The Witch’s Familiar
In Europe at the dawn of modernity, when Descartes was bifurcating the mind from the body, animals still possessed a peculiar agency. In a superstitious age when fairies, angelic beings or devils roamed the land, any animal encountered—a hare or a fox, a cat, an owl—was never just an animal, but might be an emissary of heaven, a fairy in disguise, or an agent of Satan. Nowhere do fairies, demons and animals become more entangled than in the idea of the witch’s familiar. Much like the daimon of the ancient Greeks the familiar was a fairy/demon representative often in animal form that functioned variously as companion, helper, master or guarantor of magical abilities; they can be both portal and gate-keeper to the other realm; fairyland, the underworld, the spirit realm; a world inside this one. Heavenly angels do not usually function as familiars for this power is specifically non-Christian, of far older and more immanent traditions; the familiar may even ask their human to renounce Christianity. In 1645 one Essex witch, Hellen Clark, recounted how her familiar, a white dog named Elimanzer, demanded that she deny Christ so that “shee should never want.” She would have been in want because at this moment in history—the capitalist takeoff—communal lands were being privatized and begging made illegal; the persecuted women of this era often lived in extreme poverty. Familiars can still be found today for many pet-owners attribute their animal with extra-ordinary powers. Donna Haraway details the sci-fi familiar in the Companion Species Manifesto; critters are kin and can be joined by humans in a cybernetic assemblage made to survive the end of the world. While theories of the unconscious take it as given that there is a shared human psyche, the history of the animal-familiar prompts a more radical speculation: how much psyche do humans share with our animal counterparts?