Three Spirits That Stayed: Old Stories of Familiars and the People Who Kept Them

My grandmother kept a folded piece of grey wool at the foot of her bed. Nobody was allowed to wash it. When I was small I called what slept on it "the cat", and she let me. It got the first spoonful from every pot and the first drop from every cup. I never saw it. I saw the wool, pressed down in the middle, and the bowl in the morning that was not always as full as I had left it.

When she died, it did not go with her.

I have thought about that wool for most of my life. And over the years I have found it again, in other houses, in other centuries, in records written by people who wanted the women who kept such things dead. Here are three of those houses. The first is in Essex. The second is in Greenland. The third could be any farm in Denmark or Norway, on any Christmas Eve for hundreds of years.

I. The cat in the basket

In the summer of 1566, three women from the villages around Chelmsford were brought before the court. One of them was Elizabeth Francis, from Hatfield Peverel. What she told the examiners was printed in a small pamphlet that same year, and it is one of the oldest detailed accounts of a familiar we have in English.

She said she learned the craft when she was twelve years old. Her teacher was her grandmother, a woman called Eve, also of Hatfield Peverel, who was already dead by the time of the trial.

Eve gave her granddaughter a cat. A white spotted cat. She told Elizabeth to feed it bread and milk, to keep it in a basket, and to call it by its name. The name the pamphlet gives is Sathan. The clerks liked that very much, as you can imagine.

Elizabeth said the cat spoke to her. She called it a strange hollow voice, one she came to understand by use. Think about that phrase for a moment. By use. Every day, for years, a girl and a cat in a basket, until the hollow voice made sense to her.

When she wanted something, she asked it. The first thing she asked for was sheep. Twenty-eight of them came into her pasture, black and white. They stayed with her for a time, and then they wore away, she said, she knew not how. Later she asked for a husband, and that part of the story goes badly, the way these stories often do when they pass through a courtroom.

And every time the cat did something for her, it took a drop of her blood. She pricked herself to give it, sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, and where she pricked there remained a red spot. The examiners could still see the spots on her skin.

She kept the cat for fifteen or sixteen years.

Then she went to an older woman in the village, Agnes Waterhouse, and asked her for a cake. In return, she said, she would give her a thing she would be the better for. Agnes gave her the cake. Elizabeth gave her the cat, and she told her the same things her grandmother had told her. Bread and milk. The name. The blood.

Agnes was sixty-four when she stood before the court. She said she had kept the cat a great while in wool, in a pot. Then she grew poor, and she needed the wool. So she asked the cat to change, and it became a toad, and she kept it in the same pot without the wool.

That detail is the one I cannot put down. A woman so poor that she had to take the bedding from under the thing she kept, and so careful of it that she asked it to become something that would not miss the wool.

Agnes Waterhouse was hanged that July. She was one of the first women in England to be executed for witchcraft.

The pamphlet was written to make these women monsters, and it did its work. But read it the other way, with your own eyes instead of the examiners'. A grandmother hands a spirit to a girl of twelve. The girl feeds it every day of her life. It has a basket, then a pot lined with wool. It is passed on, not thrown away, with its food and its name and its rules. That is a line. That is a spirit being kept the way spirits have always been kept, by people who knew it needed a home.

In my line we were taught that a familiar without a home wanders, and that it comes back as something else. That is why the old ones kept them in things. A key. A ring. A stone. A basket at the foot of the bed. A piece of grey wool nobody was allowed to wash.

We were also taught something Elizabeth Francis learned too late. A familiar is given blood by agreement, never by habit. What gets used to blood stops asking for anything else.

II. The songs in Greenland

Around the year 1000, the people living on the coast of Greenland were starving. The hunting had failed. Men who had gone out to fish had come back with little or had not come back at all. On a farm at Herjolfsnes, the farmer Thorkel did what was done in those days when nobody knew what would happen next. He sent for the seeress.

Her name was Thorbjorg. People called her the little völva. She had once had nine sisters, all of them seeresses, and by then she was the only one still alive. In winter she went from farm to farm, and the farms that wanted to know their fate invited her in.

The saga that tells this, the Saga of Erik the Red, describes her as if the writer had stood in the doorway and watched her come in. She wore a dark blue cloak fastened with straps, set with stones all the way down to the hem. Glass beads around her neck. On her head a hood of black lambskin, lined inside with white catskin. In her hand a staff with a knob of brass, set with stones. At her belt a pouch, and in the pouch the things she needed for her work. Calfskin shoes with the hair still on them, tied with long laces that had little knobs of tin on the ends. And on her hands, gloves of catskin, white and furred on the inside.

