75 Sentences With "familiar spirits" | Random Sentence Generator

As you go along, you find people with familiar spirits that are easy to work with.

First up: managing life with a phone, these hard and greasy familiar spirits that give and take so much in the lives and brains of tenderhearted sweeties like you and me.

In "Familiar Spirits" (2001), the novelist Alison Lurie, a friend of both men, amplified Jackson's occasional ambivalence toward the project into outright censure of Merrill, and of the work's enthusiasts: It is no wonder that David felt both exhaustion and regret.

Mulholland had criticized the claims of parapsychology and exposed the tricks of fraudulent spiritualist mediums. His book Beware Familiar Spirits (1938) revealed many of these tricks.The New Books. Review of Beware Familiar Spirits.

Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. p. 156. Leslie Shepard. (1991). Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology.

Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. pp. 111-112. Hyman, Ray. (1989).

The first part of Wilby's argument in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits is that the accounts of encounters with familiar spirits and journeys to other worlds were not invented by those elite figures who oversaw the witch trials, but that they were actually provided by ordinary folk themselves.

Both women admitted to experiencing visions of devils and that their familiar spirits visited them and sucked at their bodies.

A biography is included in the 1938 book Beware Familiar Spirits by the American magician John Mulholland (reprinted in 1979).

373 He was friends with another debunker of spiritualism the magician John Mulholland.Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. p. 126.

There were also cases of wasps and butterflies, as well as pigs, sheep, and horses. Familiar spirits were usually kept in pots or baskets lined with sheep's wool and fed a variety of things including, milk, bread, meat, and blood. Familiar spirits usually had names and "were often given down-to-earth, and frequently affectionate, nicknames."Wilby 2005, p. 63.

Frontispiece from the witch hunter Matthew Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches (1647), showing witches identifying their familiar spirits. Using her studies into the role of witchcraft and magic in Britain during the Early Modern period as a starting point, the historian Emma Wilby examined the relationship that familiar spirits allegedly had with the witches and cunning-folk in this period.

Among those accused witches and cunning-folk who described their familiar spirits, there were commonly certain unifying features. The historian Emma Wilby noted how the accounts of such familiars were striking for their "ordinariness" and "naturalism", despite the fact that they were dealing with supernatural entities.Wilby 2005, p. 62. Familiar spirits were most commonly small animals, such as cats, rats, dogs, ferrets, birds, frogs, toads, and hares.

Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. p. 142. In 1930, Stanisława was discredited at the Institut Métapsychique by Eugéne Osty as she was caught cheating.

Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. pp. 111-112. In 1879, Hermann Ulrici brought Zollner's experiments to the attention of scientists in Germany by describing them in an academic journal.

If it is a small city go to the cemetery and look > at the tombstones. It has to be done carefully but it is very > easy.Mulholland, John (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits.

Historian Emma Wilby identified recurring motifs in various European folk tales and fairy tales that she believed displayed a belief in familiar spirits. She noted that in such tales as Rumpelstiltskin, Puss-in-Boots and the Frog Prince, the protagonist is approached by a supernatural being when they are in need of aid, something that she connected to the appearance of familiar spirits in the Early Modern accounts of them.Wilby 2005, p. 59. She believed there to be a direct connection between the belief in and accounts of familiar spirits with these folk tales because "These fairy stories and myths originate from the same reservoir of folk belief as the descriptions of familiar-encounters given by cunning-folk and witches".

Mulholland, John . (1938). Beware > Familiar Spirits. Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 78. According to the magician Harry Houdini, Ira had confessed to him that he and his brother had faked their "spirit" phenomena.

Samuel Spencer Baldwin (January 21, 1848 – March 13, 1924), or Samri Baldwin, most well known as "The White Mahatma" was an American magician.Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. pp. 197-200.

Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. p. 138 He was supervising editor of the various magazines and newspapers published by Bernarr Macfadden, from 1921 to 1941. Macfadden urged him to drop the "Charles" from his name.

Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic is a study of the beliefs regarding witchcraft and magic in Early Modern Britain written by the British historian Emma Wilby. First published by Sussex Academic Press in 2003, the book presented Wilby's theory that the beliefs regarding familiar spirits found among magical practitioners - both benevolent cunning folk and malevolent witches - reflected evidence for a general folk belief in these beings, which stemmed from a pre-Christian visionary tradition. Building on the work of earlier historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Éva Pócs and Gabór Klaniczay, all of whom argued that Early Modern beliefs about magic and witchcraft were influenced by a substratum of shamanistic beliefs found in pockets across Europe, in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits, Wilby focuses in on Britain, using the recorded witch trial texts as evidence to back up this theory. The book is divided into three parts, each of which expand on a different area of Wilby's argument; the first details Wilby's argument that familiar spirits were a concept widely found among ordinary magical practitioners rather than being an invention of demonologists conducting witch trials.

He claimed to possess the ability of x-ray vision. He drew criticism from magicians of the period who could replicate his billet reading feats by trick methods.Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. pp. 207-210.

Beware Familiar Spirits. Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 127. Researchers have suspected that Palladino's first husband, a travelling conjuror, taught her séance tricks. The magician Milbourne Christopher demonstrated Palladino's fraudulent techniques in his stage performances and on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show".

Some cunning folk were said to employ supernatural entities known as familiar spirits to aid them in their practice of magic. These spirits, which were also believed to work for witches as well, are referenced in many of the witch trial records from the Early Modern period. After examining these accounts, historian Emma Wilby noted how in the descriptions given of familiar spirits by both cunning folk and those accused of witchcraft, there was "a pervading sense of naturalism", with most familiars resembling "relatively ordinary humans or animals with only slight, if any, visual anomalies."Wilby 2005. p. 62.

Wilby 2005. p. 85. Historian Ronald Hutton remarked that "It is quite possible that pre-Christian mythology lies behind this tradition" of a belief in familiar spirits. Such an idea was supported by Wilby, who compared the accounts of familiar spirits in Britain with anthropological and ethnographic accounts of helper spirits given by shamans in both Siberia and North America. Noting a wide range of similarities between the two, she came to the conclusion that British belief in familiars must have been a surviving remnant of earlier animistic and shamanic beliefs in the pre- Christian religions of the island.Wilby 2005.

Fifty Years of Psychical Research. Kessinger Reprint Edition. p. 35 Price who had spent most of his life studying psychical phenomena wrote that "There is no good evidence that a spirit photograph has ever been produced"John Mulholland. (1975). Beware Familiar Spirits. p.

Retrieved June 30, 2016 The magician Fulton Oursler when writing on the subject of magic and spiritualism, used the name Samri Frikell. He made it by combining the names of Samri Baldwin and another magician, Wiljalba Frikell.Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits.

"There have been other exposures of spirit photographers, including William M. Keeler, the American, who was the subject of a long and scathing report by the late Dr. Walter Franklin Prince."Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. C. Scribner's Sons. p. 156.

John Mulholland (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. Scribner. pp. 251-260. After 1899, she spent some time in South Africa, calling herself Helena Horos of the College of Occult Sciences. Diss Debar and Jackson went to England, calling themselves "Swami Laura Horos" and "Theodore Horos".

Neonatal milk or witch's milk is milk secreted from the breasts of approximately 5% of newborn infants. It is considered a normal variation and no treatment or testing is necessary. In folklore, witch's milk was believed to be a source of nourishment for witches' familiar spirits.

Tales like that of 1 Samuel 28, reporting how Saul "hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land","those that have familiar spirits": Hebrew , or "ventriloquist, soothsayer" in the Septuagint; "wizards": Hebrew or "diviner" in the Septuagint. suggest that in practice sorcery could at least lead to exile. In the Judaean Second Temple period, Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach in the 1st century BCE is reported to have sentenced to death eighty women who had been charged with witchcraft on a single day in Ashkelon. Later the women's relatives took revenge by bringing (reportedly) false witnesses against Simeon's son and causing him to be executed in turn.

Her detailed contribution to the topic included several court cases and accounts from Europe in which she finds mention of familiars. Mary Beth Norton's In the Devils Snare published in 2002, discusses the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692. She frequently references familiar spirits as she explores the trials of the Salem witches.

