THE WITCHES FAMILIAR

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Definition
Latin: famulus

A familiar, or an imp, is an attendant subordinate demon in the form of an animal. Such creatures drew nourishment by suckling from devil’s marks, a witch's breasts, or insensitive parts on a witch. Familiars behaved in ways that no natural pet was believed to. They ran errands, brought messages, and aided in devil worship.

The following are some of the creatures believed to have been used by witches as familiars: cats, dogs, toads, wolves, bees, bats, blackbirds, owls, spiders, flies, chickens.

MOST WELL KNOWN FAMILIARS;-

Cats
At various times, and in different cultures, the cat has been regarded as holy or as a diabolical beast, as a bringer of good fortune or as an omen of evil. The witchcraft of the Middle Ages turned the black cat into a creature that changed shape and helped perform rituals and spells for the witch. If a black cat walks towards you, it brings good fortune, but if it walks away, it takes the good luck with it. Mothers should always keep cats away from babies because they "suck the breath" of the child.

Toads
Among all living animals, toads were the most popular of all familiars. They were said to be the prefered animal shape of Satan and his demons. They were used to prepare magic potions and are present in most of the witch rituals including sabbaths.

Toads as demons
Sometimes the devil would appear to witches as a toad. In these instances, witches would kiss the toad's mouth in an act of homage. A toad was recognizable as a demon if he carried two tiny horns borne on his forehead.

Many witches baptized their toads, dressed them in black velvet, put little bells on their paws, and made them dance.

"Jeannette d'Abadie, a witch of the Basses-Pyrénées...declared that she saw brought to the Sabbat a number of toads dressed some in black, some in scarlet velvet, with little bells attached to their coats.”

An accused Cathar, a woman named Bilia, "admitted to having a familiar toad to which she fed meat, bread, and cheese, and out of whose feces, together with human body hair, whe made a powder from which she confected the potions drunk at the synagogues".

Toads in Potions and Spellcraft
The breath of a toad was believed to infect a person wherever it touched. Another common superstition existed stating those whom a toad regarded fixedly would be sized by spasms, palpitations, swoons, and convulsions.

In addition, toads were integral in some forms of experimental divination. Toad excrement was said to be used as an ingredient in flying potions by Basque witches. A lotion of sow-thistle sap and toads spittle was believed to make a witch invisible, and brandy embued with burned toad ashes was believed to be an effective cure for drunkenness. If a toad was baptized with an enemy's name then tortured to death, the victim supposedly suffered the same fate.

In 1610 Juan de Echalear, a sorcerer of Navarre, confessed at his trial before the Alcantarine inquisitor Don Alonso Becerra Holguin that he and his coven collected toads for the Sabbat, and when they presented these animals to the Devil he blessed them with his left hand, after which they were killed and cooked in a stewpot with human bones and pieces of corpses rifled from new-made graves. From this filthy hotch-potch were brewed poisons and unguents that the Devil distributed to all present with directions how to use them. By sprinkling corn with the liquid it was supposed they could blight a standing field, and also destroy flowers and fruit. A few drops let fall upon a person's garments was believed to insure death, and a smear upon the shed or sty effectually diseased cattle

Toads secrete a thick, white, hallucinogenic substance from skin glands when they are injured, scared or provoked. This toxin (C24H34O5) is called bufagin, bufotenin, or more colloquially, toads' milk. The secretion acts like digitalis in biological action, and was believed to have been used by witches for various nefarious purposes. It is also a pagan custom in the South of France to “lick the toad”, young paysants were used to get high in the first days of spring by drinking this underground milk.

