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after".
The Domestic Familiar also went by inheritance. Ales Hunt and her sister
Margerie Sammon of the same coven as Mother Bennet and Ursley Kemp, deposed
to having received their Familiars from their mother; Ales Hunt had two
spirits, one called Jack, the other Robbin; Margerie Sammon "hath also two
spirits like Toades, the one called Tom, and the other Robbyn; And saith
further that she and her said sister had the said spirits of their
mother".[57] Another case of inheritance, which is one of the rare instances
from the west side of England comes from Liverpool in 1667[60] "Margaret
Loy, being arraigned for a witch, confessed that she was one; and when she
was asked how long she had so been, replied, Since the death of her mother,
who died thirty years ago; and at her decease she had nothing to leave her
and this widow Bridge, that were sisters, but her two spirits; and named
them, the eldest spirit to this widow, and the other spirit to her the said
Margaret Loy." Alse Gooderidge, in Derbyshire, in 1597[61] confessed to
having received her Familiar in the same way, and there are other instances.
The inheritance of Familiars was known among the Pagan Lapps, and is
therefore an indication of the primitiveness of the custom.
Another method, also primitive, of obtaining a Domestic Familiar, was to
recite some form of words, and then to take as the Familiar the first small
animal which appeared after the recitation. When the religion was organised
the formula included the name of the Old God, or Devil as the Christian
recorders called him. Joan Waterhouse, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the
Mother Waterhouse mentioned above, wishing to injure a girl with whom she
had quarrelled, "did as she had seen her mother do, calling Sathan, which
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came to her (as she said) in the likeness of a great dog"[56] And Elizabeth
Sawyer, the witch of Edmonton,[58] said that "the first time the Devil came
to me was when I was cursing, swearing, and blaspheming". If she were
calling on the Old God the Christian recorders would naturally think her
words were blasphemy.
It is very clear, then, that the Divining and the Domestic Familiars were
entirely distinct. The Divining Familiar had to be indicated by the
Grandmaster himself, and was never one particular animal, any animal of the
class indicated by the Devil could be the Familiar for the time being; it
did not usually belong to the witch, and it was used for foretelling the
future, generally to forecast the result of an illness. The Domestic
Familiar, on the other hand, could be presented by the Devil or by another
witch, it could be inherited, it could be bought and sold, or it could come
of its own accord, after the performance of some ritual action or the
recitation of ritual words. It was always a small creature, which could be
carried in the pocket or kept in the house in a box or pot, it was the
absolute property of the owner, it had to be ritually fed, it was never used
except for working magic and then only for carrying out a curse.
The Domestic Familiar came into such prominence during the trials of the
Essex witches in 1645-6, owing to the sensational records of the two
witch-finders, Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, that it has ever since been
regarded, though erroneously, as an essential part of the outfit of a witch.
The Broom. In connection with the rites, more particularly with the
processional dance, the broom plays a large part. To the modern reader the
witch and her broom are so closely connected as to be almost one and the
same. Modern pictures of witches show them flying through the air seated
astride a broom, which is not the usual household implement but a besom of
birch-twigs or of heather such as is now used only by gardeners. In the
nursery rhyme of the Old Woman tossed up in a Basket, she does not ride on
the broom, she carries it in her hand.
The connection in the popular mind between a won-tan and a broom probably
took its rise in very early times, the explanation being that the broom is
essentially an indoor implement, belonging therefore to the woman; the
equivalent implement for a man is the pitchfork, which is for outdoor work
only. This is the reason why, in medieval representations of witch-dances,
the women or witches often hold brooms, while the men or devils carry
pitchforks. The broom being so definitely a feminine tool came to be
regarded as the symbol of a woman. Until within very recent times
cottage-women in Surrey, when going out and leaving the house empty, put a
broom up the chimney so that it was visible from the outside, in order to
indicate to the neighbours that the woman of the house was from home. In
other parts of England until the last century, a broom standing outside a
door showed that the wife was absent and the husband at liberty to entertain
his male friends. This identification of the woman and the broom is probably
the true meaning of Isobel Gowdie's[62] statement that before leaving home
to attend the Sabbath an Auldearne witch would place her broom on the bed to
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