Yekyua or "mother animal" is a class of Yakut spirits that remain hidden until the snow melts in the Spring. Each yekyua is associated with a particular animal, and they act as familiar spirits to protect the Yakut shaman. They are dangerous and powerful.Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion By Arthur C. Lehmann, James E. Myers p.

Animals put on trial were almost invariably either domesticated ones (most often pigs, but also bulls, horses, and cows) or pests such as rats and weevils. Creatures that were suspected of being familiar spirits or complicit in acts of bestiality were also subjected to judicial punishment, such as burning at the stake, though few, if any, ever faced trial.

Although Hope produced several images of spirits, none of his materials contained the Imperial Dry Plate Co. Ltd logo, or the marks that Price had put on Hope's original equipment, showing that he had exchanged prepared materials containing fake spirit images for the provided materials.Mulholland, John. (1938). Beware Familiar Spirits. Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 151-157.

An honorary fellow in history at the University of Exeter, England, she has published three books examining witchcraft and the cunning folk of this period. In the first two, she has identified what she considers to be shamanic elements within the popular beliefs that were held in this place and time, which she believes influenced magical thought and the concept of the witch. In this manner, she has continued with the research and theories of such continental European historians as Carlo Ginzburg and Eva Pocs. Wilby's first published academic text, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005), was the first major examination of the role that familiar spirits played in Britain during the Early Modern period, and compared similarities between the recorded visions and encounters with such spirits, with shamanism in tribal societies.

Miller originally called the play Those Familiar Spirits before renaming it as The Crucible. The word "crucible" is defined as a severe test or trial; alternately, a container in which metals or other substances are subjected to high temperatures. The characters whose moral standards prevail in the face of death, such as John Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, symbolically refuse to sacrifice their principles or to falsely confess.

The English court cases reflect a strong relationship between State's accusations of witchcraft against those who practiced ancient indigenous traditions, including the familiar animal or spirit. In some cases familiars replace children in the favour of their mothers. (See witchcraft and children.) In colonial America animal familiars can be seen in the witch hunts that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Familiar spirits often appear in the visions of the afflicted girls.

These traits are used on a wide variety of characters, either making them a nuisance to the story, a misunderstood hero, or a devious villain. In Asian folklore, foxes are depicted as familiar spirits possessing magic powers. Similar to in Western folklore, foxes are portrayed as mischievous, usually tricking other people, with the ability to disguise as an attractive female human. However, there are other depictions of foxes as mystical, sacred creatures that can either bring wonder or ruin.

The kalamat preside over Sama-Bajau community events along with mediums known as igal jinn. The kalamat and the igal jinn are said to be "spirit-bearers" and are believed to be hosts of familiar spirits. It is not, however, regarded as a spirit possession, since the igal jinn never lose control of their bodies. Instead, the igal jinn are believed to have acquired their familiar spirit (jinn) after surviving a serious or near-fatal illness.

Each machi has a rehue outside her/his house which she/he climbs in the course of certain ceremonies. This is believed to contain power transmitted to it by Ngenechen, (the supreme being in Mapuche religion) and the machi's attendant pillan (supernatural beings bearing some similarity to the familiar spirits of Early Modern European witchcraft). Faron, L.C.,1964 'Shamanism and Sorcery among the Mapuche of Chile' in R.A. Manners ed. Process and Pattern in Culture pub.

At Lincoln, Margaret accused her mother of witchcraft, while Phillipa admitted to witchcraft on behalf of herself, Margaret and Joan. The sisters said they had entered into communion with familiar spirits that had assisted them with their schemes. The mother's familiar was a cat named Rutterkin. The women admitted that they stole the glove of Lord Ros and gave it to their mother, who had dipped it in boiling water, stroked it along Rutterkin's back, and pricked it.

For instance, folklorist Eric Maple noted that in the English region of East Anglia during the latter nineteenth century, it was commonly thought that familiar spirits, which were often referred to as "imps" in that region, took the form of white mice.Maple 1960. There were however some exceptions to these naturalistic familiars, for instance a woman in Cambridgeshire was believed to have a familiar spirit that was a cross between a frog and a rat.Hutton 1999. p. 102.