Toads were also believed to have a precious stone in their heads. This stone was considered both a talisman for obtaining happiness and a means to detect poison. If the stone became hot, poison was nearby

Ravens
Omen
In most parts of the world the raven is considered a prophet and a bad omen. The Arabs call it Abu Zajir which means "Father of Omens." In Ireland it was once domesticated for use in divination practices and the term "Raven's Knowledge" meant second sight. In many areas of the ancient world, the sight of a raven flying to the right was a good omen, whilst a raven flying to the left was an evil one. Ravens deserting their nests were very bad omens and popular superstition declared that if the ravens ever fled the Tower of London, the monarchy would fall.
Like the crow and the raven, the blackbird is considered a bad omen. However, the sight of two blackbirds sitting together is a symbol of peace and a good omen.
According to shamanic conceptions, the croaking of a raven is not merely a sign of getting news of someone's death, but represents actually the speech of the deceased. In this case, it would be the soul of the dead speaking from the other world.

Symbol
In spite of its dark appearance, the raven is often a solar symbol. In Greece he was sacred to Apollo, the god of light. In China, a three-legged raven lives in the sun. His legs symbolize dawn, noon, and dusk. There used to be ten sun-ravens but they gave off such intense light and heat that an archer had to shoot nine of them in order to preserve life on earth. A red raven is the emblem of the Chinese Chow dynasty.

Ravens were a symbol of sin especially the sins of gluttony, stealing, and false teaching. They were nicknamed "thieving birds" and Icelandic children were taught that drinking from raven quill straws would cause them to become thieves. Evil priests were said to turn into ravens when they died. To European Christians, this creature is the antithesis of the innocent white dove.
But in some African and Native American traditions, he is a beneficent guide whose keen sight allows him to issue warnings to the living and to lead the dead on their final journey.

For latins, the raven's cry means "Tomorrow! Tomorrow!". Some interpret it as a symbol of the foolish sinner who puts off conversion while for others it is the hope of a new and better day. To North American Eskimos, the raven's cry sounded like "Kak, kak, kak!" which means "a deer-skin blanket." According to their legends, the raven's cries warned people not to forget their blankets when they moved.

The raven is a symbol for solitude and an attribute of several saints whom ravens fed in the wilderness, including St. Anthony Abbot, St. Paul the Hermit, and St. Benedict. The raven has long been a symbol of divine providence. [Psa 147:9; Job 38:41] Many remember the Lord's command to consider the sparrow and the lilies, but the words, "Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them," are seldom brought to mind. [Lk 12:24]

The raven symbolizes filial gratitude and affection, wisdom, hope, longevity, death, and fertility. In alchemy, it represents change and the advanced soul dying to this world. It remains a frequently used symbol in modern magic, witchcraft, and mystery.

In the telling of myths and legends, the crow frequently took the place of the raven. This is the case in most of the Northwest Pacific myths recorded above and in the story of Apollo and Coronis. The Irish war-goddess, Badb, often took on the shape of a crow. In classical mythology, this bird is an attribute of Cronus or Saturn and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, victory, and the arts.

Like the larger raven, the symbolic crow is associated with the sun, longevity, beginnings, death, change, bad luck, prophecy, and Christian solitude. It, too, is considered a messenger of the gods. Among ancient Greeks and Romans there were some who considered the crow a bad omen and the raven a good one.

The crow is associated with motherly love and spiritual strength. It was believed that fairies turned into crows in order to cause trouble. In heraldry, a crow was used to indicate a dark person such as a Moor or a Saracen. In Egypt, two crows, like two doves, were an emblem of monogamy.

Death
Eaters of carrion, ravens were messengers of death, pestilence, and battle. It was believed that these flesh-hungry birds could smell the scent of death upon a person before they died - even through the walls of a house. In paintings, the raven may be seen flying over battlefields, eager to feast on the dead. After the Battle of Armageddon, ravens will descend upon the lands of the wicked. [Isa 34:11].

Morrigane, the celtic goddess, is accompanied by three ravens: Babd, Acha and Neman, the three goddess of war.

These birds were thought to have a special taste for the bodies of hanged criminals and to enjoy plucking out the eyes of sinners. Christians thought they carried off the souls of the damned and associated this bird with Satan.

Painted black
When the rain stopped, Noah first sent a white raven to explore the sea. Instead of returning to the Ark, this bird "kept going to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth." [Gen 8:7]. After the raven’s failure, Noah sent a hite dove. The raven was forced to ciomer back to the Arch where he was blackened and condemned to eat carrion.

