Book Review

Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits– Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern Witchcraft and Magic’ by Emma Wilby

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but as the title suggests, this book is about Familiar Spirits. It uses as its source material the records of the British witch trials, focusing primarily on the case of Bessie Dunlop, who faced charges of sorcery and witchcraft at Edinburgh assizes on November 8th 1576. Part of the transcript of her trial is reproduced at the beginning of the book, where Bessie tells an unforgiving courtroom how she first met her Familiar, a man named Tom. She was not alone in this account, as hundreds of trials, from Cornwall to the Orkneys tell a similar story. Whether the spirit was human, animal or faery, they came when they were least expected, they stayed to help, and, as the book goes on to show, they were very real.

The trial records show that Bessie was convicted and burnt, her likely fate being that she was taken by open cart to Castle Hill in Edinburgh, where she would have been encouraged to publicly repent of her sorcery and witchcraft. ‘After her repentance she would have been strangled, and her body burnt to ashes before the expectant crowd.’

There is a small section about mid way through the book, where we are taken to North America for a study of the Shamanic way of life. At first this may not appear to have that much to do with 16th and 17th Century Britain, but the parallels are actually many and Shamans have been studied in great depth, offering an insight into the spirituality of early modern Britain that we might not otherwise have had. One such parallel is that Familiars chose their humans, and not the other way round: ‘He cannot choose for himself what sort he will have. They come to him of their own accord, strong and powerful.’ Although it does seem that once they had arrived, familiars could be bossed about and demands made of them. And people were not that surprised to see them, because they lived in a world where the belief in spirits was part of life. Unlike today, where very few people appear to accept their presence.

From the trial records, it becomes apparent that the reason for the initial appearance of a Familiar was the result of extreme physical stress and hardship, and here again, a parallel with Shamanism is drawn. When Bessie first encountered her Familiar Tom, she was under unimaginable stress. She was driving her cattle to pasture, weeping for her cow that was dead, her husband and child who were lying sick from either famine or an epidemic, and she was ‘newly-risen out of child-bed‘, but, weak as she was, the only one the family depended on, and the only one who had any hope of putting food into their mouths was Bessie 		In its explanation of Familiars, the book also provides a very good insight into life at the time of the witch trials, and raises the question of why (apart from the fact that they were mostly female) the Christian church waged such a war against often the poorest and weakest members of its community.

But for me, what it shows above all else, is the indomitable spirit of the people who were being tortured and put to death: ‘Given the horrors of the British witch craze …it is redemptive to think that at the core of all this human fear and pain we can find treasures as simple, and yet profound, as ‘comfort’ and ‘joy’…

Why a magical practitioner might be motivated to stay loyal to their familiar until the very end, despite being threatened with hellfire and brimstone by the whole weight of Church, c ommunity and state.

Why Wiltshire cunning woman Anne Bodenham (1653) at ‘eighty years of age…deprived of food and sleep, kept up her spirits, bravely cursing the hangman to the last’, why an unnamed Cambridge witch (also 1653), being ‘on the point of execution…. declined to renounce the faithful friend (i.e. her familiar) of threescore years, and died in her obstinacy’; and why so many magical practitioners stood up in courtrooms across the length and breadth of Britain and ‘persisted in telling long and involved stories about fairies’ – despite the fact that in doing so, they often knowingly condemned themselves to death.’

This is a very interesting book from many perspectives, and one which I thoroughly recommend.

Freda