Witch Familiar Spirit Companion · Garou

Meet Garou.

Everyone knows the story of the little girl in the red hood. She walks through the forest with a basket for her grandmother. A wolf meets her on the path, runs ahead, eats the grandmother and climbs into her bed. When the girl arrives, he eats her too. In the version the Brothers Grimm wrote down in 1812, a huntsman comes along, cuts the wolf open and saves them both.

But the story is older than that. In 1697, the French writer Charles Perrault published it with no huntsman at all. The wolf eats the girl, and that is the end. Perrault added a little moral at the bottom: young girls should beware of wolves, and the most dangerous wolves of all are the gentle, charming ones who follow them home. He did not mean animals.

And older still were the versions the peasant women of France told each other by the fire, which were darker and stranger than anything in a book.

This is the version the wolf tells.

In the 1680s, at the edge of the great forests of the Morvan, in Burgundy, an old woman lived alone in a stone cottage. She was the kind of woman every village had and every village feared a little. She delivered babies, set broken bones, took fevers down and knew what to give a girl who did not want to be pregnant. The priest called her a sorceress behind her back. The women of the village called on her whenever they needed her.

One winter, she found a wolf cub caught in a trap in the forest, half dead, with its leg crushed. She carried it home in her apron, set the leg and fed it from her own plate. It grew into a huge, grey-black wolf with amber eyes and a limp it never lost, and it never left her. The villagers called it le garou, the werewolf. She thought that was funny, and she called it Garou too.

Every week, her granddaughter Marion walked through the forest to visit her with a basket: a flat cake and a little pot of butter, just as in Perrault’s story. The old woman had made Marion a hooded cloak of red wool. Red, she said, kept off the evil eye, and in a forest, it meant you could always be seen and always be found.

And every week, Garou met the girl at the edge of the trees and walked beside her all the way to the cottage and back again. In all those years, nothing in the forest ever touched her.

The forest was not the danger. The village was.

There was a man there, a miller’s son, who had decided he wanted Marion. She had told him no. He did not like being told no. One autumn afternoon, he followed her into the forest, a long way behind, until the village was out of sight. Then he came up the path towards her with a smile on his face.

Garou came out of the trees.

They found the miller’s son two days later, in the bracken a little way off the path. The village said a wolf had killed him. And everyone knew whose wolf it was.

The men of the village took their axes and their dogs and went to the old woman’s cottage that night. Garou was out with Marion on the path. They broke down the door, dragged the old woman out of her bed and killed her as a witch. Then they waited for the wolf to come home.

He did come home. But he came home with the girl, and he saw the light of their torches through the trees, and he understood. He turned her around and took her the other way, deep into the Morvan, where no one from the village ever went.

Neither of them was seen again.

The story the village told afterwards was different. There was a wicked wolf, it said, who ate the grandmother, and climbed into her bed, and a brave man with an axe who came to the rescue. It is always the people holding the axes who get to tell the story.

Perrault was right about one thing, though. There are wolves who smile and follow girls home. Garou was not one of them. He killed one.

Marion grew up in the forest with the wolf at her side. She learned her grandmother’s craft from the plants and the trees and whatever her grandmother had taught her before. In time, she became the wise woman of the deep Morvan, the one people walked a whole day into the forest to find, a woman in a red hood with a great grey wolf lying at her feet. Garou stayed with her for the rest of her life, which was long. He did not age the way a wolf should. People said he was a garou after all.

When Marion died, very old, they found her red cloak lying in the heather at the edge of the forest, and the wolf lying on it, waiting. He would not let anyone come near it.

He is still waiting for someone to put it on.

What he can do for you

Garou is a witch’s familiar of the oldest kind: a guardian, a guide and a wolf who knows exactly what real danger looks like. He is good for:

• protection when you are alone: walking home at night, travelling, living on your own
• seeing through disguises: recognising the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the charming liar, the person who smiles and means you harm
• protecting your home, your family and especially the women and girls in it
• choosing your own path through life, and knowing when it is time to leave the path everyone else is on
• instinct and courage: trusting the hair rising on the back of your neck
• justice, against people who prey on others and think they will get away with it
• companionship for anyone who feels alone in the world

Over the years

A wolf does not trust easily. At first, Garou will walk a little way behind you, the way he met Marion at the edge of the trees. Maybe you feel safer going out at night within the first weeks, and you notice things about people you used to miss.

Once he is sure of you, he walks beside you, and he does not leave. Over the years, he becomes the kind of guardian you stop noticing until you need him, and then he is simply there.

What he is like

Calm, watchful and very loyal. He has a slight limp from the trap that nearly killed him as a cub, and he does not like traps of any kind. He is gentle with women, children and animals, and completely without mercy for anyone who hunts them.

He is quiet, but he is not cold. He likes to lie close, with his head on your feet.

How he shows himself

The smell of damp forest, heather and wet fur. A flash of red in the corner of your eye. The feeling of something large lying across the foot of your bed. A low growl you can almost hear when a certain person walks into the room. Dreams of a misty forest, a path through the heather, a figure in a red hood and a grey wolf walking beside her. And a sudden, cold certainty that you should cross the street, take another way home, or not open the door.

What to do for him

Garou is easy to please:

• Tie a piece of red ribbon or red thread to your bag, your keys or your coat, and ask him to walk with you.
• Give him a piece of bread with butter, the way Marion carried it in her basket, or a small piece of meat.
• Keep a scrap of red cloth by his vessel. It is his to lie on.
• When you walk somewhere alone, say his name before you set out.
• Take him for walks in the woods. He misses the forest.

He was the wolf in the story, and he was never the villain. He will make sure no wolf with a smile ever gets near you.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel