relied upon the human mind’s capacity for engaging with reality through poetic metaphor – making it both a philosophy and a psychological phenomenon. The Sworn Book gives detailed instructions for circle rituals to invoke the help of spirits and describes the various spirits and their areas of expertise – accounts that are often eerie and disturbing:
They have antlers like deer, claws like griffins. They bellow like mad bulls. […]
Their bodies are […] huge and terrifying […] with talons in the manner of dragons, and their heads have five faces; one is of a toad, another of a lion, the third of a serpent, the fourth of a dead man lamenting and grieving, the fifth of a man beyond comprehension.33
The spirits who appeared to John Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelley, usually took human form, but not always:
Now he is become like a great wheel of fire. […] He thrust out his hands on the sudden, and so became like a wheel full of men’s eyes. […] Now there is a great eagle, which is come, and standeth upon it. […] She hath two monstrous eyes: one like fire red; her right eye as big as my fist, and the left eye, is crystal like.34
As one of the spirits, Galvah, herself explained, ‘Angels […] neither are man nor woman. […] I am a beam of that wisdom which is the end of man’s excellency.’35 Significantly, The Lenkiewicz Manuscript includes incantations for making exactly this kind of contact with spirits among its love spells and descriptions of magic stones:
I bind thee thou sprite N [name], by these three words + tetragrammaton + anatemate + anatematevethe + and by all that belongeth to these three words. Also I conjure, charge, adjure and bind thee, N, that thou come and appear in this stone of crystal and give me a true answer of all things that I shall ask thee of.36
The Dorset magical practitioner John Walsh was arrested after it was discovered that he had a ‘book of circles’. He admitted that he used one of the rituals ‘to raise [his] familiar spirit […] [who] would sometimes come unto him like a grey blackish culver [pigeon], and sometimes like a brended [speckled brown] dog, and sometimes like a man in all proportions, saving that he had cloven feet’. John would then ask the spirit ‘for anything stolen, who did it, and where the thing stolen was left’.37 However, when John wanted to know whether one of his patients was the victim of a curse, he consulted a different kind of spirit, which might seem more obviously folkloric in origin – fairies. But these, too, were complex and dangerous beings. John met them at ancient burial mounds, and says, ‘There be three kinds of Fairies, white, green, and black. […] The black Fairies be the worst.’38 The young Cornish healer Ann Jefferies was given her miraculous powers by the fairies, but only after they had made her so ill that ‘the long continuance of her distemper […] almost perfectly moped her, so that she became even as a changeling’.39
In his book Daemonologie, King James I writes:
Sundry witches have gone to death with that confession, that they have been transported with the Fairy to such a hill, which opening, they went in, and there saw a fair Queen, who […] gave them a stone that had sundry virtues, which at sundry times hath been produced in judgement.40
Significantly, though, he also describes fairies as ‘spirits, which by the Gentiles [were] called Diana and her wandering court’.41 In her analysis of the Isobel Gowdie witchcraft case, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Emma Wilby argues that Isobel consciously saw herself as allied with a Queen of Elfland who was an evolution of a pre-Christian Nature Goddess.42 The idea that the spirits encountered by magical practitioners had their roots in ancient mythology is supported by magical texts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A ‘Prayer to Selene’, the Greek Moon Goddess, includes the lines:
Three-headed, you’re Persephone, Megaira,
Allekto […] who shake your locks
Of fearful serpents on your brow, who sound
The roar of bulls out from your mouths, whose womb
Is decked out with the scales of creeping things […]
Bull-headed, you have the eyes of bulls, the voice
Of dogs.43
Another spell, addressed to the ‘Ruler of Tartaros’, describes her as ‘dog-shaped, spinner of Fate […] dragoness, lion, she-wolf’; and it goes on:
I’ll speak the signs to you:
Bronze sandal of her who rules Tartaros,
Her fillet, key, wand, iron wheel, black dog.44
Thus, these spells are not only significantly similar to the descriptions of spirits in The Sworn Book but are also evocative of the black dog who haunted Margaret Byrom, John Starkie and the other children in the Starkie household. However, one of the most striking accounts of a Black Dog encounter occurs in the statements taken by Nicholas Starkie’s uncle Roger Nowell from Alizon Device, a teenage member of the family of magical practitioners at the centre of the 1612 Pendle witchcraft case. Alizon’s description of her first encounter with the spirit vividly establishes the eerie, sexually charged connection that is forged between them:
There appeared unto her a thing like unto a Black Dog: speaking unto her […] and desiring her to give him her soul, and he would give her power to do anything she would: whereupon [she] being therewithal enticed, and setting her down; the said Black Dog did with his mouth […] suck at her breast, a little below the paps [breasts], which place did remain blue half a year next after.45
Crucial to the link is the spiritual essence that the Dog draws out of Alizon, but which then gives her access to his magical power.46 Alizon’s reckless pride in her relationship with a spirit is echoed in a dangerous admission Edmund made at his trial. Finding himself suddenly accused by Nicholas of using ‘invocations and conjurations of evil and wicked spirits’,
Edmund stiffly denied it, and stood out against him. And he told him to his face that he should not hang him, let him do what he could. For the Devil had promised him