According to Ukrainian legend, ravens used to have many beautifully colored feathers and a lovely song but after the Fall they started eating carrion. This habit destroyed their voices and blackened their plumage. Their former loveliness is expected to be returned to them when Paradise is restored.

In the Pacific Northwest, the raven's feathers were blackened when his brother-in-law smoked him over a fire as a punishment for his trickery.

White or albino crows were so prized that fowlers tried to change the color of their baby crows by soaking them in various deadly formulas. Among the Celts, the white crow was the emblem of the heroine, Branwen. Her heroic brother, Bran, was pictured as a raven. In North America, the Kiowas taught that the white crow turned black from eating snake eyes.

The spy
Greeks believed that Apollo turned the raven black when the bird informed him of the unfaithfulness of his lover, Coronis. This episode gave the raven a reputation as a tattler, a spy, and a divulger of secrets.

In Norse mythology the omniscient god Odin had a pair of ravens called Hugin (thought) and Munin (remembrance) living upon his shoulders or throne. Each morning they flew around the earth observing everything and questioning everyone, even the dead. During the night they returned to their master and whispered all that they had seen and heard. Sometimes Odin turned himself into a raven.

Familiars
A familiar, or an imp, is an attendant subordinate demon in the form of an animal. Familiars behaved in ways that no natural pet was believed to. They ran errands, brought messages, and aided in devil worship.

Ravens are known around the world as shapeshifters and humans are often changed into ravens by an enemy's curse. They are prophets, spell-casters, and messengers of the gods. Gods and goddesses of war and thunder such as Badb have ravens as their attributes. They are early emblems of the Danes and the Vikings.
The beautiful song of the blackbird makes it a symbol of temptations, especially sexual ones. The devil once took on the shape of a blackbird and flew into St. Benedict's face, thereby causing the saint to be troubled by an intense desire for a beautiful girl he had once seen. In order to save himself, St. Benedict tore off his clothes and jumped into a thorn bush. This painful act is said to have freed him from sexual temptations for the rest of his life.

A trickster
Among the natives of the North American Pacific Coast, Raven is a hero, messenger, creator of the world, thief, and trickster. He taught the first humans how to care for themselves and make clothes, canoes, and houses. His position in Native American folklore is similar to that of the wily coyote. Some say he was born of the primordial darkness; others that he was born in the coffin of his dead mother and nourished on her entrails. He was a provident creator who brought sunlight, vegetation, animals, and the tides into the world for the benefit of humankind. He took the animals two by two onto a raft, after the manner of Noah, in order to save them from a great flood. After all the good he had done for humankind, Raven wished to marry a woman but the men refused to allow this. In revenge, Raven created mosquitoes from crushed leaves to pester them for all time. When Raven brought light to mankind, they were so frightened by it that they scattered to all corners of the world.

The dog
Aka: Black Dog, Black Angus, Gwyllgi, Spectral dog, Dog of Darkness, Hellhound

UK: In Suffolk the black dog becomes 'Old Shock' (from the Old English scucca, meaning 'demon'). In the Quantock Hills of Somerset the black dog was frequently seen and called the 'Gurt Dog'. Cornwall has various tales of the 'Devil's Dandy (or Dando) Dogs', Devon has the 'Yeth (Heath) or Wisht Hounds. Other local names include Barguest, Black Shag, Padfoot or Hooter. Just to be different, in West Yorkshire the common name is 'Guytrash'; in Lancashire this is reduced to 'Trash' or changed to 'Skriker'. Further afield, a particularly unpleasant phantom pooch frequented Peel Castle on the Isle of Man in the seventeenth century and was known as the Moddey Dhoo, or Mauthe Doog. In Ireland we hear of the Pooka. In Scotland they are called CuSith, which literally means "faery dog," or Barguest. They are called Cwn Annw in Wales, where they are seen crossing moors and wastelands by night. In England, they are called In Germanic countries they are called by a name which translates as "Gabriel's Hounds," named for the Judeo-Christian Angel of Death.

