Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic is a study by historian Emma Wilby of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early modern Britain. First published by Sussex Academic Press in 2005, the book makes the case that beliefs regarding familiar spirits found among magical practitioners – both benevolent cunning folk and malevolent witches – reflected evidence for a general folk belief that stemmed from a pre-Christian visionary tradition.
Wilby uses witch-trial records as evidence to advance the theory, developed by Carlo Ginzburg, Éva Pócs, and Gábor Klaniczay, that a substratum of shamanistic beliefs across Europe influenced Early Modern beliefs about magic and witchcraft. Divided into three parts, Wilby argues that (1) familiar spirits were a concept widely found among ordinary magical practitioners rather than being an invention of demonologists conducting witch trials; (2) these familiar spirits were not simply popular folklore, but reflected the existence of a living visionary tradition with shamanistic origins; and (3) such aspects of Britain's spiritual heritage significantly contributed to the nation's subsequent history.
Scholarly reactions to the book were mixed, although the work was broadly recognized as an important contribution to studies of witchcraft. Wilby later expanded this theory by examining the case of the accused witch Isobel Gowdie, in her 2010 book The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft, and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland.
Background
Historical research Prior to Wilby's work, the English historian Owen Davies had researched the role of the cunning folk in Early Modern Britain, culminating in the publication of his 2003 book Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History.Davies 2003. Davies had rejected the idea that there had been any shamanistic traditions among the cunning folk of Britain, and furthermore argued that the Early Modern cunning tradition should not be seen as being a continuation of a pre-Christian practice, relating that "to emphasise their pagan roots is about as meaningful or meaningless as pointing out the pagan origins of early modern potting."Davies 2003. pp. 177–186.
From the 1930s onward, various historians studying the witch trials on continental Europe had begun arguing that in some areas, the image of the witch had been influenced by underlying local folklore about visionary journeys.
Poc's book on Hungarian witchcraft and magic appeared in her native language in 1997, before being published in an English translation in 1999 as Between the Living and the Dead.
Wilby and her research At the time of writing, Wilby had done some part-time teaching at Exeter University, although was essentially performing the research in her capacity as an independent scholar. Wilby's unpublished work came to the attention of the historian Ronald Hutton of Bristol University, a specialist in Early Modern Britain, who would later note that he "gave it all the help that I could, in making suggestions for improvement to the manuscript, encouraging a publisher, and writing an endorsement", believing that Wilby had "repaid my faith richly with the result."Hutton 2010. p. 250.
Synopsis Wilby opens her book with a transcript from the trial of the cunning woman Bessie Dunlop, which took place in Edinburgh in 1576, in the midst of the Early Modern witch trials. Dunlop had been accused of "Sorcery, Witchcraft and Incantation, with Invocation of spirits of the devil", found guilty, and executed through strangulation.Wilby 2005. pp. viii–xv.
Part One The first part of Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits is devoted to a historical examination of the professional cunning folk and accused witches of Early Modern Britain, with a particular focus on the beliefs in familiar spirits that they held to; according to Wilby, this serves the purpose of "illustrat[ing] in some detail, the event-pattern, emotional dynamics, and social context of the alleged familiar-encounter, and secondly to illustrate how encounter-narratives were not merely élite fictions, that is, the result of learned prosecutors superimposing their demonological preconceptions onto cunning folk and witches, but were rooted in folk belief and came, in significant part, from the magical practitioners themselves."Wilby 2005. pp. 6–7. After laying out the basis of her argument in the book's introduction,Wilby 2005. pp. 3–7. Wilby starts by giving a context for the world of Early Modern Britain, which was for the common people an unceasingly poor and traumatic place, filled with folk beliefs about magic, religion, animism, and fairies of both Christian and pre-Christian origin.Wilby 2005. pp. 8–25.
For the sake of discussion, she simplifies the various contemporary terms for folk magic practitioners into two types: cunning folk, who generally perform beneficial magic, and witches, who generally perform harmful magic, also known as maleficium, and she explains the types of services each typically provided, often for others in exchange for goods or services.Wilby 2005. pp. 26–45. Wilby also condenses the various types of spirits that assist magic practitioners into two categories: familiar spirits for cunning folk and demon familiars for witches.Wilby 2005. pp. 46–58. Drawing from the many trial records of those accused of witchcraft during this period, she illustrates the ways that magic practitioners first meet their familiars,Wilby 2005. pp. 59–76. the types of working relationships they might have,Wilby 2005. pp. 77–91. the demands made by familiars (such as the renunciation of Christianity),Wilby 2005. pp. 92–111. and the morally ambiguous space that cunning folk and witches occupied in society.Wilby 2005. pp. 112–120.