The Portuguese translation renders the word as "gênio" in reference to the familiar spirits in Greco-Roman mythology, although Brazilian new versions use "dimon" (older editions used "dæmon"). The Hungarian edition uses "daimón". In the Hebrew edition, the term is translated phonetically, apart from the mock- bible excerpts quoted in chapter 21 of Northern Lights; there, the word used for dæmon is "er'el", meaning angel, resembling the biblical Hebrew word for foreign gods - "elil" (lit. small deity).

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.

A photograph of the medium Linda Gazzera with a doll portrayed as ectoplasm Helen Duncan with supposed ectoplasm, analysed by Harry Price to be made of cheesecloth and a rubber glove Ectoplasm on many occasions has been proven to be fraudulent. Many mediums had used methods of swallowing and regurgitating cheesecloth, textile products smoothed with potato starch and in other cases the ectoplasm was made from paper, cloth and egg white or butter muslin.John Mulholland. (1975). Beware Familiar Spirits. Scribner. p. 142.

The Senoi people respect the elders and may even elect some of them as elders, but these leaders have no absolute power. The taboo on interfering in individual autonomy does not give the elders any authority to interfere in a person's private life, to prevent him or her from ignoring decisions or leaving. Verbal abilities, not wealth or generosity, are the main prerequisites for leadership. Spiritual wisdom obtained through contact with familiar spirits in dreams are regarded as very important.

Most data regarding familiars comes from the transcripts of English and Scottish witch trials held during the 16th–17th centuries. The court system that labeled and tried witches was known as the Essex. The Essex trial of Agnes Sampson of Nether Keith, East Lothian in Scotland in 1590, presents prosecution testimony regarding a divinatory familiar. This case is fundamentally political, trying Sampson for high treason, and accusing Sampson for employing witchcraft against King James VI. The prosecution asserts Sampson called familiar spirits and resolved her doubtful matter.

Familiar Spirits is a memoir published in 2000 by American writer Alison Lurie. In it, she recounts a friendship with poet James Merrill and his life partner David Jackson which began in the 1950s. Merrill and Jackson were both wealthy, well-educated men, who lived an openly gay life decades before that was common. Together, the two men spent many years gathering Ouija board messages during séances, a fact of which Lurie was made aware of early on, and about which she never lost her early skepticism.

Other objects of reverence are spirits known as umboh ("ancestor", also variously spelled omboh, m'boh, mbo', etc.). Traditionally, the umboh referred more specifically to ancestral spirits, different from the saitan (nature spirits) and the jinn (familiar spirits); some literature refers to all of them as umboh. These include Umboh Baliyu (the spirits of wind and storms), and Umboh Payi or Umboh Gandum (the spirits of the first rice harvest). They include totemic spirits of animals and plants, including Umboh Summut (totem of ants) and Umboh Kamun (totem of mantis shrimp).

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.

Almost all witchcraft prosecutions took place in secular courts under the provisions of the 1563 Act. In 1649 the religiously radical Covenanter regime passed a new witchcraft act that ratified the existing act and extended it to deal with consulters of "Devils and familiar spirits", who would now be punished with death. There were three main types of court in which accused witches could be tried. First was the Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, which took cases from all over Scotland, with a heavy bias to the local region.

Numbers then remained generally constant until the 1960s when it grew rapidly again, and passing 2,500 by 1981 and 3,436 in 2001. A local man named Jabez Few, who died in the 1920s, was regarded by the townspeople of Willingham as a witch. They claimed that the white mice he kept were his familiar spirits, and that they could not be got rid of after his death until they were held over running water. In 1940 a German spy parachuted into Willingham, was eventually captured and turned into a double agent.

In South African English, a tagati is a wizard, witch, or a spiteful person who operates in secret to harm others or who uses poisons and familiar spirits to carry out harmful deeds. The term is first recorded in 1836; it derives from the Zulu word umthakathi, being someone who mixes medicine. The word umthakathi (plural abathakathi) itself comes from two Zulu words thaka (mix) and muthi (medicine). The term has gradually come to be used to refer only to negative, harmful uses of medicines derived from plants, animals and minerals.

A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill's play, "The Bait." They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut; Athens, Greece; and Key West, Florida. "It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew," wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, Familiar Spirits (2001).

A contemporary sketch of three other women accused: Anne Baker, Joan Willimot & Ellen Greene. During the examination, they revealed the names of other women who had aided them: Anne Baker of Bottesford; Joan Willimot of Goadby; and Ellen Greene of Stathern. All three women were taken for examination and revealed that they too had visions and consorted with familiar spirits. Willimott said her familiar was called Pretty and had been blown into her mouth by her former master in the form of a fairy, later reappearing in the form of a woman who asked her to give up her soul.

He is capable of powerful magic ranging from healing abilities to creating familiar spirits, as well as instantly teleporting to any location he has previously visited. He eventually develops feelings for the Demon Queen, even though she only returns them in an over-the-top fashion. :As part of the Queen's plan, he conceals his true identity and adopts the name of ' while living in a small village with The Crimson Scholar. While traveling through the Demon Realm as a peacekeeper, he dons an imposing black armor belonging to a former Demon King, addressing himself as a servant of the Queen called the '.

"Power animal" is a concept that was introduced in 1980 by Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman. While Harner took inspiration from his study of animistic beliefs in many different cultures, his concept of power animals is much like the familiar spirits of European occultism, which aid the occultist in their metaphysical work. The use of this term has been incorporated into the New Age movement, where it is often mistaken for being the same as a totem in some indigenous cultures. The concept has also entered popular culture in various forms, such as in the 1999 film (and earlier novel) Fight Club, when the narrator attends a cancer support group.

Shamans (known in Malay as dukun or bomoh) are said to be able to make use of spirits and demons for either benign or evil purposes. Although Western writings often compare this to the familiar spirits of English witchcraft, it actually corresponds more closely with the Japanese inugami and other types of shikigami, in that the spirits are hereditary and passed down through families. ;Polong A kind of bottled- imp, created by keeping the blood of a murder victim in a bottle and saying certain incantations over it for seven or fourteen days. The owner, who is treated as the polong's parent, must feed the spirit daily with blood from their neck.

The Covenanter regime passed a series of acts to enforce godliness in 1649, which made capital offences of blasphemy, the worship of false gods and for beaters and cursers of their parents. They also passed a new witchcraft act that ratified the existing act and extended it to deal with consulters of "Devils and familiar spirits", who would now be punished with death. In 1649 the commission of the General Assembly co- ordinated presbyteries in their pursuit of "fugitive witches", reminding them of the importance of hunting witches and encouraged them when obtaining commissions of justiciary to recommend the names of commissioners.J. Goodare, "Witch-hunting and the Scottish state" in J. Goodare, ed.

A late 16th-century English illustration of a witch feeding her familiars In European folklore and folk-belief of the Medieval and Early Modern periods, familiars (sometimes referred to as "familiar spirits" or "animal guides") were believed to be supernatural entities that would assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic.Wilby 2005, pp. 59-61. According to the records of the time, they would appear in numerous guises, often as an animal, but also at times as a human or humanoid figure, and were described as "clearly defined, three-dimensional… forms, vivid with colour and animated with movement and sound" by those alleging to have come into contact with them, unlike later descriptions of ghosts with their "smoky, undefined form[s]".Wilby 2005, p. 61.

In 1604, the year following James I's accession to the English throne, the Elizabethan Act was broadened by Edward Coke and others to bring the penalty of death without benefit of clergy to any one who invoked evil spirits or communed with familiar spirits. The Act's full title was An Act against Conjuration, Witchcraft and dealing with evil and wicked spirits, (1 Ja. I c. 12). It was this statute that was enforced by Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witch-Finder General. Supporters of the Act included the Earl of Northumberland, the Bishop of Lincoln, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, the Attorney General for England and Wales, the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and the Chief Justice of the King's Bench.

