Witch Familiar Spirit Companion · Wisht

Meet Wisht.

There is a symbol that has travelled further than almost any picture in the world.

It shows three hares running in a circle, nose to tail, around and around forever. Each hare has two ears. But when you count them, there are only three ears altogether. Each ear is shared by two hares, so that the three of them are bound together and can never be separated.

The oldest known version is painted on the ceiling of Buddhist cave temples at Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China, around 1,400 years ago. After that, it appears along the whole length of the Silk Road: on Islamic metalwork in Persia, on coins, in a synagogue in Germany, in cathedrals in France. And then, strangely, it turns up over and over again on the other side of the world, carved into the wooden roof bosses of small parish churches on Dartmoor, a wild, bleak moorland in Devon, in the far south-west of England. The people there call it the Tinners’ Rabbits.

No one knows how it got there. No one knows what it meant to the people who carved it.

Wisht knows. She was one of the three.

Dartmoor is a hard, beautiful place: miles of open moor under a huge sky, granite tors standing up out of the heather like broken teeth, bogs that swallow sheep, and mist that comes down so fast that people who know the moor all their lives still get lost in it. In the middle of it lies Wistman’s Wood, a small, strange wood of ancient oak trees that never grew tall. Their branches are twisted into knots and covered thick in moss and ferns, and the ground between them is a jumble of mossy boulders. People on Dartmoor say it is the kennel of the Wisht Hounds, the ghostly black dogs that run across the moor on stormy nights with the Devil hunting behind them. In the old Devon speech, wisht means eerie, uncanny, a little sad.

At the edge of the moor stands the village of Widecombe, with a church so large for such a small place that people call it the Cathedral of the Moor. High in its roof, carved in wood, three hares run in a circle.

In the 1630s, a girl named Thomasine grew up in that village. Her grandmother was a white witch, as the Devon people called the cunning women who healed and blessed rather than cursed. Every Sunday in church, Thomasine sat looking up at the three hares in the roof instead of listening to the sermon. When she was seven, she asked the vicar where the other three ears had gone. He told her not to ask silly questions in God’s house. She kept asking them anyway, mostly to the hares.

On Sunday, the twenty-first of October 1638, there were about three hundred people in the church for the afternoon service. Thomasine was twenty. The sky outside had gone strangely dark, and it was so dim inside the church that people could hardly see each other’s faces.

Then the storm struck.

A ball of fire burst through a window into the church. Lightning struck the tower, and great stones from the top of it came crashing down through the roof onto the people below. The church filled with smoke, flame and a terrible smell of burning. People were thrown to the ground. Some were burned. Four were killed, and around sixty injured. It was one of the worst thunderstorms in English history. The people of Widecombe said afterwards that the Devil himself had come for a gambler who had fallen asleep in the pews, and had tied his black horse to the church tower while he went in to fetch him.

In the smoke and the screaming, Thomasine saw a hare.

It was sitting perfectly still in the middle of the aisle, a brown hare with long black-tipped ears, looking straight at her. Then it turned and ran, not to the main door where everyone was crushing, but to a little side door near the altar that no one used. Thomasine grabbed the hand of the woman beside her and ran after it, and shouted to everyone around her to follow. A dozen of them got out through that door into the rain, just as another piece of the tower fell where they had been standing.

When the church was cleared, the villagers found the carved boss of the three hares lying on the floor, broken off the roof. It was cracked straight across one of the hares.

Thomasine went home soaked to the skin. The hare was sitting on her doorstep.

She took it in. She called it Wisht.

Wisht stayed with her for the rest of her life. She was not like any hare anyone had ever seen. She came into the house. She slept by the fire. She followed Thomasine across the moor in the worst weather and always knew the way home through the mist. When Thomasine went out to heal the sick and bless the newborn, Wisht went with her, wrapped against the cold in Thomasine’s old blue shawl, peeping out with her long ears like a little old woman in a hood.

Thomasine became the white witch of Widecombe after her grandmother. People said nobody who came to her with Wisht in the room ever got worse. And on stormy nights, when the Wisht Hounds were heard baying across the moor, she would wrap the hare in her blue shawl and walk out to Wistman’s Wood, and sit with her among the twisted oaks, and the hounds would pass them by.

Thomasine lived to be old. When she died, Wisht went back to Wistman’s Wood. For years afterwards, people crossing the moor at dusk said they had seen a hare sitting among the mossy boulders under the oaks, wrapped in a scrap of faded blue cloth.

The broken boss was carved again and put back in the roof of Widecombe church, three hares running in a circle. People who look up at it today count the ears and wonder.

There were always supposed to be three of them. One of them had to leave, once, to get people out of the fire.

Now Wisht walks again.

What she can do for you

Wisht is a gentle, clever and very old familiar. She is good for:

• protection in emergencies, and finding the way out when everything is going wrong
• luck, the hare’s luck, in small things and big ones
• guidance through confusion: the right path when you are lost, literally or otherwise
• wholeness and balance, when your life feels split into pieces that will not fit together
• puzzles and clever solutions: study, problem-solving, riddles and the answer no one else sees
• connection with people far away, and safe travel over long distances
• intuition, dreams and the moon
• gentle healing, the way a white witch heals

How she came to you

Wisht is not a hare who was caught or tamed. She left the circle on purpose, once, to save a church full of people. She chose Thomasine. She chooses her keepers the same way: carefully, and for life.

Over the years

At first, Wisht is very quiet. Many keepers only notice her as a feeling of calm, or a sudden knowledge of which way to go.

As the bond grows, she starts to guide more clearly. Keepers say they find their way through problems more easily, take the side door instead of the crowded one, and get out of bad situations before they get worse. Over the years, she becomes a steady presence in the home, especially on stormy nights.

What she is like

Gentle, curious and wise, with a hare’s quick nerves and a white witch’s calm. She is shy with strangers and wonderfully affectionate with her own person. She loves wild places, old trees, the moon and evenings by the fire.

She is also braver than she looks. She sat still in the middle of a burning church until someone saw her.

How she shows herself

The smell of moss, wet granite and rain on heather. A sudden mist on a window. The soft thump of a hare’s foot in another room. Finding three of something together, over and over: three stones, three feathers, three leaves. Dreams of a wood of twisted oaks, a hare in a blue hood and three hares running in a circle. And, when you are lost, a sudden certainty about which way to go.

What to do for her

Wisht asks for very little:

• Keep a piece of blue cloth near her vessel, for Thomasine’s shawl. On cold nights, drape it over her.
• Find a picture of the three hares and keep it near her. When you need guidance, trace the circle with your finger and say her name.
• Give her a few fresh green leaves, clover, dandelion or a sprig of herbs.
• Light a candle for her on stormy nights.
• Walk among old trees when you can, and bring her a small stone or a bit of moss from the walk.

She left her place in a circle that had held for a thousand years to lead a girl out of the fire. She will lead you out 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