Familiars are supernatural beings whose job it is to help witches and sorcerers. When stories of witches were told throughout England in the 1500s and 1600s, everyone knew that every witch had a small helper animal.
This animal was also used for spying or intimidating unwanted people. Moreover, these were not ordinary animals, but some demonic entities in animal guise.
For medieval European witches, standard familiars were black cats, black dogs, hedgehogs, hares, owls, and mice. In order to summon a familiar for help, the witch must have had a serious reason, for example, revenge on a specific person.
For intimidation on behalf of a witch, the appearance of a familiar as a cat or dog was very important. The villagers are unlikely to pay much attention to these animals. The familiar approached the house of the right person, hid somewhere under it and overheard all the conversations.
On very rare occasions, a familiar was not used in the form of an animal, but in the form of a human. It was a much more complex sorcery and more risky. The human familiar was easily identifiable by its very pale skin, black clothing, and malignant behavior.
In return for their help, familiars demanded blood, most often an animal. When they received this animal, they pounced on it, tore it apart and eagerly drank its blood. On other occasions, it was said that familiars would receive blood by sucking it from the witch's nipple.
Most of the witches who were persecuted in the Middle Ages were really just lonely elderly women who had a pet as their only friend. However, this is not a reason to believe that there were no real witches there and that familiars are also fiction.
Recall that the most popular familiars of English witches were black cats and black dogs, and the latter apparently has some connection with demonic black dogs, which are also mainly found only in England.
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According to one version, these demonic dogs are only one of the forms of witch familiars, and if these dogs are still seen (and they are seen), then witches still live among the British.
And now let's still tell the very story about the witch Isabelle, whose familiar she herself was, but in the form of a hare.
Isabelle Goudy was a beautiful young woman who lived in the Scottish village of Aldern in the 17th century AD. She was an ordinary peasant woman, illiterate and of low social status.
When the persecution of witches began, Isabelle was also captured and she suddenly not only confessed everything, but began to tell very unusual things. At the same time, as far as historians know, they did not manage to apply any of the usual torture or "tests for witchcraft" in such cases. She herself eagerly began to talk about herself.
According to Isabelle, she met with the Scottish fairy queen Elfheim and these meetings took place in the caves under the hill on which the village stands. It was the Fairy Queen who taught Isabelle the secret of shape change, that is, transformation into various animals.
Isabelle was so talkative that she even recited the very spell that made her turn into a hare. It sounded like "I will go to the hare with the help of great sorrow and drought and with the name of the Devil, and then I will go home." To become human back, she had to say: "Hare, hare, God does not care about you, I am now in the form of a hare, but now I will become in the form of a woman."
In total, Goudy made four confessions in six weeks, the first dated April 13, 1662. She also said that she had a meeting with the Devil one night and that he put a mark on her shoulder, and then sucked blood from her shoulder.
Then she had other meetings with him, during which they had sex. Moreover, she described the Devil as "very cold".
Goudi went on to say that other witches from her coven (community) also knew how to transform into different animals, cats or hares. And all together they were engaged in the usual things for witches - damage to crops, black magic, theft of corpses from the grave (the corpse of a child), and so on.
During one of the meetings with the Devil, he handed out special small arrows to all the witches and ordered them to be released into people. The person who was hit by such an arrow soon died.
Isabelle Goudi was married, but her husband did not know anything about her unusual things, at night, when the witch went to the Sabbath, she left a special doll in her bed instead of herself and her husband did not see a substitution.
Goudy's further stories were about how she, like a hare, ran from a pack of dogs. Gowdy said that although dogs could not harm the werewolf, they could leave scratches or bite marks that would remain on the witch's body after she turned into a human.
It is not known what became of Isabelle Goudy after such stories, although most likely she was burned or hanged, like all ordinary witches of those times. By the way, after Goudi's testimony, about 40 people, mostly women, were detained in the village. What happened to them is also unknown.
Now the legends of Isabelle Goudy are mainly used in performances or in the writings of folklorists. Modern historians believe that Isabelle was just a lady with a very large imagination, and possibly a survivor of a traumatic rape. It is the latter that can explain her very detailed and unpleasant words describing the sexual relationship between her and the Devil.
