illustrations

Familiars served a number of functions in Early Modern England, in terms of the narratives produced by and around witches. Their complicating and shifting representations make them fascinating, but impossible to pin down and collect like butterflies. Because of copyright, we are not able to use a number of the woodcuts which represented familiars to an early English populous audience. Instead, we needed to come up with our own. For the purpose of the first-run illustrations, Uszkalo gave our RAs a brief and broad explanation of how the familiar could function inside and outside of spaces of the popular imagination, as both legally "real" and impossibly shifty.

The familiar was a small slice of waking nightmare. Admitting to them made you a witch. Not admitting to them made you a liar. You were stripped and searched and poked and stabbed with needles until their mark was found on you, sometimes in your genitals where, shy and terrified, you were opened up so people could see your evil mark, and you wanted to die of shame. You were exposed morally, physically, and socially.

Familiars are the things which go bump in the night, but look completely normal if you see them quickly, in the shade. They are different from the world here, but can pass. They were mean, and petty, and evil, and hurt you to prove they could. It is what they were. They wanted to drink your blood, or cause a sore or nipple and suck on it to prove you were weak and helpless. And,really, you were. You were poor and tired and picked on. You were dirty and jealous and ready to sell your soul for some respite from the endless, dull ache of your hard existence.  The familiars worked for you doing the benign, but also killed your neighbour's livestock when not having a cow meant starving to death. They killed babies as they slept and left cold white bodies for mothers to find. They made children swallow and vomit up hair and sticks and needles. They made women go mad. They cost their owners their souls. And if you were a woman who had one, they did nothing and everything and made you a witch when being a witch meant being hung. Then they left you to choke to death.