Familiar Spirit

Familiar Spirits (AKA "Imps", "Familiars", "Greymalkin") are found throughout traditional European witchcraft folklore.

Description

Being interrogat, If ever the devil appeared afterwards to her? Confessed, That sometimes he appeared in the likeness of a great black horse, and other times riding on a black horse, and that he appeared sometimes in the likeness of a black cloud, and sometimes like a black henn.
— Testimony at the trial of Margaret Nin-Gilbert at Thurso, 1719

A Familiar Spirit, so-called because the term "familiar" was once used for a family servant, is a supernatural assistant to a Witch, of which there appear to be two major types: a spirit of divination, to act as an avatar, agent, medium or guide for the witch, representing the witch's master ("the devil", which may represent any Mythos entity which cannot speak to the witch for itself), which serve "the devil" directly, and a domestic spirit, considered to belong to the witch as the witch's own servant, imp, or spirit, to fulfill the instruction of the witch in conducting the devil's will on Earth.

The familiar described here is generally of the latter sort: the witch's servant or imp, typically taking the form of an animal, or sometimes a human or alien form, and given an affectionate name, and protected within the witch's house by day, perhaps secreted within a pot, basket, bottle, or jar, or within a secret compartment or room of the house, etc. Eyewitnesses to the presence or activities of these familiar spirits report that they would usually manifest as numerous forms, clearly defined, three-dimensional, vivid with colour and animated with movement and sound, rather than being the insubstantial or ethereal forms of Ghosts, Demons, and the sort.

Among the animal forms, all sorts have been reported, such as the familiar cats, toads, goats, roosters or hens, dogs, owls, crows, and such, but animal familiars have been reported in forms as diverse as spiders or wasps, up to horses and beyond. More exotic forms are frequently humanoid but given a strange and alien cast, often dwarfish, sometimes giant, sometimes resembling satyrs or other Mythic Creatures, and sometimes taking even stranger and more alien forms, and indeed just about any Mythos creature might serve a witch as a familiar. Though usually taking the form of solid, visible, material creatures, the familiars are known to be shape-shifters or to take or possess a variety of forms, and it is hardly unheard of for familiar spirits to take on more "spiritual", protean, insubstantial forms, or to have no visible physical form at all in this world, existing instead as a Dream creature.

Some common Mythos and other entities which may correspond to folkloric familiar spirits:

• Rat-Things
• Tilberi
• Dreamlands Cats
• Mooncalves
• Shadow People and Spectral Hunters
• Demons
• Elementals
• Horses of the Invisible
• Byakhee
• Nightgaunts
• Ghouls, Deep Ones, Faeries, and others of their kind
• Yithian in human or even animal form

Associated Mythos Elements

• race: Witches and Human Cultists (naturally!)
• location: Astral Plane
• cult: Witch Cult