The witch trials that spread over Western Europe in the early modern period are fascinating, repelling, but above all difficult for moderns to understand. The chief difficulty lies in the fact that the charges made against witches—causing harm by occult means, forming pacts with the devil, flying through the air by magical or demonic means—all strike our modern secular sensibilities as utterly fantastic. Nevertheless, these fantasies had tragically real impacts on thousands of lives. How, we ask, could our not-so-distant forebears have been so dreadfully wrong?
While most academic historians argue that the more fantastical and demonological components of the charges made against witches represent the learned fantasies of the elite prosecutors, others explain the witch trials as the Church’s attempt to eradicate remnants of pre-Christian belief and practice that survived amongst the folk. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits belongs to the latter tradition. In this book historian Emma Wilby concentrates her attention on British material and on the relationship between witches and their familiar spirits. In Britain, the witch was said to have ongoing relationships with demonic familiars, who often took the form of lizards, toads, or other small animals. She could call on her familiars to carry out malevolent acts of magic, and in return she would suckle them with her own blood, usually from an unnatural teat on her body—the so-called “witch’s teat.”
Wilby’s thesis is that the image of the familiar spirit is not an elite fiction imposed by prosecutors, but represents the folk beliefs of magical practitioners—cunning folk who practiced beneficent magic, and witches who were more malevolent. She goes further, arguing that the concept of the witch’s familiar derives from ancient British animistic religion, and that the accounts of meetings between witches and familiars describe the visionary experiences of magical practitioners who called upon supernatural helpers.
Wilby divides her thesis into three parts. First, she describes the similarities between the encounter narratives in British witch trials and British fairy lore, arguing that they prove the accounts in the trials derive from folk belief. Thus far, she merely repeats an argument that has been made several times before, but Parts II and III go beyond previous expositions of the theory to compare the narratives of familiars from British witch trials, first to anthropological accounts of shamanism, and second to descriptions of the experiences of mystics.
Proponents of the witchcraft as ancient religion theory explain the witch trials as an attack on pre-Christian religions—but since the chief sources of evidence for the nature of these religions are the witch trials themselves, this theory ultimately rests upon a circular argument. In Part I, “Demon and Fairy Familiars,” Wilby seeks to escape this bind by seeking additional evidence in folklore—especially fairy beliefs and encounters with magical helpers in folktales. A folklorist might have advised her that because something is folklore does not necessarily mean it is ancient, and that the notion that folktales preserve misunderstood remnants of ancient religion is no longer widely held. The similarities between folktales and witch confessions could also be due to cross-contamination—that is, demonological notions disseminated in news of witch trials influenced the content of folk narratives.
Wilby takes for granted that the learned prosecutors and demonologists found fairy beliefs irrelevant, and so “we can safely assume… that any direct references to fairy belief found in witch confessions are likely to have originated from the accused” (24). This argument would have been stronger if she had analyzed her sources more closely, but she explicitly avoids any close textual analysis of trial transcripts.
Part II, “Anthropological Perspectives,” is devoted to showing the similarities between early modern British cunning folk and the practices of Siberian and North American Indian shamans. The similarities with shamanistic spirit encounter narratives are taken as evidence of pre-Christian European animistic religion. This is the shortest part of the book (just thirty-six pages), and the weakest. Arguing that the shamanistic experience is “transhistorical and transcultural” (184), Wilby conflates multiple shamanistic traditions into one, melding accounts of different traditions from various locations into an undifferentiated whole, all represented in the ethnographic present tense. With such a rapid and partial survey of the anthropological data, it is easy for an author to simply pull out the similarities that support her argument and ignore the differences. Moreover, to turn to tribal religions for a view of the ancient religious practices of Europe is an approach that has not been in vogue since the days of E.B. Tylor.
Part III, “The Experiential Dimension,” suggests that at least some of the accounts of encounters with familiars and witches’ sabbats describe the vision experiences of British cunning folk who regarded the fairy folk as sacred spirits. This argument is strengthened by comparisons drawn to the visions of Christian mystics. Wilby points out, correctly, that we do not think of cunning folk as mystics because they do not conform to the pious and ascetic norms established by Christian saints. This is a useful heuristic to bear in mind, but the case would have been bolstered if the author had been aware of David Hufford’s important work on the experiential basis of folk belief. For a detailed exposition of the practices of British cunning folk, readers would be better served by Owen Davies’ Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in British History (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003).
Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits is carefully organized and clearly written (with chapter titles such as “Greediguts and the Angel Gabriel”), but ultimately the thesis of the book fails to persuade. This ambitious melding of history, folklore, and anthropology will convince true believers, but not critical thinkers.
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[Review length: 934 words • Review posted on November 21, 2006]