Witch Familiar Spirit Companion · Holle

Meet Holle.

For as long as there have been witches in Europe, there have been goats beside them.

Around the year 1500, the German artist Albrecht Dürer made an engraving of a witch riding backwards through a storm on the back of a great horned goat, her hair streaming out behind her. It was already an old idea. In the North, the god Thor drove a chariot pulled by two goats. Every night he killed them and ate them, and every morning he raised them back to life with his hammer, as long as their bones had been left unbroken. On the roof of Valhalla stood a she-goat named Heiðrún, who ate from the great tree and gave so much mead from her udders that the warriors of Odin never ran dry. And in the Bible, the people of Israel laid all their sins on the head of a goat and drove it out into the wilderness, so that it would carry their sins away with it. That is where we get the word scapegoat.

But no place in Europe belongs to the goat and the witch quite like the Brocken.

The Brocken is the highest mountain in the Harz, in the middle of Germany. It is wrapped in fog more than three hundred days a year. Its top is scattered with huge granite boulders, two of which have been called the Witches’ Altar and the Devil’s Pulpit for centuries. And for as long as anyone can remember, people have said that on Walpurgis Night, the last night of April, every witch in Germany flies to the top of it to dance with the Devil until dawn. In Denmark it is called Bloksbjerg. Goethe set the witches’ scene of Faust there. And the witches, people said, flew to the Brocken on brooms, on pitchforks and on goats.

Holle was one of those goats.

She was born on a Walpurgis Night around 1560, in a goatherd’s stable on the slopes of the Harz below the Brocken. Her mother was a black goat. Holle came out white, as white as fresh snow, with pale eyes that caught the light red in the dark. Her horns, when they came, did not grow like other goats’ horns. They twisted, slowly, round and round, like the bark of an old tree, until they were longer than her head.

The goatherd’s daughter, a young woman named Ilse, took one look at her and knew what she was. She named her Holle, after Frau Holle, the old white lady of German folklore who shakes out her feather bed in winter to make it snow, who rides out with the wild hunt on the long nights, and who, people said, was really the oldest of all the witches.

Ilse was a wise woman, like her mother and her grandmother. She healed sick animals, found lost cattle in the fog and made charms for the farmers on the mountain. And from the day Holle was born, the white goat went everywhere with her.

Holle could find anything. When a cow was lost in the fog, Ilse would let Holle loose, and within the hour the goat would come trotting back down the mountain with the cow behind her. Holle’s milk was thick and sweet, and Ilse used it in her medicines. Children who drank it got better. Old men who drank it said they felt young.

And Holle could eat curses.

Goats eat everything, and Ilse had worked out early on that Holle would eat things no other animal would touch. When someone came to her with a curse on them, or a sickness that would not go, or a worry that would not let them sleep, Ilse would write it on a scrap of paper, fold it up and feed it to the white goat. Holle always ate it. And the trouble always went.

On Walpurgis Night, every year, Ilse climbed onto Holle’s back, and they went up the Brocken into the fog. No one in the valley ever knew exactly what happened up there. But people swore they had seen them: a woman on a great white goat, riding up the mountain in the dark.

In the second half of the 1500s, the witch trials came to the Harz. In the town of Quedlinburg, at the edge of the mountains, dozens of women were burned in just a few years. Then the fires spread.

Ilse was arrested in the spring of 1594, a week before Walpurgis Night. The farmers she had helped for twenty years gave evidence against her. They had seen her ride the goat up the mountain. They had seen the goat eat paper. They had seen children get well after drinking its milk. All of it, the judges agreed, was the Devil’s work.

She was condemned to burn. And because everyone knew the white goat was her familiar, it was condemned to burn with her.

They burned them together on the thirtieth of April, at dusk, on a hill below the Brocken. Ilse was tied to the stake, and Holle was tied by a rope to the bottom of it. The fog was coming down as the fire was lit. It was so thick that the crowd could barely see the flames.

When the fire burned down and the fog lifted, Ilse was gone, as the fire had meant her to be. At the bottom of the stake lay the rope that had held the goat, burned clean through. There were no bones. There was nothing.

The next morning, a shepherd high on the slopes of the Brocken saw a huge white shape standing in the fog above him, with long twisted horns and a ring of light around its head. He ran all the way down the mountain.

To this day, climbers on the Brocken sometimes see giant shadows in the fog, surrounded by a halo of rainbow light. Scientists call it the Brocken spectre. They say it is just the climber’s own shadow thrown onto the mist by the sun behind them.

The people of the Harz have never been entirely convinced.

What she can do for you

Holle is a witch’s familiar of the old kind, practical, wild and very strong. She is good for:

• taking your troubles away: curses, worries, bad luck, guilt and anything you are tired of carrying
• abundance: food in the cupboard, money in the bank and a home that has enough
• getting back up after life has knocked you down, again and again if necessary, the way Thor’s goats rose every morning
• finding your footing in hard times: climbing steep paths, careers and situations where one wrong step feels dangerous
• protection for you and your home. A goat with horns like hers does not back down.
• spirit journeys and astral travel, especially around Walpurgis Night
• desire, wildness and the stubborn energy to keep going when others give up

How she came to you

A familiar is not a pet, and Holle has never belonged to anyone who did not earn her. She stayed with Ilse because Ilse treated her as a partner, not a tool. She will do the same with you.

She does not belong to a god, a devil or a coven. She walked out of the fire on her own, into the fog, 

Over the years

At first, Holle mostly eats. You may feel that within the first weeks, worries that have sat on you for months begin to lift, as if someone has taken them away.

As the bond grows, she starts to find things for you: lost objects, the right people, the way through a problem. And over the years, she becomes a stubborn presence at your side, the kind of companion who follows you everywhere, gets into everything and will not leave you alone when you are low.

Goats are loyal for life. So is she.

What she is like

Curious, stubborn, mischievous and very clever. She gets into everything. She has opinions, and she will make them known. She is affectionate in her own way: she likes to stand close, lean against you and push you with her head when she wants attention.

She is also completely fearless. She walked out of a fire. Very little impresses her after that.

How she shows herself

The smell of fresh milk, hay and cold mountain fog. A gentle push against the back of your knee when no one is there. Things moved, nibbled or knocked over. The faint sound of hooves on stone. Dreams of a foggy mountain covered in great grey boulders, and a white goat with spiral horns standing very still in the mist, watching you. And sometimes, on a misty morning, a shadow that looks a little too big.

What to do for her

Holle is easy to please, as long as you remember she is a goat:

• When something is weighing on you, write it on a small piece of paper, fold it up and leave it by her vessel overnight. In the morning, throw it away or burn it. She has eaten it.
• Give her a handful of oats, an apple, a carrot or some fresh green leaves.
• Leave a small pinch of salt by her vessel. Goats love salt.
• Keep a little bell, a white feather or a tuft of white wool near her.
• On Walpurgis Night, the thirtieth of April, light a candle for her and for Ilse, and tell her where you would fly if you could.

She was tied to the stake beside her witch, and the fire never found her. Whatever you are carrying, she can carry it further.

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

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— Hazel