Witch Familiar Spirit Companion · Txiki

Meet Txiki.

The toad has always belonged to the witch.

In the English witch trials, women confessed to keeping toads as imps and feeding them with milk and blood. In Shakespeare’s day, people believed that an old toad carried a precious jewel inside its head, the toadstone, and they set them in rings, because a true toadstone grew hot and changed colour when poison came near it. Shakespeare himself wrote that the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. And in the Basque country, in 1610, the witnesses before the Spanish Inquisition told of witches who kept toads dressed in little coats of velvet with bells around their necks, fed them bread and wine, and spoke to them like children.

One of those toads was Txiki.

He was born around 1600 in a garden in Ciboure, on the Basque coast of France, no bigger than a fingernail. A girl named Graxi, who would one day be the best maker of love charms on the coast, found him under a cabbage leaf after the rain and carried him into the house in her cupped hands. Her mother told her to put it back. Graxi refused. She put him in a little wooden box by the hearth, lined with moss, and called him Txiki, which means little one in Basque.

He did not stay little. By the time Graxi was grown, he was the size of a loaf of bread, with warty grey-brown skin and great copper-coloured eyes that seemed to look straight through people. Graxi sewed him a little coat of green velvet and hung a tiny bell around his neck. Her mother laughed at her. Graxi said every witch needed company.

He was more than company. Graxi soon noticed that whenever a customer who meant her harm came to the door, Txiki would puff himself up and refuse to look at them. Whenever a good deal was coming, or money, he would sit in the doorway, very still, facing the street. And when she held him in her hands before making a charm, the charm always worked better.

In 1609, when the French judge came to burn the witches of the Basque coast and Graxi’s mother was taken, Graxi put Txiki in her apron pocket and walked over the Pyrenees at night, into Spain, to her aunt’s house in the village of Zugarramurdi.

The next year, the Inquisition came there too.

When they arrested Graxi, they searched the house for her toad. Everyone in the village knew she had one. The inquisitors had heard all about the velvet-coated toads of Zugarramurdi, and they wanted it as evidence. They turned the house upside down for two days. They never found him.

Txiki had gone down the well.

Graxi was held in Logroño for four years. Every evening of those four years, her aunt said, a large toad climbed out of the well, sat on the doorstep facing the road to Spain until it was dark, and then climbed back down again.

In 1614, Graxi walked home. When she came round the last corner of the lane, Txiki was sitting on the doorstep in the sun, waiting for her, still wearing what was left of his green velvet coat.

She cried for the first time since her mother died.

Txiki lived with Graxi for the rest of her life, which should have been impossible. Toads can live for a long time, but not that long. She married, had four children, became the witch of the village and grew old, and the toad by her hearth never seemed to age at all. When she died in 1671, he was sitting on the end of her bed.

Her granddaughter took him in. She sewed him a new velvet coat, a blue one, and kept him by her hearth too. And when she grew old, she passed him on to her own daughter. For two hundred years, Txiki went down the line of Graxi’s women, from grandmother to granddaughter, each one sewing him a new coat when the old one wore out. The family always had enough money. The family always knew who could not be trusted. And the family was never once betrayed.

In the 1880s, the last woman of the line left the Basque country to go to America, as so many Basques did in those years. She could not take a toad across the ocean. On the last morning, she carried him out to the garden and set him down under the cabbages, where Graxi had found him nearly three hundred years before.

He went back to the well. People in Zugarramurdi say that on summer evenings after rain, a very large toad can still sometimes be seen sitting at the mouth of the great cave outside the village, wearing something that looks like a scrap of old blue cloth.

What he can do for you

Txiki is an old, wise and very lucky familiar. He is good for:

• money and good fortune: deals coming through, money finding its way to you, and a household that always has enough
• spotting poison: false friends, bad deals, toxic people and anyone who means you harm
• protection of your home and its doorway
• patience and staying power: waiting out your enemies and still being there when they are gone
• seeing the true value in things other people call ugly, including yourself
• clearing out the poison in your life, whatever form it takes
• family luck, passed from one generation to the next

Over the years

Txiki is in no hurry. He waited four years on a doorstep, and he spent three centuries by the hearths of one family.

At first, he simply sits and watches. You may start noticing, within the first months, which people make you uneasy, and that you are usually right. Over time, money and good opportunities tend to come more steadily. And over the years, he becomes part of the family, the way he always was.

He is very good at staying.

What he is like

Patient, stubborn and quietly funny. He has a very dignified way of ignoring people he does not like. He is extremely loyal, and he loves the women of a household above everyone else.

He does not care what anyone thinks of his looks. You should not either.

How he shows himself

The smell of wet earth and rain. A small, cool weight in your lap when no one is there. The faint ring of a tiny bell. Toads turning up in your garden or on your doorstep. Dreams of a stone village, a well and a great cave in the hills, with a large toad sitting at its mouth in a little coat. And, when someone untrustworthy walks in, a sudden cold, puffed-up feeling in your chest.

What to do for him

Txiki likes simple, damp, homely things:

• Keep a small dish of fresh water by his vessel. He likes it damp.
• Give him a scrap of green or blue velvet or soft fabric. He has always had a coat.
• Hang a little bell near his vessel.
• Leave a few drops of red wine and a crumb of bread for him now and then, the way the Basque witches did.
• Keep a damp, shady corner of your garden or a pot of moss for him, and leave the toads that come there alone.

He went down the well rather than be taken, and he was waiting on the doorstep when his witch came home. He will wait for you too.

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