual preparations made for Sabbats is available from the many engravings on the subject produced in the sixteenth century. A typical witch's kitchen will show a background littered with broomsticks, forks, bones, pots of unguent, drugs, a book of magic, and a sieve. It will be enlivened with such animals as owls, snakes, toads and bats. In the foreground a skull will probably be seen lying in the center of a circle full of cabbalistic signs, which is traced on the floor.
Old witches are portrayed as hideous hags, others as beautiful young women. Ancient ones will be blowing a fire, stirring the contents of a large black cauldron, or disappearing up a chimney on a broomstick. Witches achieved their power to fly by anointing their bodies with unguent, and in the center of many of these prints, an old woman can be seen rubbing grease over the body of a young witch, with one or several black cat familiars in attendance. Witches usually attended the Sabbats naked.
The preparation of the ointment was guarded as a precious secret. It was made from the fat of unbaptized children, often mixed with soot, and the blood of lapwings and bats. The witches would rub it all over themselves, until their bodies were red and their pores had absorbed it all. By this means, it is said
on a moonlight night they seeme to be carried in the aire. Sometimes the unguent was presented to the witches by the Devil himself. Five women charged with witchcraft in 1460 described how the Devil made them such a gift and how, whenever they wanted to go to the Sabbats, they anointed a wooden rod and their hands in it. They explained how
putting this small rod between their legs, straightway they flew where they wished to be, and that the Devil guided them over towns, woods and waters, to the place of assembly.
Cat familiars could learn and study from the
Black Book, the Bible of the witches. It contained the secret of how to become invisible, magical formulae used for the evocation of demons, and spells which would produce poisons and philtres.
When at last the witches were ready to leave, they mounted either black flying cats or goats. Sometimes they flew off on broomsticks or forks, dressed in black or naked.
Once the witches felt themselves summoned to the Sabbat, nothing would prevent their going. A man who discovered his wife rubbing herself all over with unguent tied her to the bed with ropes, but she changed into a bat and flew off up the chimney. More remarkable still is the tale of a witch who was fortunate enough to have her jar of ointment with her when she stood before the Inquisition in Navarre. How she was able to apply it is not divulged, but she succeeded in changing herself into an owl and flew off under the very eyes of the judges.
