Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits by Emma Wilby

If I had the opportunity to go back to school and study 'Cunning Magic,' I would.  But I do have access to a lot of books, so reading and personal study is the next best thing. I've had this book on my Amazon wishlist for months and months, then a few weeks back, it became unavailable through Amazon, and I knew that if I was going to get a new copy for a decent price, I would have to buy it now from an independent dealer. So, I just went ahead and bought a lot of the folklore books that I am using for research and study. You can see some of them down at the end of the blog. Cunning Magic is the kind of magic that commoners practiced in the medieval ages and early modern times. Traces of it have evolved today into very new things. The thesis of this book is one I've long embraced, but it's not a popular viewpoint.  As a Catholic, I've long explored  the power of mysticism and how ordinary folks from past times have viewed lingering 'old ways' within their new perspectives with their  religion. Yes, because religion is always in a state of flux.

It is safe to say that this state of 'flux' did not happen overnight.  This is how history works, some things fade, others linger, some morph, some are rewritten, and a lot is a mix and mash of all of those. It's never what we think.  It never happens for the expected reasons. Sometimes it's subtle. It's especially never what we think for ordinary people.

Wilby is looking at people accused of witchcraft and why? But what she explores differently is why these people made the confessions that they did. Were they hysterical fictions or did these confessions hold some kind of personal truth?  I certainly believe in the latter for a lot of women who died, excluding the women who suffered in the religious wars of the Reformation, which added a new dimension and has no place in this discussion.

I am interested in women who believed in magic, mystics whose late medieval minds embraced the darkness in the same manner as prehistoric people did, as in darkness was an entity, yes, a 'thing' that could swallow their existence. These were women who lived in the borderlands of folk magic, cunning magic, and the religion of the Church.

As Emma Wilby wrote of Bessie Dunlop, "In her role as a 'cunning woman', or popular magical practitioner, Bessie Dunlop worked at the rock face of the sixteenth-century Scottish life: she delivered babies, healed the sick, consoled the bereaved, identified criminals and recovered lost and stolen goods."

Bessie had a familiar spirit who helped her in these tasks, one she confessed to knowing. A note in her trial records says she was convicted and burned. Most likely she was strangled prior to burning.

From this distance, it's difficult to view witch confessions as just created fictions when cunning folk were involved. It's even more difficult to speculate on what cunning folk really believed. Wilby's book is a wonder, it's thoughtful and provocative. It asks us to step back if we can, in time, and look at the the power of the human mind and how it connected to nature and the world around it.

Highly recommended.