Part Two The second part of the book proceeds to lay out the case that the encounters with familiar spirits recorded by those investigating cunning folk and alleged witches did not simply reflect "accumulations of folk belief" but that instead they offer real "descriptions of visionary experiences - actual psychic events which occurred in historical time and geographical space" which "could be interpreted as evidence that popular shamanistic visionary traditions, of pre-Christian origin, survived in many parts of Britain during the early modern period."Wilby 2005. p. 7. Wilby turns to anthropological methods to make this point: since little to no evidence of pre-Christian beliefs in Britain exist, she looks at other indigenous shamanic traditions—namely Siberian and Native American, modeled after the anthropological work of Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas.Wilby 2005. pp. 123–127. She details the ways in which shamans of these cultures meet their spirit guides, form a working relationship together, invoke them, and build intimate, fulfilling relationships together that can last for decades, all while drawing parallels to the customs of Early Modern British cunning folk and witches that she laid out in part one.Wilby 2005. pp. 128–145. She points out that in addition to similarities in practicies, there are also similarities in beliefs: both believe in a spirit world that exists separately from our own and that magic practitioners can travel there, but that they must do so carefully because if a human's soul gets trapped there, their body will die.Wilby 2005. pp. 146–159.
Part Three The third and final part of Wilby's study deals with what she describes as "the possible spiritual significance of these traditions," which includes the argument that these encounters with familiars were actually mystical experiences. She reviews the ways that scholars have looked at the ontology of familiar encounters, which often include the belief that they were partly or wholly fiction, as opposed to the contemporary writings that treated them as real events. Specifically, she analyzes the nature of European Witches' Sabbaths, whether they were "empiracally real events" or "illusory" ones; both contemporary writers and present day scholars have puzzled over this question, and Carlo Ginzburg suggested a new option in 1989: that these events were "evidence of the survival of ritual trance experiences derived from pre-Christian Eurasian shamanism".Wilby 2005. pp. 165–168. Wilby argues that the familiars themselves might have been the result of the same phenomenon. Even though scholars thus far had not explored that possibility because trial transcripts did not support this claim, she points out that shamans of all cultures typically have difficulty talking about their experiences. She also points out direct evidence of trance-inducing techniques used in witches' sabbaths and indirect evidence of it used in invoking familiars.Wilby 2005. pp. 168–184.
Wilby notes the various ways that scholars have "pathologized" these familiar encounters by describing them as fantasies and mental illnesses, not unlike the way scholars once analyzed shamanistic beliefs. Scholars now believe that shamans provide a benefit to their society, and even describe their experiences as mystical. Ken Wilber theorized that there are ten "levels of consciousness", of which the top four can be described as "transcendent". Roger Walsh built on this work by showing that shaman's visionary experiences fit into the eighth level, called the "subtle" level, also citing the work of Carl Jung that describes them as "real" experiences.Wilby 2005. pp. 185–198. Learned magicians of the period who practiced "high magic" have been recognized as having mystical experiences, so Wilby provides some reasons that scholars may have treated common magic practitioners differently: these practitioners were illiterate and therefore never recorded their experiences, they were intimidated by crowded courtrooms during witch trials, they sometimes used methods of deception that our culture would term quackery, they didn't conform to today's preconceptions of mysticism that we inherited from Christianity, and there was a large gulf between the way they experienced the world versus scholars of today—the last point being elucidated by Ananda Coomaraswamy's claim that our society suffers from "imaginal illiteracy" which prevents our mind from forming images in the same way as illiterate peoples.Wilby 2005. pp. 199–217.
Wilby draws parallels between the cunning folk and witches to Christian contemplatives whose status as mystics is taken as historical fact, including Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton, Teresa of Ávila, Bridget of Sweden, Hadewijch, and Christina Ebner.Wilby 2005. pp. 218–242. She discusses research that claims mystic experiences are innate to the human condition, and that a percentage of people are naturally predisposed to experience them, but explains that everyday conditions in Early Modern Britain which are much less present in our society today—malnutrition, grief, darkness, hallucinogenic poisoning, and animist beliefs—are many of the same conditions that tend to induce mystical experiences, and are often practiced as part of shamanistic traditions. Wilby concludes by saying that although these folk magic beliefs and practices have mostly been lost to history, they contain an essential human truth evidenced by the recent resurgence of magical practices, such as neo-paganism.Wilby 2005. pp. 243–257.
Reviews and reception
Academic reviews