Origin
There are numerous mythological references to 'hellhounds' in Greek, Indic, Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Armenian and Iranian sources. As scavengers and carrion-eaters, dogs came to be associated with death, in both the classical and Celtic religious traditions.

The cult is older than that of Osiris, and can be traced to the Sumerian goddess Bau who was also dog-headed. Her name may well be onomatopoeic, little removed from 'bow-wow'. Anubis himself, written in early heiroglyphs as 'An-pu', may be a direct continuation of Bau's father, the Sumerian god An.

In the early stages of Egyptian religion, at least, Anubis was linked with the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, known in most mythologies throughout the world as the 'Dog Star' and the central consideration of the Egyptian calendar - although Sirius was later most closely linked with Isis, of course. Incidentally, this is where our expression 'dog days' originated: the hot, parched season that followed the heliacal rising of Sirius coinciding with the Nile's annual inundation of the valley.

Dogs were closely linked with the Greek goddess Hecate (along with lions and horses). Indeed, at times she was depicted as dog-headed and was certainly linked to the Dog Star, Sirius. Her pet was the dog Cerberus (or Kerberos) who is the watchdog at the entrance to Hades.

A dog as companion on the road to the Otherworld occurs explicitly in one of the tales in that vast hindu epic the Mahabharata. Yudhishthira, the King of Pandavas, with his five brothers, their joint wife and a dog set off on a rambling journey which took them to the sacred 'omphalos' of the hindus, Mount Meru. The companions die one-by-one of exhaustion but Yudhishthira survives and 'enters heaven in his mortal body, not having tasted death' . The dog too comes with him, and is revealed to be Dharma (the Law) in disguise.

The Altaic shaman encounters a dog that guards the underworld realm of Erlik Khan. When the Yukaghir shaman follows the road to the kingdom of shadows, he finds an old woman's house guarded by a barking dog. In Koryak shamanism the entrance to the land of the dead is guarded by dogs. In Eskimo shamanism, a dog with bared teeth guards the entrance to the undersea land of Takakapsaluk, Mother of the Sea Beasts. The custom of burying a dog and the skin of a favourite reindeer with a dead man was still current among Ugrian people of Siberia earlier this century

Greyhounds are specifically mentioned in the early Welsh literature: they formed some of the many gifts presented to Pwyll by Arawn, lord of the Otherworld, in the First Branch of the Mabinogi. Two greyhounds accompany Culhwch, when he sets out in all his splendour to visit his cousin Arthur, in 'Culhwch and Olwen.'

Hellhounds almost abound in the northern myths - such dogs are mentioned in Baldrs Draumar, Voluspa, Gylfaginning, Grimnismal, Skirnismal and Fjolsvinnsmal.

Description
Black Angus is a large black dog with yellow eyes and sharp fangs who roams the northern English and Scottish countryside showing himself to those who will die within a fortnight. Scottish Lowlanders claim he has horns on his head, which may have derived from some confusion with the Christian Devil. Like death itself, the hellhound speaks, but does not listen; acts, but never reflects or reconsiders. Driven by hunger and greed, he is insatiable and his growl is eternal in duration.

“Another belief is that there are ghostly black dogs, the size of large retrievers, about the fields at night, that these dogs are generally near gates and stiles, and are of such a forbidding aspect that no one dare venture to pass them, and that it means death to shout at them. In some places the spectral dog is named "Shuck" and is said to be headless.”

Rev Worthington-Smith's book on the folklore of Dunstable, published in 1910

Role
Psycopomps

They are 'psycopomp', a quality assigned to some creatures and animals, whose function is to guide the departed souls on the paths to the Otherworld.

Faery foretellers of death

Any person who is the target of this dark messenger's pronouncement dies within a fortnight, and one must wonder how much of this is self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stories
In the various british tales of Piper's Holes, a man, usually a piper but sometimes a fiddler, enters an underground passage way. Those above ground follow his progress by listening for his music but suddenly all goes quite. Intriguingly, in the tales the man seems to invariably be accompanied by a dog. The dog emerges from the entrance, desperately frightened (or badly burned, in some versions) but the man is never seen again. Although never explicitly tied to a 'hollow hill' legend, this folk tale motif seems to have much in common with the even-more common notions of barrows being hollow and of underground tunnels of improbable length.