Flag of Yatagarasu at Kumano Hongū Taisha Kitsune of Fushimi Inari Misaki are subordinate to the high- ranking divine spirits, and when divine spirits appear in the human realm and are said to be the small-scale divine spirits that appear as omens or to serve as their familiar spirits. Misaki can be often seen as animals. The Yatagarasu that appears in Japanese mythology is one type of misaki, and when Yatagarasu guided Emperor Jimmu during Jimmu's eastern journey, this provides one example of the characteristics of misaki. Also, the kitsune within Inari Ōkami household are also one type of misaki, and like these Yatagarasu and kitsune, those that appear as heralding something important and the incarnation of gods are also considered misaki.

These fall into two broad categories: those that explain the occurrence of misfortune and are thus grounded in real events, and those that are wholly fantastic. The first category includes the powers to cause impotence, to turn milk sour, to strike people dead, to cause diseases, to raise storms, to cause infants to be stillborn, to prevent cows from giving milk, to prevent hens from laying and to blight crops. The second includes the power to fly in the air, to change form into a hare, to suckle familiar spirits from warts, to sail on a single plank and perhaps most absurd of all, to go to sea in an eggshell. Witches were often believed to fly on broomsticks or distaffs, or occasionally upon unwilling human beings, who would be called 'hag-ridden'.

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.

The second then proceeds to argue that these familiar spirits were not simply a part of popular folklore, but reflected the existence of a living visionary tradition, which was shamanistic and pre-Christian in origin. Finally, in the third part of the book, Wilby looks at the significance of this tradition for Britain's spiritual heritage. Reviews of the book published in specialist academic journals were mixed, with some scholars supporting and others rejecting Wilby's theory, although all noted the importance of such a work for witchcraft studies. Wilby meanwhile would go on to expand her theory by focusing it in on the case of the accused witch Isobel Gowdie for her second book, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2010), also published by Sussex Academic Press.

Thereby, the magician gains command of them in his own mental universe and removes their negative influence from his life. Further, these spirits must deliver a number of familiar spirits (four principal familiars, and several more associated with a set of magical word-square talismans provided in the Abramelin's Book Four). The magical goals for which the demons can be employed are typical of those found in grimoires: the practitioner is promised the ability to find buried treasure, cast love charms, the ability of magical flight, and the secret of invisibility, to list a small number of examples. Magic squares feature prominently in the instructions for carrying out these operations, as does a recipe for an anointing oil (taken from Exodus 30), popularly used by ceremonial magicians under the name "Abramelin Oil".

A painting in the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria, condemning witchcraft and traditional folk magic Throughout the early modern period in England, the English term "witch" was usually negative in meaning, unless modified in some way to distinguish it from cunning folk. Alan McFarlane writes, "There were a number of interchangeable terms for these practitioners, 'white', 'good', or 'unbinding' witches, blessers, wizards, sorcerers, however 'cunning-man' and 'wise-man' were the most frequent." In 1584, Englishman and Member of Parliament, Reginald Scot wrote, "At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, 'she is a witch' or 'she is a wise woman'". Folk magicians throughout Europe were often viewed ambivalently by communities, and were considered as capable of harming as of healing,Wilby, Emma (2006) Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. pp. 51–4.

Through the 1640s the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and the Commission of the Kirk lobbied for the enforcement and extension of the Witchcraft Act 1563, which had been the basis of previous witch trials. The Covenanter regime passed a series of acts to enforce godliness in 1649, which made capital offences of blasphemy, the worship of false gods and for beaters and cursers of their parents. They also passed a new witchcraft act that ratified the existing act of 1563 and extended it to deal with consulters of "Devils and familiar spirits", who would now be punished with death.J. R. Young, "The Covenanters and the Scottish Parliament, 1639-51: the rule of the godly and the 'second Scottish Reformation'", E. Boran and C. Gribben, eds, Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550-1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), , pp. 149-50.

Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches (1647), showing witches identifying their familiar spirits. Following the Lancaster Witch Trials (1612–1634), William Harvey, physician to King Charles I of England, had been ordered to examine the four women accused, and from this there came a requirement to have material proof of being a witch.Gaskill 2005: pp. 46–47 The work of Hopkins and John Stearne was not necessarily to prove any of the accused had committed acts of maleficium, but to prove that they had made a covenant with the Devil.Thomas 1971: p 543; Gaskill 2005: p 47 Prior to this point, any malicious acts on the part of witches were treated identically to those of other criminals, until it was seen that, according to the then-current beliefs about the structure of witchcraft, they owed their powers to a deliberate act of their choosing.

