Witch Familiar Spirit Companion · Gwen

Meet Gwen.

The hare has always been the witch’s animal.

Two thousand years ago, before she led the Britons into battle against Rome, Queen Boudica let a hare run from the folds of her cloak and read the future from the way it ran. Julius Caesar noted that the Britons would not eat hares at all. And for hundreds of years afterwards, all over Britain and Ireland, people believed that some women could turn themselves into hares at night. If a farmer shot a hare in his field and wounded it, the next morning an old woman in the village would be found limping, with a fresh wound in the same place. And it was said that an ordinary bullet would pass straight through a witch-hare. Only silver could hurt her.

In 1662, a Scottish woman named Isobel Gowdie stood before a court and told them the words she said to go into the hare. I shall go into a hare, with sorrow and sigh and mickle care. And I shall go in the Devil’s name, ay while I come home again. Then she told them the words to come back.

Gwen knew those words. She knew the words to come back too. In the end, it did her no good.

She was born around 1740 in a narrow valley in the mountains of mid-Wales, called Pennant Melangell. The valley had its own saint. Twelve hundred years earlier, the story goes, a prince was hunting a hare there with his hounds, and the hare ran to a young woman named Melangell who was praying alone among the trees. It hid under the hem of her robe. The prince’s hounds stopped dead and would not go near her. The prince was so moved that he gave her the whole valley as a sanctuary, forever.

The people of the valley called hares Melangell’s lambs, and for centuries no one in that parish would kill one.

Gwen’s name means white. Her grandmother was the wise woman of the valley, the one who charmed warts, found lost sheep and knew which plants to give a woman in labour. When Gwen was sixteen, her grandmother took her up onto the hill one night when the moon was full, taught her the old words and showed her how to go into the hare.

It was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to her.

As a hare, she could run faster than any horse on the hillside. She could hear a footstep half a mile away. She could see in every direction at once. She ran the hills under the moon, through the heather and the bracken, and she saw the valley as no one else saw it: where the lost sheep had fallen, where the fox had its den, who was walking home late and from whose house. In the morning, she came back down the hill, said the words, and was a girl again, with dew on her feet.

She always came back as a white hare. Every other hare in Wales was brown.

For years, it was her secret. Then a new man bought the big house at the foot of the valley, a squire from England who had money and dogs and did not care about any Welsh saint. He liked to course hares with his greyhounds. The people of the valley told him about Melangell’s lambs. He laughed at them.

One night in October, the squire’s greyhounds picked up the scent of a white hare on the hill.

They ran her for an hour, down through the bracken and across the river and through the fields, until she was half dead with exhaustion. With the dogs right behind her, she ran for the only place she could think of: the little old church of St Melangell at the bottom of the valley, where the saint’s shrine still stood. She slipped through the gap under the churchyard gate.

The dogs stopped at the gate. They would not go in. They stood there howling, exactly as the prince’s hounds had done twelve hundred years before.

The squire stood beside them in a rage. He knew what everyone in the valley whispered about hares that ran like that, and he knew what it took to kill one. He cut a silver button from his waistcoat, rammed it down the barrel of his gun, and waited.

At dawn, the white hare came out of the churchyard. He shot her.

The silver caught her in the back leg. She did not die. She got away across the river and up the hill. But a witch who is hurt while she is in the hare, the old women said, cannot say the words to come home. The hare’s mouth cannot shape them through the pain.

The next morning, Gwen’s family found her clothes folded neatly on a stone at the edge of the top field, where she always left them. Gwen never came down the hill again.

But every evening after that, at dusk, a white hare with a limp came to the bottom of her mother’s garden and ate bread from her mother’s hand.

Within the year, the squire’s horse threw him on the valley road and broke his neck. The groom who was with him said a white hare had run straight across the road under the horse’s feet.

The white hare was seen in the valley for a very long time. Long after Gwen’s mother died. Long after everyone who had known her as a girl was gone. People in Pennant Melangell still said, when they saw something pale moving on the hillside at dusk, that Gwen was out.

What she can do for you

Gwen knows two shapes, and she has lived in both. She is good for:

• change and transformation: becoming someone new, or finally becoming who you really are
• escape: getting out of bad situations, bad relationships and tight corners, fast
• protection from people who chase, hound or harass you
• intuition, dreams and the moon: sensing what is coming and seeing what others miss
• luck, the old luck of the hare, and fresh starts when spring comes around
• a safe place: peace and sanctuary at home, the way Melangell’s valley was a sanctuary for hares
• speed and lightness: getting things done, and not letting heavy things hold you down

Over the years

Hares are shy, and Gwen is shyer than most. At first, she keeps her distance. You may only sense her at dusk, or on nights when the moon is bright.

Once she trusts you, she comes close and stays close. Over the years, you can change more easily than you used to, let go of old shapes more easily, and feel quicker on your feet when life suddenly changes direction.

She also brings sanctuary. Her home was a valley where hares were safe. She makes yours the same.

What she is like

Gentle, quick, curious and a little wild. She is easily startled and hates loud noises and shouting. She loves the moon, wild flowers, open hillsides and being free.

She is also braver than she looks. She outran a pack of greyhounds to the church door. Anyone who hounds you will have her to deal with.

How she shows herself

The smell of heather, wet grass and wild flowers. A flash of white at the edge of your sight, low to the ground. A sudden quickening of your heart, as if you are about to run. Dreams of moonlit hills, a little stone church in a valley, and a white hare sitting very still, watching you. And, on nights of the full moon, the old picture of a hare in the moon, clearer than it has ever been.

What to do for her

Gwen is very easy to please:

• Leave a piece of bread on your windowsill at dusk, the way her mother fed her.
• Give her a few fresh green leaves, dandelion, clover, or a little parsley.
• Keep a white feather or a tuft of white fur or wool near her vessel.
• On the night of the full moon, look up and find the hare in the moon. Say her name.
• If someone is hounding you, say quietly: “Melangell be with me.” She will hear it.

She ran into a hare’s body one night under the moon and never came out of it again. She knows exactly what it means to change shape and keep going, and she will help you do the same.

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.

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— Hazel