Thorkel gave her the high seat, with a cushion stuffed with hen feathers. For her supper they made porridge of goat's milk, and they cooked the hearts of every kind of animal that could be found on the farm. She ate with a spoon of brass and a knife with a handle of walrus ivory. She said very little that evening. She slept on the farm, and she let them wait.

The next day, near evening, everything was prepared for her. And then she asked for something nobody on the farm could give her. She needed women who knew the ward songs. The varðlokkur. The old songs that call the spirits in and keep them close while the seeress works.

No one knew them. Until a young woman called Gudrid said that she did. Her foster mother had taught her when she was a girl in Iceland. But Gudrid was a Christian now, and she said she would not sing them. Thorkel asked her. Thorbjorg asked her. In the end Gudrid agreed.

The women made a ring around the platform where Thorbjorg sat, and Gudrid sang. The saga says she sang so well and so beautifully that nobody there could remember hearing a lovelier voice.

Afterwards the seeress thanked her. Many spirits had come, she said. Spirits who had turned away from that place before and would not listen to anyone. They had come because the song pleased them. And now many things were clear to her that had been hidden, both from her and from the people there.

The famine would end, she told them. It would not last past the winter, and when spring came things would get better. The sickness on the farms would lift sooner than they expected. Then she turned to Gudrid and told her what lay ahead of her. A marriage in Greenland that would not last long. A road that led back to Iceland. And a great line there, with bright beams of light shining over her descendants.

I come back to this story every winter for one sentence in it. The spirits had turned away before. They had been there all along, all around that starving farm, and they had not come. Nobody knew how to ask them. Nobody had the song.

Spirits choose. They come to a voice they know, to a house that feeds them, to someone who has learned the old way of asking. Everything in a seeress's work is built on that. The catskin gloves, the hearts on the plate, the cushion of hen feathers, the songs. All of it is a way of saying: you are welcome here, and I know how to keep you.

III. The butter at the bottom of the bowl

The third house has no date, because it happened on so many farms for so long. You will find it in Denmark and in Norway, and the old people told it as if it had happened to someone their own grandparents knew.

On a farm there lived a nisse. He lived in the barn, in the hayloft, near the animals he looked after. He was small and old and grey, and he was not to be trifled with. A farm with a contented nisse prospered. The cows gave milk, the horses were glossy, the hay stayed dry. A farm with an angry nisse did not.

On Christmas Eve the family carried a bowl of porridge out to the barn for him. That was the agreement. And the porridge had to have butter on it, a good pat of butter melting on the top, the way you would serve it to someone you respected.

One Christmas Eve, the porridge was carried out, and the butter had been put underneath it, down at the bottom of the bowl. Some tell it that the farmer did it as a joke. Some say it was a careless girl. The nisse looked at the bowl and saw no butter, and he was so angry that he went into the byre and killed the cow standing there.

Then he sat down and ate the porridge anyway. And at the bottom of the bowl he found the butter.

The story says he grieved. He had been wrong, and he knew it. So that same night he went out across the frozen fields to a neighbouring farm, found a cow that looked exactly like the one he had killed, and brought it home and tied it up in the dead one's place. By morning the byre was as it had been.

Every child in the North learned that story as a warning. Feed the nisse properly or he will hurt you. But it is also a story about a spirit that keeps its accounts. He took what he thought was owed. When he found out he was wrong, he paid it back, at night, in the snow, from his own pocket, so to speak. A pet does not keep accounts, and a servant does not pay back what it took. The nisse did both. He lived on that farm, and he expected to be treated like someone who lived there.

When my grandmother set the first spoonful aside, she was doing what those farm wives did with the Christmas porridge. She was keeping an agreement. The first of everything goes to the one who keeps watch, before anyone in the house has tasted it.

What the three houses have in common

A white cat in a basket in Essex. A seeress in catskin gloves on a starving farm in Greenland. A grey old man in a hayloft with a bowl of porridge going cold in front of him.

In every one of these houses, the spirit had a place. It had food that was its own. It had rules, and the people around it knew the rules or paid for not knowing them. And in every one of these houses, someone had learned how to keep it from someone older. A grandmother. A foster mother. The old people on the farm.

That is what has been lost. Most people today who feel the pull toward a spirit have nobody to hand them the basket. They have nobody to teach them the song, or tell them where the butter goes.

I have kept spirits most of my adult life, and I have been handed what my line knew about keeping them. Some of the spirits I work with have agreed to go into the world, bound into a ring, a key or a stone, the way the old ones always kept them. Bound, never made. A made thing is always hungrier than it was promised to be. A bound spirit is one that has said yes.

Each one goes out with its own rules, and with what it wants to be given first. If you have read this far and you keep thinking about the folded wool at the foot of the bed, you can see the ones who are waiting in Spirit Companions.

Give it the first spoonful. And put the butter on the top.

— Hazel