Cu Chulainn, the Hound of Culann - had a very special and close relationship with dogs. As a young boy, he is called Stanta, but he kills the huge guard dog of Culann the smith and, as a penance, he takes the dog's place and also his name. This affinity with dogs recurs in the adult life of Cu Chulainn: he has a geis (a bond or taboo) on him that he must never eat hound-flesh. But he is offered dogmeat at a feast, and there is another geis on him never to refuse hospitality. He breaks the first rule and eats the meat; this act weakens the hero's supernatural strength and leads ultimately to his death.

In the Old English Passion of St Christopher the saint is described thus: 'He was of the race of mankind who are half hound'. The OE Martyrology says he was of 'The nation where men have the head of a dog and from the country where men devour each other'.
St Christopher, of course, lived by a ford and made a name for himself by carrying Jesus across a river. The crossing of the river is reminescent of the watery boundary with the Otherworld and other death characters “passers” such as Caron

Guardians of the corpse ways
These perhaps derive from the belief that the first person to be buried in a churchyard would have to guard any subsequent inhumed souls. Baring-Gould put forward the belief that it was the custom to sacrifice a dog, specifically one without a single white hair, in the foundations of the church - although direct evidence is lacking. In Scandinavia a similar practice more commonly use a lamb, but the creature was still known as the Kirkogrim .

The hellhound sits at the border of this world and next, between life and death, hope and fear, and also between good and evil. For this role, the dog is perfectly suited, being the domestic species par excellence, the tamed carnivore who stands midway between animal and human, savagery and civilization, nature and culture.The dog is the oldest domestic animal, traceable to the paleolithic, since when dogs have enjoyed a peculiarly close relationship with humans, sharing their hearths at night and guarding the home, working during the day as sheepdogs or hunters. This close symbiotic relationship with people is reflected in the early literature where dogs seem to have clear connections with the Otherworld. But this is not unique to hounds as many species from bulls, boars, to owls and cuckoos have clear associations with deities which lead to ritual veneration.

Hunting hounds
Dogs were used in the hunt and this may have been the origin of their symbolic link with death. In tales and myths, hunted animals appear sometimes as messengers of the divine or underworld. The hunted creature itself may be enchanted or possess magical qualities: it may be a transformed human or a god in animal form.

In 'Pwyll', Arawn, king of the underworld, has a pack of shining white, red-eared dogs, their colouring proclaiming their fairy origins. The Cwn Annwn or Hounds of Annwn were ghost dogs which appeared only at night to foretell death, sent from Annwn to seek out corpses and human souls, described in an early Welsh poem as small, speckled and greyish-red, chained and led by a black-horned figure.

In the Welsh 'Tale of Culhwch and Olwen', Culhwych's quest for the hand of Olwen is associated with a number of tasks connected with supernatural dogs: one of his 'labours' is to seek the two whelps of a great bitch called Rhymni, who is in the shape of a she-wolf and extraordinarily swift.

The pair
In some mythologic tales, it is suggested that there is not only one but usually a pair of hell dogs, one being the dog of life and the other the dog of death, serving to carry off one about to die, while the former can restore him or her to life. In the Armenian mythology, one hound is named Spitak, 'the White', and the other the hound of death, Siaw, 'the Black'. In the Greek mythology, Cerberus is sometimes mentioned along with his brother.

Odin has two hounds who keep ceaseless watch - one sleeps by day and the other by night - outside the castle of Mengloth.

One is called Gifr,
and the other Geri,
if you want to know that;
very ancient guards
and they keep guard
until the gods are torn apart. Fjolsvinnsmal

The names of these hounds, Gifr and Geri, are closely linked to words meaning 'greedy', understood to mean hungry for the flesh of the dead