The Dorset magical practitioner John Walsh was arrested after it was discovered that he had a ‘book of circles’. He admitted that he used one of the rituals ‘to raise [his] familiar spirit […] [who] would sometimes come unto him like a grey blackish culver [pigeon], and sometimes like a brended [speckled brown] dog, and sometimes like a man in all proportions, saving that he had cloven feet’. John would then ask the spirit ‘for anything stolen, who did it, and where the thing stolen was left’.37 However, when John wanted to know whether one of his patients was the victim of a curse, he consulted a different kind of spirit, which might seem more obviously folkloric in origin – fairies. But these, too, were complex and dangerous beings. John met them at ancient burial mounds, and says, ‘There be three kinds of Fairies, white, green, and black. […] The black Fairies be the worst.’38 The young Cornish healer Ann Jefferies was given her miraculous powers by the fairies, but only after they had made her so ill that ‘the long continuance of her distemper […] almost perfectly moped her, so that she became even as a changeling’.39
In his book Daemonologie, King James I writes:
Sundry witches have gone to death with that confession, that they have been transported with the Fairy to such a hill, which opening, they went in, and there saw a fair Queen, who […] gave them a stone that had sundry virtues, which at sundry times hath been produced in judgement.40
Significantly, though, he also describes fairies as ‘spirits, which by the Gentiles [were] called Diana and her wandering court’.41 In her analysis of the Isobel Gowdie witchcraft case, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, Emma Wilby argues that Isobel consciously saw herself as allied with a Queen of Elfland who was an evolution of a pre-Christian Nature Goddess.42 The idea that the spirits encountered by magical practitioners had their roots in ancient mythology is supported by magical texts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A ‘Prayer to Selene’, the Greek Moon Goddess, includes the lines:
Three-headed, you’re Persephone, Megaira,
Allekto […] who shake your locks
Of fearful serpents on your brow, who sound
The roar of bulls out from your mouths, whose womb
Is decked out with the scales of creeping things […]
Bull-headed, you have the eyes of bulls, the voice
Of dogs.43
Another spell, addressed to the ‘Ruler of Tartaros’, describes her as ‘dog-shaped, spinner of Fate […] dragoness, lion, she-wolf’; and it goes on:
I’ll speak the signs to you:
Bronze sandal of her who rules Tartaros,
Her fillet, key, wand, iron wheel, black dog.44
Thus, these spells are not only significantly similar to the descriptions of spirits in The Sworn Book but are also evocative of the black dog who haunted Margaret Byrom, John Starkie and the other children in the Starkie household. However, one of the most striking accounts of a Black Dog encounter occurs in the statements taken by Nicholas Starkie’s uncle Roger Nowell from Alizon Device, a teenage member of the family of magical practitioners at the centre of the 1612 Pendle witchcraft case. Alizon’s description of her first encounter with the spirit vividly establishes the eerie, sexually charged connection that is forged between them:
There appeared unto her a thing like unto a Black Dog: speaking unto her […] and desiring her to give him her soul, and he would give her power to do anything she would: whereupon [she] being therewithal enticed, and setting her down; the said Black Dog did with his mouth […] suck at her breast, a little below the paps [breasts], which place did remain blue half a year next after.45
Crucial to the link is the spiritual essence that the Dog draws out of Alizon, but which then gives her access to his magical power.46 Alizon’s reckless pride in her relationship with a spirit is echoed in a dangerous admission Edmund made at his trial. Finding himself suddenly accused by Nicholas of using ‘invocations and conjurations of evil and wicked spirits’,
Edmund stiffly denied it, and stood out against him. And he told him to his face that he should not hang him, let him do what he could. For the Devil had promised him that no halter would hang him.47
When Ann Jefferies was about to be arrested,
the fairies appeared to her and told her that a Constable would come that day, with a warrant to carry her before a Justice of the Peace and she would be sent to jail. She asked them if she should hide herself. They answered, No, she should fear nothing, but go with the Constable.48
It would seem that Edmund had received some similar reassurance from a spirit. Of course, saying ‘fear nothing’ is not the same as saying that nothing bad is going to happen. But it was part of the very nature of spirit encounters that they could make magical practitioners careless of their personal safety. They were the ultimate magical experience – and through them practitioners expressed their allegiance to magic’s alternative vision of the universe.49 Magic was not irrational – magic was anti-rational. It was a series of techniques – such as scrying and the use of charms and incantations – specifically devised to enable the intuitive and creative aspects of the mind to achieve precedence over the rational. In Daemonologie, King James I dismisses fairies as a delusion created by the Devil and condemns magical practitioners for their ‘curiosity’ and ‘restless minds’.50 Magic took people to a place where the normal rules did not apply, where the assumptions of the established social order were irrelevant. For those who experienced it, it was psychologically liberating, even when it involved exploring aspects of inner experience that were mysterious and dangerous. But in an authoritarian society based on simplistic concepts of good and evil it would always seem a threat.
Conclusion
Right from the start, John Starkie was suffering from the symptoms of a ‘restless mind’. But he not only had a natural tendency to find magic intriguing, he was also attracted to it precisely because it was a challenge to authority and fed into his struggle to assert his individuality within a family that was very much part of the Establishment. That was what Edmund offered and symbolized to John. Edmund might have been wary of allowing Nicholas to witness him invoking spirits, but that does not mean that he would (or could) have hidden from John the crucial role that spirits played in magic. On the contrary, magical practitioners envied children their openness to the spirit world and often employed them as scrying assistants.51 Ultimately, however, John would be convinced that magic was not a transformative vision of the universe, but delusion and chaos – a path not to liberation, but to possession.
Crucial to this transition,