Spirit guides
Consulting spirits – or perhaps necromancy (raising the dead) – was an ancient form of learning hidden knowledge, and a dangerous one. The perils were famously explored in Christopher Marlowe’s late sixteenth-century play Dr Faustus, in which Faust’s hunger for magical prowess leads him into the Devil’s clutches. But the lure of discovering the secrets of the universe – or finding out the prospects for the next harvest – remained powerful, and various early modern individuals left evidence about their interactions with otherworldly beings.
In the 1630s, the constables of Tudweiliog, Caernarfonshire, complained to the courts about the vagabond Harry Lloyd, who used ‘wicked and unlawful arts’ including fortune-telling, palmistry and ‘familiarity with wicked spirits in the night time’. The constables feared that this made him ‘dangerous to the inferior sort of people’. Lloyd acknowledged that he met fairies and other spirits every Tuesday and Thursday nights, but claimed that he was only trying to make his neighbours rich.1Stuart Clark and P. T. J. Morgan, ‘Religion and Magic in Elizabethan Wales: Robert Holland’s Dialogue on Witchcraft’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27:1 (1976), 31-46, at p. 43. The astrologer Elias Ashmole (1617-92) described how to summon a fairy as a servant. First the practitioner should soak a crystal in the blood of a white hen and wash it in holy water, then strip three hazel sticks and write the fairy’s name on each stick. They should bury these items under a hill, then dig them up and call the fairy when the planets were in the right alignment.2K. M. Briggs, ‘Some Seventeenth-Century Books of Magic’, Folklore 64:4 (1953), 445-62, at p. 458.
An 1806 engraving showing John Dee’s associate Edward Kelley performing necromancy.3Ames of Bristol, ‘Edw[ar]d Kelly, a Magician: In the Act of Invoking the Spirit of a Deceased Person’, in Ebenezer Sibley, A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences, part 4 (London, 1791), pp. 1106-7, via Wikimedia Commons.
Detail from the frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches (1647), depicting witches with their familiars.4 Wikimedia Commons.
Interrogated about the source of their powers, some accused witches described dealings with otherworldly spirits. In England, these might take the form of familiars – spirits who typically appeared as animals and performed services, sometimes in return for sips of the accused witch’s blood. In Scotland, familiars were uncommon, but various healers and diviners described being taught by ghosts or fairies. Alison Pearson from Fife, who was tried for witchcraft in 1588, had a spirit guide called William Simpson, seemingly a ghostly relative. She described him as ‘a great scholar and doctor of medicine’ who would ‘teach her all things’.5Robert Pitcairn (ed.), Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1833), vol. 1, pt. II, pp. 162-3; see esp. Julian Goodare, ‘Emotional Relationships with Spirit-Guides in Early Modern Scotland’, in Julian Goodare and Martha McGill (eds), The Supernatural in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester, 2020), pp. 39-54. She also knew the Fairy Queen and others from the fairy kingdom. Sometimes relationships with spirit guides were friendly, or even sexual, but spirits were typically capricious and might also be dominating or frightening. In the eyes of the authorities, these spirit guides were emanations of the Devil, and most confessions led to execution.
Below is a retelling of the story of one man’s ill-advised experiments in spirit conjuration.6See Jonathan Barry, Raising Spirits: How a Conjuror’s Tale Was Transmitted across the Enlightenment (London, 2013).
A seventeenth-century seer from the island of Colonsay describes her method for foretelling future events.7Robert Kirk, ‘Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth and his “A Short Treatise of the Scotish-Irish Charms and Spells”’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), The Occult Laboratory: Magic, Science, and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2001), p. 88; we have modernised spelling and punctuation.
Being asked who gave her such sights and warnings, she said that as soon as she set three crosses of straw upon the palm of her hand, a great ugly beast sprang out of the earth near her and flew in the air. If what she enquired had success according to her wish, the beast would descend calmly and lick up the crosses. If it would not succeed, the beast would furiously thrust her and the crosses over on the ground, and so vanish to his place.
In her 1576 trial, accused witch Bessie Dunlop from Ayrshire recounts how she prevented a marriage on the advice of Thom Reid, her ghostly spirit advisor.9Robert Pitcairn (ed.), Criminal Trials in Scotland, from A.D. 1488 to A.D. 1624 (Edinburgh, 1833), vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 56.
[Thom Reid] sent her … to William Blair of the Strand, and his eldest daughter, who was contracted and shortly to be married … and declare unto them, “That if she married that man, she should either die a shameful death, slay herself, cast herself down over a crag, or go reidwod [mad];” whereby the said marriage was stayed [halted] and the laird foresaid married her youngest sister.