Wilby obtained copies of the trial records, which had been presumed lost for two centuries, from which she concluded that Gowdie had been involved in some form of shamanic visionary trances. In The Visions of Isobel Gowdie Wilby extended the hypothesis set out in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits to include the concept of ‘dark shamanism’ (or, shamanic practices that benefit people or things belonging to one group by harming people or things belonging to another). She noted that recent anthropological research suggests that dark shamanism plays a much bigger role in tribal shamanic practice than previously thought and that when this new paradigm is brought to the analysis of witch confessions like Isobel Gowdie’s, the correlation between European witchcraft and shamanism becomes even more compelling.Academia.edu, Published papers While controversial, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie was widely celebrated among historians of witchcraft for bringing new perspectives to the subject.

In an article written for The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, the historian Ronald Hutton, who had aided Wilby in editing her manuscript and finding a publisher, noted his belief that Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits was "so important" for witchcraft studies because it dealt "directly with the possible relations between the people concerned and a spirit world", something which recent British scholarship in the field had tended to avoid. Believing that "[n]obody had done anything like this before", Hutton did however admit to some criticisms, relating that "I think some of her suggestions more speculative than others, and (as she knows) I worry a bit about her selective use of widely scattered examples of what can be called shamanism taken from other parts of the world. This, however, does nothing to diminish my enthusiasm for her work." Wilby's work also proved an influence on the historian Joyce Froome in her study of the Pendle witches, Wicked Enchantments (2010).

He was also recorded as coercing local people to obtain water for him from the village pump by threatening to set upon them white mice, a rodent which in local folklore was associated with misfortune. Another tale that Maple recorded also associated Pickingill with white mice; according to this, a visitor travelled to the cunning man's cottage only to find him lying in bed, with the mice suckling from his nipples. Pickingill was also known for his purported ability to control animals, namely horses, and it was believed that when he struck a hedgerow with his stick, game animals would run out that could then be caught, killed and eaten. It was also rumoured that he could do things faster than ordinary human beings, and that he could do an hour's job in only a few minutes, with some believing that he got his imps—his familiar spirits—to do the job for him.

The first of two chapters deals with a character named "Walters the Magician", historically identified as Luman Walters, a treasure seeker and early convert to Smith's church. Chapter 1 begins: > And it came to pass in the latter days, that wickedness did much abound, and > the "Idle and slothful said one to another, let us send for Walters the > Magician, who has strange books, and deals with familiar spirits; > peradventure he will inform us where the Nephites, hid their treasure, so be > it, that we and our vagabond van, do not perish for lack of sustenance". Walters is described as "producing an old book in an unknown tongue, (Cicero's Orations in latin,) from whence he read in the presence of the Idle and Slothful strange stories of hidden treasures and of the spirit who had custody thereof. " The text describes Walters as leading treasure seeking adventures: > The Magician led the rabble unto a dark grove, in a place called Manchester, > where after drawing a Magic circle, with a rusty sword, and collecting his > motley crew of latter-demallions, within the centre, he sacrificed a Cock (a > bird sacred to Minerva) for the purpose of propiciating the prince of > spirits.

Whilst the historian Keith Thomas had touched on the subject of English popular magic in his Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), in a 1994 article on the subject of the cunning folk, the historian Willem de Blécourt stated that the study of the subject, "properly speaking, has yet to start." These ideas were echoed in 1999, when the historian Ronald Hutton, in his The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, remarked that the study of the cunning folk and European folk magic was "notoriously, an area that has been comparatively neglected by academic scholars." Nonetheless, articles on the subject were published in the late 1990s, primarily by the historian Owen Davies, who in 2003 published Cunning- Folk: Popular Magic in English History (which was later republished under the altered title of Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History in 2007). This was followed in 2005 with the publication of Emma Wilby's Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, which took a somewhat different attitude to the cunning craft than Hutton and Davies, emphasising the spiritual as opposed to simply practical side to cunning folk's magic.